A class was losing a third of its students halfway through every session. We blamed everything except the thing it was.
In the middle of 2024 one of our grade nine maths classes was losing about a third of its students partway through the session. Consistently, session after session, at around the fifty minute mark.
We spent two months on theories. Attention spans, because that is the comfortable explanation and it blames nobody present. The hour, since the class was at nine in the evening. The teaching, which we reviewed and which was fine. We even changed the break position.
Then somebody asked the students, which is what we should have done in week one. The answer was data.
Almost all of them were on monthly mobile packages. A video class was consuming enough that by the last week of the month they were rationing, and the ration was the second half of the lesson. Once we knew to look for it, the pattern was obvious in our own figures: the drop was much worse in the final week of every month and nearly absent in the first.
Nobody had told us because, as one of them put it, it was not our problem and there was nothing we could do about it. That sentence is the part I still think about. A student assumed that the service they were paying for could not possibly be adapted to the conditions they were living in, so they quietly received two thirds of it.
Two changes came out of it.
We built an audio and slides mode. You hear the teacher and watch the writing appear on the board, and it uses a small fraction of the data of a video class. It also holds on a connection that would drop a video call, which turned out to matter to an entirely separate group of students whose problem was not data at all.
And we made every recording downloadable, properly, so a week of lessons can be fetched in one go over a good connection and watched with nothing. Students on the weakest connections now do this at school or at a relative's house on a Friday.
Attendance through the whole session went from about two thirds to over ninety per cent, and it no longer falls at the end of the month.
What we changed in how we work is smaller and more important. Every new student is now asked about their connection and their data before they pay for anything, and the help desk will test it with them. And twice a year we ask every class what is getting in the way, in a form that takes two minutes, because the expensive problems are the ones nobody thinks to mention.
