dead grandmothers

When I was in college I almost choked when one of my peers said she couldn’t turn in her mid-semester thesis because she’d brought her daughter’s book bag instead of her own to class. The prof appeared to swallow it hook, line and sinker. Later, however, he was a bit skeptic when I told him I’d missed class because I had to wait on a marching band to clear the alley behind my house. But it was true. The local high school had decided to practice in the street and had marched up the alley where my car was parked, and I couldn’t get out until they did. I later wrote a story about it (this was an advanced expository writing class) and my prof got a kick out of it then. But for a while nobody believed me but my neighbors.

Cindy, at 7:00 am EST on March 14, 2006

Dead Grandmothers

My students don’t have or give excuses for being absent because I don’t have an absence policy. I would get emails about “personal” problems keeping students away, but once I removed the absence policy, the students stopped emailing and coming to class with excuses.The previous policy was to lower the grade one level after 5 absences. Now I the policy is to email/phone me if you are “going to be absent” more than two times in a row.

Sally, at 8:25 am EST on March 14, 2006

Let’s do some math on this. Say you have 100 students who are 20 years old. Say they have 3 living grandparents each, for a total of 300 living grandparents, between 65 and 85 years old. Over a twenty year period, most of these grandparents die, and more die who are younger or older, so perhaps you have 300 grandparents die over 20 years, or about 15 per year, about 1 per 20 days. If you have twice as many students, it could be 1 per 10 days. With anticipation, shock, mourning, travel and funerals taking 5 days (maybe a little high), this means that at any time there’s about 50% chance you have a student who is dealing with a death. Add uncles, aunts, parents, etc., and on an average day, one student in your class is dealing with a death in the family. If they only tell you about this when they have to miss something important like an exam, then what you’ll see is for most exams, someone has such an excuse. When I hear an excuse from a student I don’t know, I figure it’s more likely than not that the student really has had a death in the family. Harrassing a grieving student seems more harmful than letting someone con me. Therefore, I tend to give benefit of the doubt, although I still ask a question or two as I’m offering condolences.

Warren, at 9:25 am EST on March 14, 2006

The Dead Grandmothers Society

In Knoxville at a meeting of the journalism faculty several years ago, one professor chanced to remark that the mother of the local newspaper publisher had died because his daughter, a J-student, had to be excused from an exam to attend the funeral. That prompted several other faculty to think back to when the young woman was in their classes. When the counting was done, the publisher’s daughter had had four grandmothers die over the course of two years.

Bill Dockery, University of Tennessee, at 9:41 am EST on March 14, 2006

Dead Grandmothers

With the variety of extended/mingled families that exist right now, in conjunction with recent generations of people having children later in life, it would seem that college-age students probably have increased opportunities to deal with grandparental discorporation. I know it seems to me that the incidences are increasing (maybe I’m just jaded. . .). However, at the beginning of each semester, during our initial exploration of the course syllabus, my students and I discuss the differences between the terms “excuse” and “reason", when it comes to being absent from class. This allows us the opportunity to talk about semantics as well as accepting personal responsibility. We talk about choices and the consequences of those choices. Telling the truth is one choice. Now, many of my students will (sometimes even sheepishly) tell me the real REASON they were gone or why they won’t be in a future class. Sometimes the reason IS a grandparent, but regardless, it is always a piece of information that allows me to really get to know my students and a practice which hopefully helps them learn something about themselves.

Hbarnes, Instructor, Art & Humanities at Butler Community College, at 11:45 am EST on March 14, 2006

Lies in My Life

This is a hard issue, cuz it seems so inescapable.

I wonder how often I’m lied to. Like Sally, I’ve tried to avoid this calculus by removing a lot of motives. But that’s not enough — some students are conditioned/disposed to lie and will, almost as a matter of practice or to earn points for getting over.

The fool/cynic dichotomy sounds harsh, but feels right, even in the moment as you face a student and his/her story. Even if you decide to exercise judgment and make ad hoc decisions to avoid this either/or, after deciding, I find, the question remains: Which was I this time??

Like intellectual dishonesty issues w/ students, this issue is easily deteriorative — just wears you down! Maybe it’s like the problem of shoplifting at a mom & pop store w/ lots of local patrons. How much shall this inevitability shape our attitudes towards all students and our teaching generally?

My daughter, now 25, once told me she doesn’t remember ever telling me the truth when it mattered during her early teens. It wasn’t the Cleaver Family era for us (more like the Haskell family, I’d guess). She and I are way past that now. She has matured and is a source of aching pride for me. I doubt this helps others, but it does me, as I teach Other People’s Children, and I try to keep as a first principle one of Herbert Kohl’s admonitions: It is the duty of every teacher to make no final judgments about what it’s possible for a young person to do.

Still, I hate being lied to and must swallow my resentment, doubts and resentment lest they become who I am as a teacher.

Mike Sacken, prof of educ at tcu, at 11:50 am EST on March 14, 2006

For exams, as my syllabi all explain, I don’t give makeups. The option is to write an eight page essay on a topic of my choice. Since I started this policy four years ago, I haven’t had a student miss an exam.

As for absences from class, I allow a maximum of four, for whatever reason. Four or less is okay, more than four means a reduction in the final grade of one letter for each above four. I tell students that if they miss more than four, they’re simply missing too much of the class to do well in it. Thus, no need for excuses. I also add that I note who has missed few or no classes, and raise “class participation” grades accordingly. So, if grandmothers die, I don’t hear about it.

Finally, one other thing I do to keep attendance high is regular reading quizzes, which make up a significant portion of the final grade (10%). The questions are easy, and if students do the reading and show up, they’ll do well on the quizzes. If they don’t, they won’t.

willie mink, ass prof at midwestern midlevel u, at 12:25 pm EST on March 14, 2006

An Opportunity for Research

According to all the figures I’ve seen, women outlive men in the U.S. A visit to any retirement village in Florida reveals that elderly widows outnumber elderly widowers.

But according to my experience as a teacher and practically all the stories I hear from other teachers, the grandmothers of college students expire at a much higher rate than do the grandfathers of the same students. Furthermore, grandmother mortality seems to spike at certain times of year: midterms, termpaper due dates, and final exams during the fall and spring semesters. Hardly any grandmothers die in September or January.

Clearly, then, we’re witnessing an anomaly in mortality patterns. This gender disparity in senior death rates and the seasonal fluctuations in the number of grandmas departing this world for a better one seem ripe areas for research. Smart universities can probably hit up the private sector—particularly the insurance and funeral-home industries—for serious dough to conduct studies. Several possibilities come to mind:

1) Does having a grandchild in college shorten a woman’s life expectancy? If so, life-insurance companies might want to alter policies so that a woman’s premium rises when one of her grandchildren starts college. (A corollary study: Does having more than one grandchild in college further increase a woman’s likelihood of dying?)

2) Does having a grandchild in college lengthen a man’s life expectancy, allowing him to outlast his wife and thus explaining why mostly grandmothers die when termpapers are due? If this turns out to be the case, then we can expect to see a correlation between college enrollment figures and the number of elderly widowers. The entrepreneurial mind sees an opportunity to launch a new senior matchmaking service. Insurance companies, of course, should lower life-insurance premiums for a man whose grandchild has started college.

3) Do more grandmothers die during exam periods and when big papers are due? Statistical evidence of a pattern would benefit funeral directors by allowing them to plan for the busy seasons, much as retail managers plan for certain times of year.

Drop what you’re doing and get busy on a grant proposal.

Mort Allitee, A teacher who’s sick unto death of lies, at 3:05 pm EST on March 14, 2006

Dead Grandmothers, Sick Aunts

I love Willie Mink’s solution of an 8-page, my-topic, paper option and I’m going to co-opt it. My own solution has been to consciously assume, against all available evidence, that the little stinkers are all adults and that if they don’t want to come to class it’s their decision, their life. I don’t give exam makeups, but if they bring me documentation of death or disaster they can get away without a zero, just no grade at all. Since my classes are difficult and they need all the grades they can get to average in at the end (which I carefully explain to them), they tend not to miss exams — especially since I refuse to give them the extra-credit assignments they beg for toward the end of the semester, when they see all those C’s and D’s. My all-time favorite excuse was a guy who told me he couldn’t make the exam because he was in jail! (And he was. But he still got a zero, for chutzpah.)

marya, at 4:35 pm EST on March 14, 2006

The dead, the undead, and other excuses

My attitude toward death-in-the-family excuses is to accept them — or at least appear to accept them — as true. I’d rather be duped (or appear to be) than challenge a student who indeed has lost someone.

The most outrageous excuses I’ve ever heard or heard of — a student years ago explained her poor work in my class as a result of worry about whether she’d contracted HIV from her steroid- using, needle-sharing boyfriend. As I later learned from other sources, none of it was true. I wonder if it ever occurred to that student how much anguish her lie caused me. And a colleague heard a long story from a student who claimed to be pregnant, with a boyfriend who wouldn’t help out. It occurred to my colleague that by the student’s time-line, she ought to have been very visibly pregnant. Bewildered, he said something about that. Her reply: “Damn — I thought it’d work.”

Some professor, at 5:40 pm EST on March 14, 2006

The dog ate my homework

I used to laugh about this one, too, until I got a puppy. She ate everything—papers, computer disks, library books, my class rosters with grades for the first eight weeks of the semester, and more.

Philip, at 1:05 pm EST on March 15, 2006

Omerta on excuses

Student: “I can’t be in class next week because my father has ordered me to come home for a family meeting.”

Me: “Who’s your family? The Corleones?”

elaine liner, the phantom prof blogger, at 1:10 pm EST on March 16, 2006

“Four or less is okay, more than four means a reduction in the final grade of one letter for each above four. I tell students that if they miss more than four, they’re simply missing too much of the class to do well in it.”

I hated this attitude when I was a student, because it is false on its face. If the justification given were true the policy would not be necessary.

Samwise, at 9:35 am EST on March 17, 2006

I can understand needing a policy for when students are absent during exams or finals or when projects/term papers are due. I like the idea of a having to write an 8 page paper on a topic the professor chooses. That seems easy enough on the professors part. I don’t understand why professors have absence policies for normal everyday classes where an exam is not being given. To say that missing more than X number of classes means you haven’t been educated enough in the class is a load of crock. How many of you know or knew, while going through college yourself, that student who could miss class everyday, read the text, comprehend the chicken scratch notes he/she got from a buddy that did go to class and still ace every exam including the final? Where you that student? How many of you went to every single class, took tape recorders to ensure your captured everyword, studied 40+ hours a week and still ended up with a B or C? How many of you fell or fall somewhere in the middle? The point is, every student is different. Yes, there are some students who don’t the actual lecture class to do extremely well. Yet others will come to class sick as dogs if they have to just so they won’t miss anything. I envy those who comprehend so easily as to not need to hear the professor’s lecture. I myself fell in the middle range of students. I didn’t need to go to class everyday, but I chose to go to be enlightened. Be honest, does it really hurt your feelings that much when students consistently skip class? I seriously doubt it. Your lectures should make students want to be in class. If they aren’t, maybe it’s not them, maybe it’s you. My views on this may change when I get deep into being a professor. But the way I view it is this: I run my classes, lectures, and policies the way I as a student would have wanted a professor to be. It works for me. It won’t necessarily work for you, but you never know until you try.

Former Student-Current Professor, at 10:20 am EDT on April 27, 2006

I think it takes someone with no conscience to lie about the death of a loved one to simply get out of a class or exam. My close friend and boyfriend from high school just commited suicide during finals time and I had to miss a few classes. When I asked one professor for a study guide ahead of time because I wouldn’t be in class, he told me I was out of luck unless I came to the class. How rediculous! Always give someone the benefit of the doubt. You just never know. How would all of you instructors feel if it was you? Grandparents, etc. do pass away, you know. If someone is heartless enough to lie about something like that, leave them be...they will get theirs. In the big picture, does a class or exam really matter THAT much, anyway?

Amanda, at 5:15 pm EDT on May 5, 2006