Dear Editor:
I am writing in ire in response to the article on the front page of the Daily Athenaeum last week suggesting tightening WVU's attendance policy. I am a nontraditional student, and have always found WVU's attendance policy expectations difficult to content with.
You see, at my age, many responsibilities and demands pull on my schedule; and I no longer have the liberty to focus most of my energy on only one facet of my life while being "taken care of". Thus, I have found that I had to miss class due to illness--mine, my child's, or my babsitter's--or waiting for opportunities to make money, important meetings in local projects, and speaking at conferences out of state regarding issues pertinent ot my life and my community's. Indeed, I feel my education is broadened by these involvements, my family's wellbeing steadily improves, and I am expanding my connections and future marketability.
I have often said among peers, I never have missed class because I was hung over or just wanted to take a morning off to myself. Everyday of my life, since at least the time when I began to live away from my parents, I, upon waking up to my myriad responsibilities and obligations, make conscientious decisions about how to best divide my time and energies to accomplish my goals. I learned many of these skills in the progressive government junior high and high schools I attended, where students who were able to maintain a 3.6 GPA were awarded with an honors pass which allowed them to do projects of their own choosing instead of attending whatever classes they deemed they could catch up on later.
The workplace is rapidly changing, to global organisms with telecommuting options, flextime, demanding more creativity and independent thinking for companies to stay ahead of the competition, calling for teamwork, a family-oriented atmosphere; and indeed an ever rapidly growing number of skilled men and women are being entrepreneurs and taking the initiative to run their own small businesses. Instead of preparing students for these types of future work environments, WVU's punitive and intimidating attendance policy fosters dependence and creates the type worker who, when he gets his turn, will terrorize his coworkers, draining surrounding individual's work potential, and ultimately his health and the wellbeing of his family.
I would like to propose a policy at WVU also that encouraged individual responsibility. Personally, and in communicating with other WVU single parents/students, I feel that an attendance policy is totally inappropriate and irrelevant for this population. For other nontraditional students, maintaining a GPA of 3.0 might be the determining point at whihc a student would make their own attendance choices. For younger WVU students, perhaps this policy, with a 3.2 prerequisite, would more appropriately be implemented after satisfactory completion of the freshman year.
I encourage our university faculty and administrative decisionmakers to move ahead in their thinking, to being open to a stance of confidence in the students of all ages at WVU.
Sincerely,
Nina Forest