A colleague posted recently asking where to draw the line on “sick enough to cancel class.” I know this answer varies a lot with people’s personal situations with regards to health (some people are always sick or in pain to some degree) and with regards to employment (the security of tenure can be very real, as can the insecurity of precarious employment). But, writing from my own particular position, coming to work sick is something I do not want to model for students.

I do not want my students to learn that work trumps personal health or safety. I do not want my students to learn that it is reasonable that your job demand personal sacrifice that causes you real harm. This isn’t about a low-level priorities sorting (like, should I go to the dentist on Tuesday during class, or should I go to an uncomfortably early appointment on Wednesday?), but rather about how we deal with real health concerns and safety needs. I’m bad at this.

Countless jobs I have had have demanded I be bad at this. For many years, like many U.S. Americans, I was paid hourly at jobs with no paid sick days. So, I went to work sick. I went to work days before (and days after) a necessary knee surgery. I went to work the day after my grandmother’s funeral. In almost all cases, that was for survival. I needed the hours on the clock, so I went to work. Now, this is no longer the case, and I want to do better at setting reasonable expectations for myself. In doing this, I am also modeling to students what reasonable expectations look like. I am building in my classroom a tiny system, and I want that system to be less terrible than average reality.

We show students what adulthood looks like

When I was an undergraduate in one of Krista Comer’s classes, someone fell asleep. It was a large enough class that the person might have hoped to escape notice, but it was a small enough class that this was very unlikely. When she noticed the sleeping student, she did something I found surprising: She told us to leave them alone. She mentioned how students falling asleep used to bother her since she’d worry she was boring them or something, but then came to the realization that, probably, they were just very tired.

In a previous class with her, she once asked why I was leaving class 10 minutes early. I apologized — I was going to the dentist. My tooth was broken, and the bond had come off. She said “Oh, that’s fine! You were just the third person, so I wanted to make sure it wasn’t about class.” I hadn’t emailed in advance because the class had 80 people in it. I figured if I sat near the door it wouldn’t be a big deal. I was mortified when she asked, then relieved when she gave her reason. It made sense. It wasn’t personal.

Dr. Comer taught and mentored me for years, and I’m grateful to her for the influence she had on me intellectually and professionally. But I think a lot about the other types of things she taught me without meaning to — that students sleep in class because they are tired, that being aware of our own feelings and worries makes us better and more compassionate teachers.

Our classes are systems–and worlds–we build

In so many ways the world does not align with my expectations and values. My classroom doesn’t have to be like that. So, I stopped taking role regularly because it makes me worry more than it should and changed my relationship with students for the worse. I give quizzes. There are regular assignment submissions. I can tell if someone has disappeared from the class, most likely. And, if someone manages somehow to get a good grade without ever coming to class, well, wow. Good job, I guess, although it hasn’t happened yet.

There are no excused absences, but there is usually extra credit so if a student misses something, they can figure out a workaround, or if they just do poorly on something for whatever reason, there’s a way to compensate for that. A bad day doesn’t need to be a bad semester. I do not need ghoulish proof that someone’s grandmother really died, but I also don’t want students to make up a more-or-less plausible stories about why something didn’t happened. I care because I care about students as people, but I don’t care about their reasons or excuses past that. If a situation is difficult enough that it is derailing school for a student, then I encourage them to go to the dean of students to get help coordinating communication with all their professors and to connect with on-campus services.

I tell my students, please, to not come to class sick. If they are ill, they can submit work due via email. Most assignments have revise-and-resubmits built in, so if they can’t finish, they can turn in what they have for credit, then fix it later. We should all do our best, but what that means varies day-to-day. What that means shouldn’t demand sacrifice that puts our health, our wellness, our selves at risk. Real, successful people miss deadlines and mess things up sometimes, just not most of the time. I want to teach my students how to sort through that.

What if I was nice to myself instead?

And, so this is a lot to say: I try, very hard, not to go to class sick, because I tell my students they shouldn’t, so I should model that. I tell my students to take care of themselves, so I do my level best to take care of myself (I’m getting better at that). What that means can be complicated.

For example, my colleagues were shocked when I went to a meeting a couple weeks after my kid was born. But on that day, it felt a lot better to get dressed, leave the house, and be a grownup with a job where I usually feel competent than it did to stay at home stumbling through parenting a newborn. I contributed to the meeting. I found being alone for the ride to and from campus delightful. I’m glad I went.

But, in most situations, I try to ask what it might mean to be nice — to my students and to myself. The expectations we have for ourselves become our expectations of others. My tendency to grit my teeth and head in used to make me more inclined to expect that of students. But, ultimately, why? In most cases, it isn’t necessary. We should just sort out some other solution and grant ourselves and each other what we need to get by.