It took me about four or five years of my teaching career to figure out an efficient system for navigating make-up work. And as the technology got better, so did my ability to keep up with my absent students. But I remember those days before I had my current system in place. Students would line up at my desk before and after class to ask me what they had missed “last Tuesday.” This always made me completely frazzled because I really needed those five minutes to prepare and reset for the next class walking in the door, especially when the next class was an entirely different grade/ subject area. Before and after school were not good times to discuss make-up work either because I was either doing school duty in the Writing Center, or I was tutoring, or it was Friday, and I was GONE. Email didn’t present a super great solution either because I didn’t have time to respond to 20+ emails per day (not all of that about absent work). So, I decided to come up with a system that would give me back my time answering emails, before/ after school, and in between class periods. And I wanted a system that put the responsibility back on the students. After all, part of our job as secondary teachers is to prepare our students for adulthood—whether that is in college or in life. They need to learn how to be responsible for their own paperwork and keeping up with their own records.

So, here are SIX STEPS for navigating the turbulent waters of high school make-up work.

1. Give your students a syllabus each marking period.

The first thing I give my students at the beginning of each marking period is a calendar/ syllabus. When I taught in Texas, this was a requirement, and I am SO GLAD IT WAS because it got me into a habit of planning that has really made my job as a teacher much more efficient. I put quite a lot of time into planning each marking period. Here is a sample calendar for an Honors Sophomore English class from 2012: