The start of December also heralds the start of the holiday season. Whatever tradition you celebrate or even if you don’t celebrate anything at all, the stresses are there: work-related get-togethers, family get-togethers, sorting out shopping and food and family and travel. As academics we are also dealing with end of term: class deadlines and exams, student work that has to be graded, and making sure we get all that paperwork submitted on time. All of this together adds up to a lot of stress. Very often, stress shrinks our world, causing us to turn our focus inwards. But as educators, we have a responsibility to resist this inward pull and to look outwards as well, to truly pay attention to the colleagues and students around us and recognise that they are struggling too.
One winter I was teaching a fourth-year seminar course and I got to know the students reasonably well. On the last day of classes rather than have a structured lesson I just had a drop-in, a time for connection and conversation without judgment. Most of my students did come by, if only to say hello and happy holidays. Towards the end of the period though, one of my students came to me in a state of some distress.
Initially she just asked if she could have an extension on her paper. But I could see there was something much deeper going on, and so I started by asking her why she needed the extension. She broke down in sobs and told me her story. She was an international student from Ethiopia, and her father had just weeks before been murdered in a street mugging. He had been paying her a monthly allowance against the wishes of her mother and uncle who did not approve of her, a female, getting an education, and wanted her to come home to ‘look after her uncle’. They stopped the monthly allowance and as a result my student was about to be made homeless. As it happened, my daughter had moved out of our downstairs suite that September, we hadn’t decided what to do with it yet, and so I offered it to my student for as long as she needed and not to worry about any rent. I also gave her an extension on her term paper, and suggested that she use her experiences to write it (it fit the curriculum well enough). She was able to finish the course, and her degree program.
I could have hidden behind the rules and rubrics and said, oh well, so sad, I guess you fail. I could have just offered her the extension and left her to figure out how do to that, but I very much doubt if a student on the verge of homelessness in the middle of winter with no money, no family to fall back on and nowhere to go, would have found that particularly helpful. We are all aware of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs; the first level is that we have to be able to meet our basic physiological needs of food, water, and shelter. Without that solid foundation, nothing we teach will really matter. I had both the opportunity and privilege to be able to help a fellow human to find her feet, to not let an absolutely horrific personal trauma to derail her in ways that might not have ever come to a positive resolution.
I often think that as educators our responsibilities extend beyond simply delivering knowledge and applying a rubric. Our students are people, individuals with lives and stories and mountains to climb. They need us to listen, really listen, and offer advocacy and advice, and sometimes, a little extra. Extending a hand, even when that means going above and beyond the rubric, or even beyond the classroom, can make all the difference in another person’s life.
We also need to remain aware of the difference between equality and equity. My student needed equity. She needed that extra support, a place of safety, where she could finish the term and figure out her next move. Fairness and equality have a place in grading, in classroom management, and in our syllabi and rubrics. But empathy and equity also matter. To apply the latter, we need to listen, even or perhaps especially at a time of year where stressors seem to multiply.
I wish you all a very happy holiday season, and hope that in the midst of all the holiday stress, you are able to experience moments of grace, both for and within yourself.
