> "I can't do much to ensure that students will care enough to hit the books to overcome their disappointments, but I can change what I do."
> "there were far more 0s in the final grid of grades. I even had a couple of 0s on quizzes, where students simply failed to show up."
If this was happening to my class (I am not a teacher!) I would feel it was reflecting badly on me, not the students. Poor grades are one thing but I would feel that zero results (due to increasing numbers of students not showing up) says I need to change my teaching style. A bunch not showing up means they have no faith in your ability to help them fill the gaps in their knowledge to the point they might be able to scrape through with a pass.
I skipped a lot (okay, most) classes during my time in college. It didn't really have much to do with the teacher -- I was just lazy and would rather sleep / write code. It's not necessarily a lack of faith as much as it is a lack of ambition, in some (many?) cases. Sometimes I would take courses where they were teaching topics where there effectively were no gaps in my knowledge. That didn't make them poor professors, either, it just meant I shouldn't have been made to take the course.
If anything, I would think consistently low grades would be worse. This means that people are attending the class, but not "getting it". I think it's trickier with programming; I met many people in my programming courses who just flat out couldn't understand the basic concepts, despite paying attention, taking copious notes, and spending hours studying.
> "there were far more 0s in the final grid of grades. I even had a couple of 0s on quizzes, where students simply failed to show up."
If this was happening to my class (I am not a teacher!) I would feel it was reflecting badly on me, not the students. Poor grades are one thing but I would feel that zero results (due to increasing numbers of students not showing up) says I need to change my teaching style. A bunch not showing up means they have no faith in your ability to help them fill the gaps in their knowledge to the point they might be able to scrape through with a pass.