Progress

When I started teaching taking the daily attendance for a class was quite straightforward: there was a register and you manually marked the attendance. That took about two to five minutes with an average class; a bit longer with more challenging ones. In fact, we took the attendance twice a day in the UK, once in the morning, and again after the break for lunch. There was also a fairly simple way to monitor fluctuations in attendance by class. At the end of the week the teacher would calculate the percentage overall attendance of the class and the Heads of Year (as I think they were called) would monitor those general numbers. (For my first year of teaching this meant I had to relearn how to do percentages. But then calculators were invented to my profound relief.) Also there were folks employed by the local authority who would look at individuals' attendance and follow up on obviously problematic cases (these folks being known as the school bobbies where I taught in South Yorkshire.) It was easy to check on whether a kid you were teaching on any given day was actually in school as the registers were kept centrally and easily available to all. It was a simple but effective system that had been in place for some years. Pretty much forever, I would think.

When I came to Singapore the picture was much the same, except that attendance was taken only once a day, there being no break for lunch when kids could leave the premises. The only significant difference was that, to my surprise, there was much less emphasis on the teacher completing the register and getting it back to a central location. The assumption seemed to be that generally students would be in school so there wasn't so much following-up on them. It was also harder to 'settle' the register since students could be busy doing any number of official things even as the day began. It struck me then that the system was dangerously open to abuse and, in time, I realised I was right.

Now, three decades on, taking the register is vastly more complicated. In my school it's all done through an app that is supposed to facilitate the work, and, of course, makes it much harder. It still makes sense to have a hard copy, of course, just to be able to see who has been ticked as present. But now all that information has to be sent into cyber-space and just getting into where you need to be to record it means remembering a number of passwords (and hoping they work) and hoping that the system doesn't hang or decide to go slow. On Friday I got all the data needed recorded correctly but it took 17 minutes for the system to acknowledge receipt of the data. Today I gave up after 20 minutes, but was later reassured that my data had been captured. But the thing is I've got to go back in and check for this.

Isn't progress wonderful? I do wish they'd stopped at calculators though.