<p>I am surprised to hear that ANY parent would talk to a professor about his/her child’s work or intervene in a dorm roommate situation absent very strong extenuating circumstances (i.e. a roommate is mentally ill or dangerous). If a student can’t handle advocating for him or herself in most situations, then that student is not ready to be in college.</p>
<p>The only matters we take care of with our daughter are paying for tuition/housing/etc. and helping her to move in and out of the dorm. We also insist that she call at least once a week. She is at a big public university, where no one holds her hand, and she is thriving. A lot of students need the more personal attention of a smaller and/or private school. That’s fine, too. If parents want to raise self-sufficient children, though, they need to start insisting that their children step outside their comfort zone and do some things for themselves by the time they’re in high school.</p>
<p>Recognizing years ago that our son with Asperger’s was probably going to be able to attend college, we started pushing him to seek help from his teachers himself and to ask questions himself to find out who could help him with school administrative matters. We helped him with the college search by getting material for him and taking him to visit different places, but he will have to do most of his own advocacy in college. Yes, he will need more help than our daughter, but we want him, for his own sake, to be able to live independently when he is grown.</p>
<p>Advice is one thing. Our children know that they can ask us for advice any time. Intervention is another. Think of it this way: As parents, we need to look after our children’s best interests. It is in their best interest to grow up to be independent adults. We must help them on that journey. It’s a lot easier to set that pattern by the time they’re in high school than it is to try to set it later.</p>
<p>Marsian, I will have to consult you later on how you handled college issues related to your S with Asperger’s. Thinking about my own D who has some disabilities, I was going to comment that even though our children may be 95–99.99% independent, they are sometimes really immature about the other .01 to 5% and might still need some supervision in those areas into the college years. Some kids have difficulty dealing with adults in administrative settings, some are deficient in personal organization or self-care, some struggle with medical issues, some need academic accountability. My older D is highly independent, but when she’s very stressed she’ll call to think out loud and sort out how she is going to prioritize what has to be done and fit it all in. Sometimes I think there are some easy solutions to her scheduling problems that should be fairly obvious, but she can’t seem to see them so I help her. Smart kid, at a top school, but just not strong in this area. I don’t think that is intervening, though. It’s more advising. However, I can see how some parents might need to be hands on for certain types of weakness in their children.</p>
<p>GFG – It sounds like what you are doing with her daughter is advising, helping her to “think out loud” and making suggestions. In my mind, that’s not intervening. That’s being a good parent! </p>
<p>Yes, children with disabilities are another matter indeed. While we have encouraged and fostered independence, we still may need to give more assistance to our son.</p>
<p>I think each of us probably has some tipping point where we would intervene–it’s probably not at the same point, though. We also have our judgments about whether other people are intervening too much, or not enough. I do think that you have to recognize that kids are different, and that some kids will always need more intervention than others–they will just not toughen up as much as somebody else’s kid.</p>
<p>Which is why it’s so confusing. Since I didn’t see any of the emails, I think there’s a chance D could have misunderstood, but what she said was that the prof told her to redo the assignments over break and she would review them. I believe she implied that the redone assignments might enable D to change her grade.</p>
<p>At this point, I’m dropping it. Who knows what was conveyed, and if D did poorly during the term, she got the grade she deserved, painful as it is. D is focusing on doing well now, which I think is a good tactic.</p>
<p>Not intervening (it wouldn’t do any good), but I’m incensed.
S was horribly ill from the norovirus. He started being ill at 3am on Thursday, and continued through Thursday, at which point he was exhausted and dehydrated. A housemate called security because he thought he needed to go to the hospital, but S declined. He spent most of the next couple of days sleeping and trying to hydrate (which wasn’t easy). </p>
<p>Unfortunately, he had two classes Thursday with assignments due and one with a quiz. Unbelievably to me, two of his professors would not excuse him from the quiz and one of the assignments. He is being docked. One said it was because he did not tell him in advance (impossible), and one said by the time he turned in the assignment (the next class) it was too late because solutions had been posted (even though he had wrote to the prof on Friday and received no response).</p>
<p>Of course, there are no allowances, in the way of any extension or even any expression of sympathy. And this is at a liberal, supposedly nurturing LAC. But I think it is unconscionable that he is being penalized! And he has appealed to these profs who won’t budge. </p>
<p>So I’m not intervening with the profs, but to him, I just feel like this is so outrageous I’m seriously recommending transfer. D has NEVER had any similar problem at her large state school where they have always been reasonable and humane. </p>
<p>The kids who have been lying for years have ruined it for the kids who really are sick. It really stinks, but if I were your son, I would go talk to the profs during office hours. I am not particularly flexible either when kids are sick. I often feel as though the assignment should have been complete before the sickness set in. I am a bit more flexible if a student sends me a quick e-mail either just before or shortly after the missed class.</p>
<p>If nothing else, your son will learn from this. As adults, we have to call in sick or if we are so sick that we cannot call, we have someone else do it. If a student does not think he is sick enough to go to the clinic, he probably can type out an e-mail.</p>
<p>Oh, and I would add that if someone e-mails me and tells me that he/she is vomiting, I send a thank you,for them NOT coming to class and sharing. Please do not tell my students that that excuse will get them out of anything.</p>
<p>It really is too bad that your son is being penalized, but so many kids lie to get more time on assignments, professors tend to get a bit cynical.</p>
<p>dough, that’s actually a pretty standard response. You go to the doctor. You get a note. Did he get any kind of documentation? Otherwise, it’s far too easy to fake. Is the prof really just supposed to take his word for it?</p>
<p>Or, you do what a lot of students do, you suck it up best you can, go to class to turn in the assignment/take the quiz, and then go home and sleep.</p>
<p>Edit: It’s probably in his syllabus too that assignments/quizzes/etc can only be made up with proper documentation (if at all!). I often have classes where they have a “drop the lowest grade in x category” clause to compensate for an illness not allowing you turn something in.</p>
<p>Thanks much for the responses. Definitely enlightening. I went to a liberal LAC that took the honor code pretty seriously, and the assumption was that if you said something it was true. D’s school requires an honor pledge that folks seem to respect. I am taken aback that the assumption seems to be that the kid is lying and cheating, but maybe that’s life these days. S can provide documentation from the RA and security, but for one prof at least, it doesn’t matter. But yes, at some places at least, they do take the student’s word for it (Haverford…). And I wonder if that doesn’t make students more honorable and respectful. </p>
<p>And I would never have recommended a needless trip to the hospital or health center, but after this, sadly, I may.</p>
<p>And as far as the dropping the lowest grade, that can be a huge advantage if you need it. It doesn’t seem fair to lose that advantage because of something totally out of your control. </p>
<p>And this wasn’t a “just suck it up” kind of thing. If you’ve had it lately, you know you feel like you’re going to die even if you’re not. His housemate called security because he was huddled on the floor of the shower for an hour. And as MDMom suggested, that would have been the worst thing for him to do concerning the health of others.</p>
<p>And, as a Mom, I wish there were just a bit more kindness. I sent him a care package at least.</p>
<p>Your son might also talk to the inflexible prof about dropping a grade if he does well on the rest of his assignments. Last semester, my daughter(at mid-size public) decided that she would skip class on a Tuesday and study for a test that she thought was on Thursday. When she opened her syllabus at about 11:10 for her 11:00 class, she discovered that the test was Tuesday. Bummer. She dashed to class, underprepared, and took the test in about 30 minutes. At the time of the test, she had about a 99 average. She went to the prof and told him her mistake. He told her that because the final was cumulative, he would give her the final test grade for both tests. She got a 199/200 on the final, so it worked out.</p>
<p>Have your son ask the question.</p>
<p>I would also add that having a kid in college has made me a bit more compassionate with my students.</p>
<p>For illness, it is smart to visit the health center or at the very least talk to a dean or RA or someone who can vouch for the student’s situation. Even though my daughter has a chronic illness that is well documented with the disabilities office, and she has excused absences on her plan, which prof.'s have in writing, she would never expect the prof. to just believe her. She drags herself to the health center and gets a note.</p>
<p>As for the general discussion of when we have intervened, I think this totally depends on the child’s personality. If you have independent kids, that is not always an accomplishment of parenting, but an innate trait. I have some of each in my house and tailor my parenting accordingly. They all unfold naturally over time, and take care of things.</p>
<p>The other thing is that college is hugely consuming, and it can be difficult to, say, even get to the post office. Taking care of bureaucratic red tape things like insurance means long periods on hold on the phone. I often offer to do some of those things, but only do them if asked.</p>
<p>I am getting older and don’t plan on being independent of them in my later years! They will have to spend some time on hold for me, eventually, no doubt.</p>
<p>I think the U.S. culture is a bit phobic of interdependence. That is not the same thing as helicoptering, not at all.</p>
<p>I don’t let kids make-up quizzes or turn in late assignments. It really doesn’t matter why they were gone. I just got tired of trying to figure out who was being honest with me and who wasn’t, and more often who caught something viral and who caught a bad case of the brown bottle flu, which can also make students quite ill. </p>
<p>I’m also pretty inflexible because it discourages grade grubbing and students trying to do work later to gain the advantage of finding out what’s on a quiz or what the assignment answers are. Those particular behaviors come along from high school and I hate them.</p>
<p>Bottom line, I feel bad for kids who are sick. If they let me know in advance of a missed class, I will make sure they get materials, etc. that they need, even copies of my notes, so they don’t get behind. But, I still don’t let them make up little assingments and quizzes.</p>
<p>Do freshman orientation and a student (or parent) handbook outline what to do academically when a student is sick enough to have to miss class or an assignment? Even if the topic is covered somewhere, many kids probably wouldn’t pay attention to it until they’ve already had to drop the ball. But this is one of those issues for parents and students to discuss before freshman year starts (not that I did).</p>
<p>My kids were so healthy in hs. I sent them off several hundred miles away with updated immunizations, a box of OTC meds, and an assumption that their immune systems would continue to serve them well. But they didn’t. Each kid had several bouts of illness that caused them to occasionally miss class (mono, cellulitis, viral pneumonia, flu). Fortunately, they usually worked ahead on their assignments, and their profs were accommodating. And I nagged them to go to the health center, so there was some kind of documentation, though I don’t believe they ever had to produce it.</p>
<p>One d takes many dance classes and has to show up for class even if she’s excused from participating. I roll my eyes about this - I think people have a responsibility to stay away from others if they’re actively contagious. She was excused on the three occasions when she’s been on an IV at the Health Center. A little common sense would be nice here.</p>
<p>Ordinary lives, apparently these things are still at your discretion, but I wonder how you would feel about a kid with a major health condition, documented through disabilities office, who nevertheless is a high enough achiever overall to be at your college. Some of these kids work harder than anyone, get most everything done in advance (in case something happens), cannot pull all nighters and go to bed early, don’t drink, push through enormous pain or other impairment, yet still may miss a class or be a day or two late. Do you believe in the concept of a level playing field at all in these instances?</p>
<p>As for kids with acute, temporary illness, I would think that the fairest policy is to rely on health services/MD notes. Even with that documentation, you would still not give a student an extension or excused absence or make-up or whatever?</p>
<p>Let me tell you about the note from student health. Because medical information is private, it says only “so and so was seen in student health”. You can walk in, ask for a band-aid, and get a note saying you were seen. And quite honestly, asking a student for documentation simply puts me in the role of trying to determine what is a legitimate excuse and what isn’t. I don’t want to go there. </p>
<p>I’m not sure how the student with the disability and a level playing field fits in. The disabilities officer determines reasonable accommodations and I am required, by law, to give those, no matter what they are.</p>
<p>My son is a senior in HS, and attending the local community college for advanced classes that he cannot get in his HS. He is also applying to colleges, and a few competitive programs within the college, as well as competitive scholarships. He had an interview out of state this past w/e that he found out about 10 days prior to the interview. No negotiation of dates. Part of the interview was on Monday. Returned to the state at 9:30pm Monday night. </p>
<p>2 of his prof’s at the CC announced tests/quizes in classes on Monday last week. The same day they were announced, son approached the prof about making up, or even taking the test on Friday. Both have no test make-up policies. Both have drop the lowest grade policies to “cover” that issue. </p>
<p>He is now in a situation in those classes where if he is required to miss another class with a test because of a mandatory interview for scholarships or programs, he will have to drop the class or have his grade in that class suffer significantly. </p>
<p>That is not appropriate for a CC that is offering services to students knowing that they are applying to schools, scholarships and other programs post graduation. That includes all of the 2+2 programs that they have. I did send a note to the admissions and deans office with the overall issue. Not for my son in particular, but as a CC wide problem that needs to be looked at. This CC has recently been talking about how to increase continuation rates, lower class drop out rates, and send more kids on to 4 year colleges. This is one way to help that a little bit.</p>
<p>I intervene for things that affect my husband and me directly and in situations where safety is at issue. We handle all things financial (except D’s spending cash because she has a job and it’s none of our business because we pay the bills monthly. She is reponsible for letting us know if there are special fees for specific classes.</p>
<p>I contacted student life this past fall because there was a hurricane planning to hit the school and come directly up the coast to where we live. My husband’s job requires him to work when a state of emergency has been declared, so I called to ask the school what the emergency plan would be. Eventually, move-in was pushed back a week, but I’m not sorry that I stepped in there because there were ramifications for our entire family.</p>
</p>