Why Showing Up Should Matter

Two years of watching attendance quietly stop meaning anything finally pushed me to rebuild my classroom around one rule: some things only happen if you're actually here.

Posted: August 16th 2026

"Let's eliminate the will to win and think about the will to prepare to win, because the preparation is much more important than the will." - Bobby Knight

Knight's whole point is that everybody wants to win - that part's easy, that part's free. What separates people is whether they're willing to do the unglamorous work that actually gets them there. It's a sports quote, sure, but it's been sitting with me for a different reason lately: a lot of my students have quietly figured out that they can skip the "prepare" part entirely and still collect something that looks like a win.

Not win, necessarily. But get by. Log in, grab the notes, submit the form, collect the grade, never actually be present for any of it.

I've written on this blog before about the tools I've brought into my classroom - ChatGPT for building out course-world content, MagicSchool for assessment, Diffit for differentiating materials. I still believe in all of that. I'm not the guy who's going to tell you AI ruined education. But I'll tell you what it did do: it quietly finished off a problem that Covid started, and for a while I didn't have a good answer for it.

Here's the shape of the problem. Covid taught an entire generation of students that "school" could happen through a screen, on their own time, disconnected from a room and a teacher and a group of other fifteen-year-olds. That was a necessary adaptation in 2020. But we never really walked it back. Kids kept the habit of treating class as optional content to consume whenever, if ever. And then AI showed up and made the consuming part frictionless too - why sit through a lesson when you can generate a passable answer to whatever the lesson was going to ask you in the first place?

Attendance didn't just get worse. It got worse and it stopped costing anything. That's the part that finally got to me. A kid could miss four days, catch up on a slide deck at home, let a chatbot smooth over the gaps, and hand in something indistinguishable from a kid who'd been in their seat all week actually thinking. The room had stopped being where the value was.

So I stopped designing my courses as if it was.

I didn't want to go backwards and just start docking marks for absences - that's a blunt tool, it punishes the wrong things, and it doesn't actually make anyone want to be there. What I wanted was a structure where being physically in the room unlocked something worth having, instead of a structure where being in the room was just... the default way to receive content that could technically be received elsewhere.

That's become the backbone of what I now call Residency. I'm not going to unpack the whole system here - that's a much longer story I've been writing up separately - but the short version is this: my courses are built as gamified, in-world simulations (a business world, a retail world, a marketing agency, depending on the grade), and I've drawn a hard line between the tasks a student can do anywhere, anytime, and the tasks that only unlock through being present. Not busywork gated behind attendance. Actual opportunities - the interesting stuff, the stuff with a payoff - that simply don't exist for you if you're not in the room to claim them.

The bet I'm making is a simple one: kids will show up for something they actually want, even in 2026, even with a chatbot in their pocket. They just stopped believing school was that something. My job became making the room worth walking into again - not by threatening them if they don't, but by making sure the good stuff only happens there.

It's early days for me writing publicly about this - Residency has been a few years in the building and I'm still finding the edges of it. But attendance in my rooms this year looks nothing like it did in 2022, and for the first time in a while that number feels like it's actually telling me something true about how engaged my students are. More on how the whole system works soon.

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