From Inside Higher Ed:
By Nick Roll
June 26, 2017
When Morgan King emailed her professor about missing class, it wasn’t a typical request for an excused absence. King, a single mother and University of Tennessee student, couldn’t find child care June 14 and emailed her professor, Sally Hunter, the next day to explain why she missed class, The Knoxville News Sentinel reported.
In Hunter’s response, which King shared on Twitter, she not only invited King to bring her child to class if need be, but offered to hold her while lecturing so that King could take notes and pay attention.
“In the future, if you are having trouble finding someone to watch Korbyn, feel free to just bring her with you to class. I would be absolutely delighted to hold her while I teach, so that you can still pay attention to the class and take notes,” Hunter wrote.
King's tweet has since garnered nearly 5,000 retweets, one of which was by University of Tennessee Chancellor Beverly Davenport.
This is not an uplifting story. This is administrators not providing childcare to students who need it, who are all too happy to let professors pick up the slack and provide free childcare on top of all their other duties.
I let students bring their kids to class, because our institution doesn't provide childcare either. But I'm not going to pretend it's wonderful and awesome. It's not. It's us doing the best we can in the face of administrative indifference.
Frankie
I would vote for you for Dean of Students, if only that were how it works.
ReplyDeleteThank you, Wombat! I accept your nomination.
DeleteI promise not to load absurd amounts of unpaid labor onto faculty and then praise them on Twitter for "being part of the solution" (so much easier that addressing the fact that enrolling an infant at the onsite childcare center costs nearly a thousand dollars a month)
This is a great point, Frankie. Child care needs society-wide solutions, not relying on the individual goodwill of proffies (however nice that may be to hear!)
ReplyDeleteTo understand the other problems with this story (aside from the structural ones noted above, with which I wholeheartedly agree), all one has to do is imagine what students (and parents and administrators) would have said if the professor had tried teaching while holding her own baby (in fact, didn't that happen a while back? And result in a wide range of reactions?). Emergencies are emergencies, and the best solution is going to vary with the circumstances, people involved, etc., etc., so I'm not saying that a professor should never have his or her own kid, of whatever age, in the classroom, but I think most people realize that's not the optimal arrangement.
ReplyDeleteOne of the many disturbing assumptions here is that teaching, unlike learning, does not require that the teacher be able to devote her full attention to the task.