Academic relief

It may or may not come as a surprise to you, but apparently every semester, in a lot of colleges and universities throughout the land, there’s an epidemic of grandparent death, for which professors and teaching assistants are asked to either extend deadlines for coursework or exams, or perhaps remit them altogether.

Interestingly, in a study of this catastrophic recurrence, it hits hardest at mid-terms and finals time. And evidently some students have an endless supply of dying grandparents.

Well, The Chronicle of Higher Education has solicited advice from a variety of instructors (although I notice they’re pretty much all in the humanities—no mathematics, engineering or physics profs here) as to how they would reply to a student seeking academic relief in their hours and weeks of need.

The responses are just cherce. No, really, you have to read them, but I’ll give you a couple of samples.

Takiya Nur Amine, associate professor of dance, UNC, Charlotte:

“I only consider make-up work when illness or family crisis is documented via official letter from the Dean of Students office. Please do not show up with an obituary or a copy of the funeral program or have your mama call me and leave nasty voicemails about how I had better accommodate you because your granny has just died. Upon receipt of the required documentation, I will make an appropriate arrangement concerning the midterm for you. And I am sorry you had a death in the family. That truly sucks.”

Angela Jackson-Brown, assistant professor of English, Ball State:

“Dead grannies no longer impress me. In fact, dead grannies are so 1990s it’s not even funny. And to be honest, the way my luck has gone this semester, I probably have already taught your mother and/or your father, and if DNA is any indicator, they most likely “killed off” your granny years ago. Thus I’m asking you to forgo that little granny dance of death with me. And it would probably only take me a half a minute of Google searching to find your granny taking selfies of herself in real time. So let’s save each other the trouble.

“Drop my class and keep your granny from dropping dead … again.”

Lisa Guerrero, Associate professor of critical culture, gender and race studies, Washington State:

“I believe in karma … both mine and yours. And if you are fine with tempting karma by virtually knocking off family members on a whim simply because you can’t get your act together, then you have bigger problems than the grade you’re going to get in my class.”

Well, you get the drift.

This whole spate of quasi-inventiveness reminds me of the last lecture that my zoology professor gave before the final exam. He informed us what we’d be allowed to bring into the room for the test, and all the measures he’d taken to prevent us from cheating. Reciting that preventive list took a lot longer than the part about what we were allowed. And he was quite clear that he’d amassed that list over years of teaching and discovering all the ways students would cheat.

(For example, he allowed us to bring in one 3”x5” note card with whatever we wanted to write on it. But he stipulated that it was a single card, with only two sides written on it. Because in the past, students had used razors to split the note card so they’d have four sides of notes.)

I remember thinking at the time that if people had devoted any fraction of their cheating effort on actually studying, they wouldn’t have needed to cheat. But obviously I would be wrong.