A former colleague was approached in 1998 by a teary-eyed student in his seminar. The student had missed a couple of weeks of work, and he explained that he had been in a car accident with his twin brother. The brother had died in the accident. He pleaded with my colleague to allow him back in the seminar. My colleague let him return to class and helped him make up the work he had missed. The student did well in the class.
The following year the student asked my colleague for a letter of recommendation for medical school. My colleague agreed and in his letter he devoted a long paragraph to how this student had dealt with this horrible tragedy. Then my colleague got a note from the dean. During an admissions interview an interviewer had asked the student to say a few words about his brother. "Oh, he's doing great" the student exclaimed."He's starting at Goldman-Sachs in September." Busted.
The university decided to expel the student a month shy of graduation, and of course medical school was out of the question. The parents sued the university and my colleague had to give a deposition because he was named in the suit. The next day the student stepped in front of a passing Amtrak train. The suit was dismissed, but it very easily could have ruined my colleague's entire career. It certainly contributed to ending the kid's life.
So now whenever a student approaches me with a tragedy my stock response is: "I am very sorry to hear that. I am not a mental health professional so I am not equipped to help you. Here is a list of mental health resources available to students through the health center. Please have someone from the health center contact me so that we can make arrangements to help you finish your work."
I'm not being cynical, just rational. The moral of the story is that the best of intentions can lead to unintended consequences that really are tragic. I don't assume that the kid is lying. I just acknowledge that I am not trained to deal with the situation.
For the more cynically inclined, another colleague of mine always pulls the student's home address from the registrar and sends a condolence card to the family. Only once has she received a thank you note. In every other instance she has received either an apology or an angry phone call from the putatively dead parent. But the student always drops the class immediately, which solves the real problem.
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Doveryai, no proveryai
ReplyDeleteMy university would never have decided to expel the student a month shy of graduation. If this student had been one of mine, he'd have gone to medical school. Today, he might have been performing surgery on you, or on someone you love.
ReplyDeleteIt's tragic that this student stepped in front of a passing Amtrak train. His prof didn't force him to do that, though. I like the idea of referring a student who claims to have had a tragedy to the health center, since as a Ph.D. I am not qualified to do grief counseling or to diagnose or to treat any ailment, physical or psychiatric.
I do require students who want to be excused from class, labs, or assignments because of funerals to bring me paper copies of the obituaries. I feel bad whenever they deliver genuine ones, but this rarely happens. I tell them, "I am sorry, and I don't want to seem hard or mean, but I will need documentation of attendance at any funeral or family emergency, which includes the dates the student is gone. This is because I am being asked to give a student an exception that could be seen as favoritism which affects her or his grade, and I need to be able to show why I allowed that." Other excuses that I will accept for being marked "excused" for exams, labs, or class assignments include a physician's or counselor's note, the cover sheet from a hospital discharge, or a police record in which the student is listed as the victim of a crime.
Frod, I have the same list! I feel like a creep for it, but it reduces the number of sob stories to zero. The only thing I add is that the documentation must list "you or a legal dependent," because I have student parents in the mix.
DeleteNotice how I don't say, "I am sorry, and I don't want to seem hard or mean, but I'm going to have to require documentation, because many students in the past have told me they had to go to a funeral or had a family emergency when they didn't." I used to say this, until some nasty piece of work aggressively retorted, "Are you calling me a liar?!" I said, "No, but anyone can make a mistake," and then amended my syllabus, now at 17 pages and counting.
DeleteMy syllabus requires them to bring proof, also. I am always reminded of Klinger on the M.A.S.H. tv show.
DeleteI don't do this at the moment, but suspect that I may need to think about doing so in classes where I give exams (not my usual approach, since I teach writing). Group work (which otherwise has many things to recommend it) also causes major headaches when students' complicated lives, real or imagined, intervene.
DeleteMy list also includes jury duty and military service requirements.
DeleteThis counts among nightmare scenarios for many of us, I suspect. Not just the possibility that an honor charge (which would be possible at my school, too; they've recently updated the honor code to be very specific about lying to get out of work or lateness penalties being a form of cheating) could be the last straw/proximate cause of a suicide, but that a low grade (even on a low-stakes assignment, since students seem to have very little sense of proportion about such things) could play the same role. Of course we're not responsible for student decisions, including this one, but it's still a troubling prospect.
ReplyDeleteThe good news is that treating such suggestions very seriously, as the original poster and Frod suggest, seems to work pretty well. If the student really is in trouble, (s)he may get help (we've got an increasingly good student-in-trouble reporting system, designed mostly, I suspect, to deal with danger-to-others situations, but it also works well for danger-to-self ones, and the all-too-common ambiguous/combination ones). And if (s)he isn't, a referral tends to stop the excuses. The situation of this kind which caused me the most lost sleep was a young woman -- an online student, which made figuring out what was going on all the more difficult -- who claimed that she was "afraid of what her father would do" if she failed the class. I finally sent her an email suggesting that, in most cases, talking to her father now would be the wisest course, but that, if she had reason to fear for her safety, then she should contact a domestic violence resource center -- the contact information for which I supplied -- and make plans to leave. In the end, she finished the class, not particularly well, but well enough to pass. I'm still not sure whether she was engaging in hyperbole or was actually in an abusive situation. At least I think my response was an appropriate one in either case, since it sent the message that she was making claims that deserved to be, and would, be taken seriously.
I used to expect only students to do this. Then I expected it of fellow proffies. Then, administrators. Now, almost everyone.
ReplyDeleteWait, you have colleagues who claim deaths to get out of work? SMH!
DeleteDo they claim their own deaths?
DeleteClaiming death? IDK. But big lies... yes. Big lies. It seems we can't even go a week without reading about some star proffie or administrator lying about having earned a PhD. And then there are the bigger crimes....
DeleteI like the idea in the OP about sending a condolence card to the family. That's compassionate and brilliant.
ReplyDelete@Frod: "I do require students . . . to bring me paper copies of the obituaries." That presumes that the family can afford to place an obituary, which is essentially a paid advertisement of a death (unless the death counts as a news item). Everyone I know who has placed one (an unfortunately high number) has commented to me about how shocked they were when faced with the price. And these were middle-class families.
Actually, I believe an obituary is usually an unpaid article about a recently-dead person, written by the newspaper staff, while a death notice is the paid advertisement, usually written by the family. Newspapers vary in whom they'll write an obituary for; some will do any local resident, while others insist on some degree of fame/noteworthiness/notoriety.
DeleteThat said, Proffie G is right: death notices are, indeed, expensive, and also carry a risk of inviting thefts from empty houses, either during the funeral or during the clean-out period, which can take a while for out-of-town family with busy lives. So many people choose not to place them for security as well as cost reasons. We didn't do so for any of my grandparents, nor was there a funeral program for any of them, since we chose to hold small graveside services for each of them (they were in their nineties, and had very small families, and few live, mobile, friends). There were clergy present at each occasion (in one case a longtime neighbor even more elderly than the decedent, but entirely with it mentally and able to perform a brief service as long as we provided a lawn chair), but I never thought to ask for a note to excuse my absence from college/grad school in two of the cases. In such circumstances, I suppose one could ask for a copy of the death certificate; families usually need to obtain multiple copies of that, in order to deal with everything from utility bills to survivor benefits.