It’s a phenomenon as old as the college classroom: the ready-made student excuse of the grandparent’s death. There can’t possibly be this many dead grandparents, vent some instructors.
Viorica Marian, a professor of communications at Northwestern University, on Saturday offered the latest entry in the genre on Twitter:
Some professors commiserated. One said she’d been forced to ask students for proof of death because the number of dead grandparents grew so high. Another said she’d “had a student kill over 7 grandparents” by the time he graduated.
But other professors were quick to denounce the tweet, and the trend of student shaming that they say it stands in for, as mean-spirited and missing the larger point. Jesse Stommel, executive director of teaching and learning technology at the University of Mary Washington, posted on Twitter that this kind of treatment causes more students to lie because “teachers turn the complexity of their lives into a punchline.”
Others pointed out that the ages of 18 to 22 often coincide with when grandparents reach their 80s and 90s, making the excuse not unlikely on a large scale.
Pushing back on turning a student’s need for an excuse into a joke, professors suggested that their colleagues show a little empathy for students and give them the trust professors want from students.
Students protested the professors’ getting a laugh out of their experiences, too, whether it be from the true death of a grandparent or whatever issue a student may not be comfortable sharing that caused an absence. When professors assume everyone is lying about having a grandparent die, it can break trust and cause emotional turmoil. Students chimed in with their own experiences of being perceived as lazy or a liar when their grandparents died, or in response to strict attendance policies while facing chronic illnesses.
Professors find themselves in a tricky position as a result: Interrogating their students about the death of a grandparent is crass, but allowing a student to subvert the attendance policy is unfair.
Some professors shared the policies they use to avoid getting the “dead grandparents” excuse. Giving a no-questions-asked absence for students when “life happens” takes away the need for any explanation or lying. Others said that when students feel they are being overly policed, they might come to class sick or damage their own well-being by attending when they shouldn’t. A policy that shows respect for students as adults, they said, is the answer.
Another professor noted that a strict attitude toward absences may not consider the increasingly nonwhite, first-generation, or low-income status of students in college classrooms. Many are carrying more responsibilities than the more privileged classes of years before, a fact professors may not be thinking about.