I believe the children are our future

I'm a little concerned about my afternoon World Civilization classes. The students are just not taking the class seriously. Many of them don't attend regularly. Yesterday when I started my discussion of Plato's Apology and Crito, only eight of of possible thirty students were in class. Many of them come late, they leave during class and come back, or they leave early. They don't turn their cel phones off and they carry on conversation in class all the time. I don't know if there's a cultural issue, or if it's just the afternoon time slot (the classes are MWF at 2 & 4 PM), or this is just how things work at BYUH.

I've tried threatening, I've tried attendance quizzes, I've tried making the class more interesting, and now I've resorted to my final strategy - failing people. I just got the first quizzes back form the testing center and they're just short of disastrous. Out of thirty possible points, several people scored less than ten. In our department meeting at the beginning of the semester the Chair asked us we needed to give out lower scores in order to combate grade inflation. The way things are going right now I should be able to help with that.

The attitude of my students was reflected in a recent exchange at the end of class on Monday. After my lecture I was cleaning off the whiteboard and turned around to see a student waiting to talk to me. Even though this was probably only the third time he'd attended class, I recognized him from his skater attire, his goofy oversized baseball hat that he wore sideways, and his overwhelming sense of entitlement. Here's what ensued:

Me: What can I do for you?

Slacker: I need to pick up a review sheet for the quiz tomorrow.

Me: There is no review sheet. There's only three questions on the quiz.

Slacker: Well...how am I supposed to know what to study?

Me: You study the things I lecture about in class, you can use the text to review.

Slacker: What?!

Me: We also did a review on Friday. If you came to class you'd know that.

Slacker: (rolls his eyes, shakes his head, and walks away mumbling)

After that performance I couldn't wait to get the quizzes back, I sorted through them all to look for slacker's quiz. He answered only one of the questions and scored six out of thirty. I have no doubt the next time I see him will be two weeks before finals when he shows up at my office and says "Yeah...I'd like to pass this class, so what do I need to do?"

Oh well, I've got bigger problems right now. I went to Giovanni's shrimp shack in Kahuku yesterday and had some scampi. Now Kaddi won't come near me because apparently I have butter and garlic oozing out of my pores. I may need to go soak myself in the ocean for few hours today, or else I'll be sleeping on the couch again.