I’ve got to disagree with Clarissa on this one: It’s not fair to equate pregnancy with a hangover (even if the nausea can be similarly overwhelming). Specifically, a student who misses class for pregnancy-related disability should not be treated the same as one who misses due to oversleeping or a hangover.
But let’s back up. Clarissa was responding to a post by The Feminist Breeder on prodromal labor, in which TFB also mentioned that she was feeling crappy enough in her 40th week of gestation that she just couldn’t hang with her college-degree program. Here’s the bit that set Clarissa off:
I have to keep going to class until I’m really in labor, and school is pretty far away. My Tuesday class is a reasonable half hour away, but my Wednesday class is 90 minutes away in traffic. If I started hard, active labor at school, I have no idea what I would do. Also – get this – I left class early last Tuesday because I was so sick I couldn’t see straight, and my professor actually had the balls to dock me 20 out of 25 possible Participation points just because I had to leave. Clearly she’ll be docking me ALL 25 Participation points for each class I miss while I’m doing a silly little thing like trying to have a baby, so I cannot take off a single extra day other than what is absolutely necessary. (And yes, I am SOOO writing a letter about that.)
Now, I think jumping straight to a letter to college administrators, rather than trying so say, talk to her prof, is pouring gas on the flames. If a student has a beef – especially an adult student like TBF who’s got the cojones and verbal skills – she should first talk to the the instructor, preferably when she doesn’t feel on the verge of hurling. Personally, I would be much more receptive to a conversation than a formal complaint. Going slow offers a chance to preserve the student-teacher relationship as a collaborative one. Going directly to the administration strikes most teachers as an act of aggression (which is why I’ve never done that to my kids’ teachers, even when it might have been warranted). Often, too, the instructor will cool down and reassess a rash decision, opening the gate to a reasonable compromise. If not, there’s still time to write a scathing letter, though I suspect TBF, who could very well be in labor as I write this, felt the hourglass was empty (prodromal labor has a way of remininding one of the clock). And so I understand perfectly why she might skip negotiating and just lodge a formal complaint.
That said, I just can’t sign on to Clarissa’s reaction:
There is no doubt in my mind that her pregnancy is very special to this woman. It must also be very special to her relatives and friends. For strangers, however, of which her professor is one, it is neither more nor less special than another student’s hangover. Both the pregnancy and the hangover are the results of the choices these students made as adults. In my capacity as an educator, I don’t think it’s my place to judge whose choices are more legitimate and deserve of greater consideration. All I need to know is that the student wasn’t there and, as a result, didn’t manage to participate.
This is a false conception of “fairness.” As my friend Moonglow (who just happens to be the mother of a brand-new daughter, yippee!!!) told me today: “I never promise my kids that I’ll treat them all equally. But I do commit to treating them all fairly. That means knowing what each of them needs and when they need it.” (And if I misquoted you, my dear, please blame it on the delectable distraction of brie with fig jam.)
Much the same goes for my students. Last spring, a student of mine landed in the ER with appendicitis and only appeared two weeks later (full documentation in hand). I’ve had multiple students felled by mono, over the years. I’ve had students come to me with serious mental health issues (sometimes exacerbated by the portion of my syllabus dealing with sexual violence). I’ve had students totter to class on crutches due to slippery messes in the dorms. I’ve had students with arms in casts due to (ahem) barroom brawls.
I am not happy about the last category of problem – injuries that result from drunken stupidity – but I am grateful for those students’ frankness. And once a student acquires a disability, don’t I have an obligation – both human and feminist – to accommodate it? Would I not be a monster to mark down a student on participation just because his appendix tried to kill him? How could I live with myself if a student went into a spiral of depression, and I exacerbated it with rigid expectations of attending every single class meeting?
Last year, I had a graduate student announce to me that she was likely to give birth within the next couple of weeks. I was dumbfounded. I hadn’t even noticed she was pregnant, only that she’d put on a few pounds. (That alone should’ve given me pause, because I tend not to notice even major changes in people’s shapes. I’m obtuse that way.) The very next class meeting, she was absent, because she’d just come through labor. A week later, she showed up for class, her iPhone brimming with baby pictures. She worked very hard not to let her pregnancy interfere with her coursework, but I certainly could have found ways to accommodate her if she’d asked for more time off.
There’s an easy, pragmatic, fair solution to most of these situations. Exempt the student from work missed (as long as it’s not a major project) and weight the rest of their grade more heavily. This little trick works as well for a pregnant student as for anyone else struck by unexpected disability. The student does pay a small price, in that there’s more pressure on the rest of their work and less opportunity to dilute a crummy grade. But it’s a fair price that makes allowances for the fallibility and vulnerability of our flesh. However much a university might pretend that we’re all disembodied brains, in the end those brains still rely pretty heavily on their whole-body support systems.
I guess I’m a bit of a feminist-Marxist on these issues: from each according to hir ability, to each according to hir needs. That doesn’t mean abandoning all standards. It simply means realizing that life intervenes. Death intervenes. And all kinds of other shit – good, bad, and ugly – intervenes, too. Students are whole people, often needy people, coping with lives more complicated than we instructors often know. They cannot be reduced to their throbbing-in-a-petri-dish brains (or pickled-in-a-game-of-beer-pong brains, either).
This isn’t a matter of trusting my students. (Mostly they deserve my trust; sometimes they prove that they don’t.) It’s a matter of trusting my own judgment. I trust myself to distinguish between the student who couldn’t turn in her final paper on time due to strep and the one who added my class late, then fell asleep in the back row after a mere three minutes! Hey, at least he zonked out so fast I couldn’t take it personally; there was no time for me to bore him to sleep.
This is also an arena where I have to live true to my principles. Any feminist ought to be committed to disability rights. Heck, even Sarah Palin (a nightmare feminist, but a feminist nonetheless, in my book) at least pays lip service to disability rights. You cannot honor human rights without acknowledging that most of us, if we live long enough, will eventually live with a disability. You cannot work toward gender justice but then insist it’s only for those of completely able bodies and minds. What does that mean for me, practically speaking? If a student is struggling to achieve with a disability – of any sort, be it a physical, mental-health, or learning-style condition – it’s my job as an educator, feminist, and mensch to help them perform at their peak, on as level a playing field as I can cobble together.
But hey – isn’t pregnancy a natural, healthy condition? Well, for all the work that women’s health educators, natural childbirth advocates, and feminist historians have done to unseat the idea that pregnancy = disability, we do childbearing women an awful disservice if we insist that pregnancy never spawns disability. Most of us suffer at least debilitating fatigue. Most of us have stories about how we nearly ralphed at work. My students from fall 2002 and winter 2003 – when I was gestating the Tiger – can consider themselves lucky that I maintained a barf-free classroom. And I got off easy, compared to my friends who landed in the hospital, hitched to an IV, after weeks of incessant vomiting.
If you care about women, you must care about mothers, and thus you must be willing to honor pregnancy-related disability as real disability. And yes, pregnancy usually results from a planned, voluntary choice, these days, but not always; women still find themselves pregnant against their will, and they still sometimes decide to carry out a surprise pregnancy, even with the option to terminate. Anyway: Should I only make allowances for students’ injuries if they can prove that, say, the other guy started the fight, or the other driver broke the law? And do I really want to start interrogating a pregnant student about why she and her partner didn’t both get sterilized before they ever had sex (after all, every other contraceptive is fallible), or why she didn’t terminate the pregnanacy early on? That way lies fascism.
To be crystal clear – and fair! – Clarissa doesn’t advocate bare-bulb interrogations. She instead argues that one should never cut students slack when their free will contributed to their inability to participate; that a class missed due to a hangover is no different than one missed due to pregnancy symptoms, because in both cases, “choice” was involved. I trust Clarissa enough to believe her when she says she’s a good teacher – and actually, I trust that in a few more years, because she’s smart and tuned in to her students, she may very well trust herself to draw finer-grained judgments, which just might put the pregnant students in a different category from the hardcore imbibers.
But this other extreme – harshly penalizing pregnant women for making a “lifestyle choice” that most couples eventually make (but predominantly women pay for) – sets feminism back a couple of generations. It tells women, “It’s fine if you want to compete with the men – as long as you’re just like the men!” Didn’t we leave that trap behind us in the ’80s, along with big hair, shoulder pads, and Tears for Fears?
Patron cat of Kittywampus (1985-2001)
I don’t feel that it’s right for me to appoint myself as judge and jury in what constitutes more or less legitimate reasons for being absent. Doing this would take me way too far onto the ground that I don’t think it’s my business to invade.
You say that a hangover is less acceptable of an excuse than pregnancy. How about if the student got drunk because his mother had been diagnosed with cancer? Or his sister killed herself? Or he was raped in the dorms? How deep should I go into everybody’s life stories to disinter reasons behind why and what happened?
I’m not my students’ parent, judge, medical professional, shrink or confessor. I can only evaluate their work on what they give me. The simple fact of the matter is that if people don’t participate it defies logic to give them points for participating. The reason why an absence due to pregnancy and an absence due to hangover are the same in this sense is not that “choice is involved.” It’s that people did not participate.
As for students with disabilities, I do not appoint myself their judge either. We have an office for Students with Disabilities staffed with people who have been trained to assist such students. The office gets in touch with me and tells me what I need to do to accommodate such students. This, I believe, is the most practical and reasonable way to proceed. Far be it from me to start deciding what is or isn’t a disability. I am not qualified nor trained to do that.
I think your definition of what constitutes the legitimate task of an educator is way too broad and requires that one bring a huge set of personal beliefs and convictions into the classroom and start imposing them on students. This, I think, is ultimately extremely disrespectful of the students.
We are not qualified to diagnose our students, nor should we try to take the place of a qualified counselor. But we *can* rebalance the expectations for a student if she or he comes to us with a real problem. One way to to do that is to not penalize them when their life circumstances make it unreasonable to expect participation or attendance. Another way is to build a no-excuses-asked absence or two into the syllabus, which allows them to miss once or twice without penalty. Students who miss more than that either need to expect a penalty or talk to me if there’s a legitimate issue in their lives.
I don’t pry into students’ lives. It’s up to them whether they want to disclose any details. But my experience is that declaring the classroom a place that will accommodate disabilities (both on the syllabus and in the information I provide orally on day one) opens the door to a dignified level of communication when they have a serious issue that reasonably deserves accommodation.
So yeah, I can imagine situations where a student exhibited apparent screw-up behavior, yet I could still make an accommodation if she or he came to me with the backstory. Years ago, I had a student who seemed to fall into that category, but as I got to know him, it was glaringly apparent that he had severe PTSD from having very recently served in Iraq. And yes, I then cut him a little slack with attendance while also making clear to him that he didn’t have carte blanche.
Sooner or later, a student may come to you and tell you that they are suicidal. How will you respond? Obviously, the first step is to notify student health services if the student is not already getting help there. But will you insist that all work be turned in – and on time? Would you require them to get their suicidal depression certified by the office of disabilities before offering any accommodation? Or would you offer some flexibility, realizing that additional stress might put that student over the edge?
What about the student who misses several classes due to emergency surgery? I’ve had two such cases in the past year, and I dealt with them by simply exempting those missed days from their participation/attendance requirement.
I don’t think this is imposing my personal beliefs on my students. I don’t see the disrespect in understanding that the human body and psyche are vulnerable. I regard it as an ethical duty that’s incumbent not only on educators but employers as well. Sometimes, ethics ought to trump unbending “logic.”
This follow up comment from TFB makes the professor’s behavior seem particularly egregious:
The attendance and participation points were listed in the syllabus just as they are for every course I’ve taken in my life, and clearly stated that exceptions would be at her discretion with prior approval. Well guess what? I got that prior approval on the very first night of class when I approached her about my condition. She told me that she would accommodate me however was necessary, and even told me not to worry about getting my work done on time OR coming back to class after the baby and suggested instead that I could take an incomplete and spend the summer working on the class. I told her thank you, but that I planned on being at every class possible and would turn in every assignment on time if at all possible, which I have done. Never once did she say that I could do all the work and have no chance of getting an A if I followed her advice.
The incomplete is a crap idea, given that most universities eventually convert the I to an F. My grad school didn’t do that, but I chalk that up to Ivy privilege. TFB would be at risk of failing if she went for the I – at least, if she were at my college – and so I would recommend an incomplete only as a last resort. But the key phrase for me is that TFB believed she had “prior approval.” Maybe there was a significant miscommunication, but overall it sounds to me like TFB practiced due diligence, while the prof vacillated on her expectations – perhaps a mark of her inexperience? (I’m not excusing here, when I cite lack of experience – only trying to understand.)
I’ve been at this gig for close to a decade now. At the start, I was very uncomfortable making exceptions and accommodation, in part because I shared Clarissa’s compunction about prying into students’ lives. I am fully aware that disclosure of their problems to me is never completely “free”; as long as I assign a grade, there’s an element of coercion. And yet, I’ve found a way to subsume that under mentorship, rather than casting myself as judge and jury. Perhaps that’s what has made the difference between prying and just *being there* for students in crisis.
Clarissa,
What would you like sick students to do in your class? Just stay in class being sick so as not to lose points? Should pregnant students just take an entire semester off? What should students do to meet your expectations?
The irony is that these questions are just the mirror image of those that face women professors who choose to have bio-children. See: my reference in this post to nearly ralphing on my poor students. They will never know how close they came! Or my second child’s birthday – 6/19/23 – about a week after grades were due, and just late enough to spoil my students’ fantasies that they could substitute a paper on the latest X-Men movie for their final if my baby arrived early.
Seriously, most universities are among the worst offenders when it comes to realize that bringing a child into the world (including through adoption) takes time – and that penalizing women for their disproportionate role will only lock them into subsidiary positions.
As far as I know, Clarissa is still childless, and perhaps plans to stay that way. That’s cool. Parenthood does not confer moral superiority. It does, however, force one to regurgitate the Kool-Aid when it comes to pregnancy being a time of special vibrancy and health. Being preggers taught me that growing a baby was often an exhausting grind. A little humility regarding other people’s embodied experience is a healthy thing. By now, if someone (male or female) tells me they feel like crap, I try hard to listen.
My two pregnancies were about as easy as a woman could ask for (except for my children’s apparent lack of any desire to come earthside), and I worked a week past my due date both times. I laughed off my boss who worried about me going 40 minutes out of town to do an interview when I was 4 days past my due date, and I laughed off the janitor who told me I should be taking the elevator instead of the stairs.
But when I spent four hours standing around a murder scene (I’m a newspaper reporter) in 90 degree weather with no food or water when I was 8 1/2 months pregnant, you can be sure I was thinking I should have had some sort of “special” treatment.
And this second time, working the late shift and getting home at 11:30 p.m., the exhaustion sometimes made me want to cry.
One of my editors, herself the mother of two young kids, commented on how easy I made it look. Sometimes I regretted making it look that easy because it meant no one appreciated how much it took. No working mother wants to look like she can’t do her job because of her motherhood.
When people complain about pregnant women wanting “special” treatment, I think they don’t realize that a pregnant women doing a “normal” amount of work is already working harder than everyone else.
And I guess the other thing people should consider is that while getting pregnant may be a choice, how you feel when you’re pregnant isn’t a choice. The two women in my office who were put on bed rest and had premature babies didn’t choose that, anymore than I chose to have easy pregnancies.
Yes! Even the most uncomplicated pregnancy will definitely complicate your life. I too was lucky to have two very healthy pregnancies with no major issues. But oh, the nausea! I had studied the history of childbirth for years, and yet I had no clue that it was pretty common for it to persist past 13 weeks or so. (For me, it stretched through about the first half.) And the fatigue! I had to rewrite my dissertation chapter on pregnancy and work after I’d gone through it myself. Seriously! I had definitely drunk the Kool-Aid that makes us think that just because pregnancy is *healthy* it shouldn’t slow us down.
Good point on making it look “too easy.” We are all conditioned to do this, if we’re able. If we don’t, then we’re afraid of being regarded as malingerers or whiners – or taken less seriously in the workplace. It’s a real double bind.
As for bed rest, my best high-school friend went through that with her second. The irony is that the medical evidence for its efficaciousness is weak-to-nonexistent. And it’s such a hardship – I had no idea until she described how hard it was to mother her first-born from bed, all while getting weaker and more uncomfortable. (One of these days, if I can find the time, I need to write a rant against bedrest.)
Very cool that you’re a newspaper reporter! I’m not surprised, though, given how beautifully you write.
I checked back on The Feminist Breeder’s blog. All that prodromal labor got her to 9 centimters without any contractions that she would describe as painful. And she gave birth to a beautiful baby girl at home. She’s still dealing with trying to mother a very fussy little girl while wrapping up the semester at school, but I’m glad she had such a happy ending to her pregnancy.