One of the most tedious duties of teaching, in my opinion, is keeping up with students’ tardies. My school’s tardy policy involves giving students a warning for the first tardy, a day of detention for the second tardy, two days of detention for the third tardy, and a referral to the office for each additional tardy. The tardies are supposed to be cumulative for the entire semester (or year, at the other campus of our school, since they’re not on a 4×4 block schedule as we are).
One problem is that in all my years of teaching, I don’t think I’ve ever had so many students tardy so many times as I’ve had this year. Another problem is that even the days of detention must be written up on a referral and sent to the person in charge of after-school detention, so that means we have to scrounge up referral forms from the main office pretty much all of the time. Oh, and there’s the problem of students not serving their assigned detention, which means they usually end up in ISS, which in turn creates more work for us.
All policy and carry-out contention aside, I’ve been working on a way to keep up with all of the tardies for all of my students in one place, rather than having to continuously look back through all of my attendance records. (And, since I really love — seriously! — creating forms, it was a fun endeavor. :P) So, last week, I’d thought I’d finally come up with a great tardy form; then, I realized it wasn’t perfect and reworked it a bit. Now, I think it’s official. :P
I shared it with my fellow teachers and have gotten some very nice feedback. It’s a Word document, so it’s easily adjustable, in case your school’s tardy policy is different from mine. (And, if it is, I’d love to hear what it is and how it works for you…)
Updates
- 9/6/09 :: New tardy form, revised to fit this year’s policy, added.
- 2/5/11 :: Corrected broken code for the image and download link.
- 2/5/11 :: Posted the latest version of the tardy form.
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Most of my teaching resources are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License, which means you can feel free to use them with attribution as long as you don’t use them commercially. If you’re not sure, don’t hesitate to ask me. Unfortunately, I am currently unable to send out my tests and quizzes, but I am hoping to establish a less time-consuming alternative for this in the near future. Sorry!!
