PSA/thirsty: grandparents

We joke about this time of year being dangerous to grandparents, and it's true: some students' grandparents are in far better health (or much longer dead) than their grandkids' college professors are led to believe.

But I was reminded this week that grandparents do often fall ill, and sometimes die, while their grandchildren are in college.  A friend's father-in-law collapsed suddenly early this week, and, though he's making a slow recovery, things could easily have gone the other way -- and his college-freshman grandson could have lost his second grandparent in as many years, just before exams.  And the grandson is a good, fairly innocent, kid, who would never lie about such a thing himself, and would have trouble imagining that others might -- or that his professors might in fact have encountered multiple students who lied about dead or dying grandparents.

Even in grad school, I was similarly naive: when I canceled a (fairly routine) seminar presentation on
short notice, it never occurred to me that my professor wouldn't take my explanation -- that my grandmother had died suddenly, and I needed to meet my father in a city an hour away to make arrangements -- at face value (it also didn't occur to me to provide some context, including mentioning that my mother, an only child, died when I was a child; that I was this grandmother's oldest living blood relative; and that I had been playing a role in arranging her care and managing her finances for the last several years.  In some ways, I was responsible beyond my years; in others, like many 20-somethings, I took my own experiences, and the perspective they created, for granted, and had a limited sense of just how different others' experiences and perspectives were).  I'm not sure whether the professor believed me or not, but in retrospect, she did cool considerably toward me after that episode, which makes me wonder.

I'm also mindful that one of my own grandfathers died during my freshman year, but not at a particularly busy time of year, or in a context that required me to miss more than a class or two (I left for Thanksgiving a day early to attend his burial, which my father scheduled partly to minimize disruption of my and my brother's school schedules. I also flew to my grandparents' home city when he was first hospitalized, about a month before, with full knowledge that I was probably saying goodbye, but that was over a weekend, so it didn't affect classes, and I doubt I mentioned it to my professors).   I suspect that's more the norm: there are, after all, 52 weeks in the year, and only a few of them hold midterms and final exams.  Even assuming that most students start college with at least 2 living grandparents, and leave with no more than 1, and taking into account the large numbers of students some of us teach, the likelihood of numerous grandparents falling ill during a few crucial weeks of the semester is relatively low. 

Based on my own experience (especially the grad school one), I tend to take students' explanations/excuses of family emergencies at face value, but in many ways I have it easy: the grade in my course is based on papers, not exams, and the papers have to be finished by a certain date so that I can grade them and turn in final grades by the deadline.  They either exist or they don't, and if not, the student is or isn't well enough caught up to receive an incomplete (and in most cases, if (s)he is on top things, (s)he doesn't need an incomplete, just a brief extension, for which I allow room in the course calendar, partly because I can't grade c. 90 final papers in a few days anyway).  I know it would be more complicated if I taught classes with more tests and exams.

So maybe I'll make this a Friday thirsty (though those are supposed to be fun, aren't they? Or maybe just likely to drive one to drink? If so, this might qualify, at least slightly, especially at a time of year when the need to make even one more slightly-complex judgement call can feel like the last straw).

Q: How common are dead/dying grandparent excuses, in your experience?  Have they become more or less common over your teaching career? And how do you deal with them?