<p>I think he has brought up the issue now simply because he is close to reaching the limit. </p>
<p>I suspect the problem may be gastrointestinal, such as irritable bowel syndrome or inflammatory bowel disease. With these kinds of conditions, an individual may have hours or days with minimal symptoms and other times when urgent trips to the bathroom are necessary. These disorders are also a lot harder to talk about than, say, a back injury that makes it difficult to remain in a sitting position for 50 minutes, and they can’t be addressed by standing in the back of the room instead of sitting. </p>
<p>If your student had a back problem, he would have come right out and told you about it. But if the problem is intestinal, that’s a different story.</p>
Another possibility for the lack of details is because there aren’t any. As someone who had a gastrointestinal ailment that lasted through a solid year of school, it is indeed unpleasant to talk about it… but if you need and want special treatment you have to talk about it to somebody, because even at great school there are unscrupulous students who will use a false ailment to get special treatment.</p>
<p>Tell the student to register with the Disability Services office on campus and get the needed paperwork. Accommodations may be legally provided for physical illness, mental illness, or learning disability. Then you will be able to give him appropriate accommodations as recommended by the professionals in that office. You don’t need to know, nor will you be told, the details of his condition or the rationale for the accommodations.</p>
<p>PS Students with chronic physical conditions like Crohn’s and asthma should really register for accommodations even if they end up not needing them. It’s much easier to have the paperwork in place; also, accommodations can’t be legally provided retroactively, but only from the point in the course where the student registers and self-discloses.</p>
<p>PPS Professors aren’t qualified to determine appropriate accommodations based on documentation from a doctor presented to them by the student directly. That is not the way to do it. The student needs to go through Disability Services.</p>
<p>I agree that there are really two separate issues here: one is the procedure for giving and getting accomodations, and the second is whether the student can really do the work of the class without attending. On the second question, it seems to me that there are some classes that you can’t really do without being in class–an example that occurs to me is a creating writing workshop–the whole point is the class interaction. A lecture class is at the other end of the spectrum.</p>
<p>The ONLY issue here is adherence to departmental policy. The OP states, “Fortunately for me this is a problem that my dean will have to deal with–I give students a set number of unpenalized absences (5 per semester; actually this is a department policy).”</p>
<p>If the professor waives the department policy for a student, then the professor is open to charges of favortism. Any decision made by this professor concerning any student will necessarily be subject to review, since he will have established a precedent for granting waivers.</p>
<p>There are reasons that policies and procedures are in place. Five absences is not an arbitrary number - it has been agreed upon by the department and approved by the university administration based on years of experience and accumulated wisdom.</p>
<p>There should be clearly delineated exceptions to departmental policies for medical conditions that must be strictly adhered to. If the policies are unreasonable, work to remedy them, but do not arbitrarily ignore them.</p>
<p>Most colleges have written polices re ADA and implementation- and “attendance accommodaton” is often covered. Some say a student should both be fully registered with the disability office and make needs known to profs within 7 days of the start of class or very soon after the problem arises, depending. It is clear that this is not a professor or dept decision, but a matter of the school and the regulations. This popped up first, as one example, from a google look. [Attendance</a> Accommodation Student Disability Services | Allegheny College - Meadville, PA](<a href=“http://sites.allegheny.edu/disabilityservices/attendance-accommodation/]Attendance”>Student Accessibility and Support Services | Allegheny College)</p>
<p>Luckily, the school will decide for you, but I can see your concerns. And those of students.</p>
<p>I would confirm that said condition is real, and see if you could get the doctor or student to expand on how else it might affect them. Then I would make the appropriate consessions to accomadate them. I think you have to be suspect at first, but I also think that if they really do need it then you should do everything in your’ power to help someone who honestly trying to gain an education.</p>
<p>What NJSue said. Our SSS director is also the campus disabilities officer. No one but her EVER needs to see a student’s documentation. We use a card system. If the student presents a card with an accommodation, the instructor is legally obligated to provide the accommodation. Questions are addressed to the disabilities officer, not the student. Send the student to the disabilities office. Do not deal with the student directly. If that office determines there is no disability to accommodate, adhere to departmental policy regarding attendance. </p>
<p>With all the talk of disability, remember that college is not the same as high school wrt level of accommodation. College accommodations are about access, not success. A professor can be required to allow students to miss more than the “allowed” amount of classes, but the professor cannot be required to recreate a classroom experience at another time. A test can be given orally or with extended time, but a professor can’t be required to write a whole new test. Privacy issues and the rights of other students will be a problem in taping discussions. If discussion/workshop/practice/activity is an integral part of the learning experience, and if poor performance on exams is a likely result of missing that activity, your student may suffer some negative consequence for missing class, even if the overt penalty for doing so is eliminated.</p>
<p>And a prof may not be required to allow the student to exceed x number of absences. One factor is how much the classroom interaction matters- and can incl how he syllabus is structred. But, the point is, it’s the school’s to handle.</p>
<p>The ques was, what we think of all this- I don’t think it’s outrageous for you to have bumped this up to the right folks.</p>
<p>I agree with all that this is a question to be dealt with by the Disabilities office. in fact, it’s entirely wrong for a professor to ask the student or student’s doctor to provide any details. Equally, it is entirely the student’s responsibility to work out documentation and accomodations with the DS office. He cannot expect the professor to evaluate and respond to his request independently.</p>
<p>That all being said, this would be a problem in my classes, which are very much discussion based. Taping of discussion would not be the same as participating. Some schools run on-line or hybrid courses, where discussion takes place on sites like Blackboard. For a student who chronically cannot attend class, that would be a possible solution.</p>
<p>We have an attendance policy where I teach also. I don’t always invoke it, depending on the student’s progress in the class and the circumstances of the absences. I would probably tell this student that he would need, at this point in the semester, to deal with this through DS, and I would let him remain while that was being worked out.</p>
<p>If your policies are spelled out in your syllabus, you cant arbitrarily change them for one student, as it isnt fair to the others. Agree that he should get a note from his Dr and that the administration/disability services should handle his request. It probably affects all his classes. If he had a pilonidal cyst removed it could be hard to sit without a donut cushion or something, but again, not your place to decide. Good luck.</p>
<p>I have a student with some sort of medical issue that causes him to leave class on occasion (I think it’s crohn’s) but he is dealing with missing chunks of the discussion/lecture on his own. The unanticipated side effect is that other students seem hesitant to work with him on projects because they don’t know about his disability and are misinterpreting his frequent departures as slacking off.</p>
<p>I have another student, older veteran, with back problems that make it uncomfortable for him to sit in those awful deskchairs for the entire hour. He stays seated unless we break into small group discussions, and then he stands…which can have the effect of him dominating the group (he is also strongly opinionated).</p>
<p>My question is how the missing of info covered in class is going to be handled. </p>
<p>For example, it has been my experience that in a lot of classes (especially in humanities and social sciences), the lectures don’t necessarily track with the assigned readings–they can be a starting point, or an adjunct, or illustrate other points of view, for example. Discussion can go in lots of different directions. In some classes, students or groups of students are assigned topics to present/teach to the class.</p>
<p>Many professors give credit for class participation, because that is what makes the subject matter come alive, and because discussion deepens understanding and brings out perspectives that might not have been considered otherwise.</p>
<p>Come exam time, exam topics could cover all or any of the above. Questions based solely on lecture material not covered in the reading. Questions asking students to compare different lines of thinking presented in lecture. Questions asking students to compare info from the lecture to various info from assigned readings.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t necessarily have problems with a student leaving class if necessary. But I wonder if the student could do well on an exam in a subject that could not be self-taught through the readings. Even if the professor gave the student a copy of the outline for the missed lecture, I don’t think it would necessarily be adequate. And yet I don’t think the professor should be required to tailor an exam to cover readings only so the subject matter could be self taught by a student. And while the professor might agree not to count a lack of class participation against a student, I think the lack of class attendance/participation might work against the student on an exam.</p>
<p>So I have no idea how this situation should be treated.</p>
<p>Thanks for all of the thoughts here. I just wanted to clarify that I offered the suggestion that the student could stand in class if he wanted as a choice that might appeal to him. I was not suggesting it as an “accommodation” for a “disability” because, as other posters have pointed out, that is a different, more specialized question that other people handle. It is possible that he has medical issues, such as IBS, that standing would not address. But all he said to me was that he had difficulty sitting through class (and I understand that he might not have wanted to tell me everything, but all I know for sure is what he told me). I posted my question here because I was curious whether other people would think that it was crazy to suggest that a student might want to stand in class–again, assuming that it did address the source of his discomfort (back pain, or pain from a medical procedure, or whatever it is).</p>
<p>Sorry–we went far afield. In answer to that particular question, I think it’s not unreasonable. I might put it as a question, “would standing be easier for you?” but overall, if the student is simply saying he can’t sit through class, I think the suggestion is perfectly reasonable.</p>
<p>Not that this in any way changes all of the advice you’ve gotten about him needing to go through the disabilities office, because that’s absolutely true, but I can attest to the fact receiving accommodations of any sort that people can see can be overwhelmingly uncomfortable. If I had a condition that made it difficult for me to sit for long periods of time, I would be mortified to have to get up and stand, attract the attention of anybody sitting around me, and have them wonder what I am doing and why. It’s difficult to explain how uncomfortable it is. Of course, I would do it if that is what I needed to do and that’s what this kid needs to do, but it can be more difficult than people realize and MANY students go without accommodations because they are embarrassed that others will see and make assumptions. One visible accommodation I did have was that I could use a laptop to type my notes in classes where laptops were banned, and I got evil looks throughout all my lectures in that class from students who thought I was blatantly disrespecting the professor’s policies. And people stared. And stared. It was really upsetting and distracting. I am not saying this should in any way change the way the situation is handled, but it is an aspect of the issue where some sensitivity would be compassionate. The idea of other people finding out that you have a “problem” feels like the worst thing in the world sometimes.</p>
<p>I also have severe IBS issues that caused me to miss many of my college classes. There are some classes I am not sure if I went to more than once or twice during the absolute worst semesters-- I probably should have withdrawn. Good semesters I probably attended between 60 and 75% of my classes, though I had some stretches where I was doing really well, too. Almost all of my classes had very strict attendance policies. Sometimes professors would be flexible, sometimes they weren’t. Sometimes I was able to get C or C- for participation portion of my grade just so it didn’t completely tank my whole course grade, I participated a lot when I was in class to try and make up for it. Some courses I failed participation, probably most. I did well on all my exams and papers and kept up with my classes fine, but it was really not an easy problem to deal with. I felt like most of my professors hated me, which I am sure wasn’t true, but it sure felt like it. It’s not easy to know your professors are getting tired of hearing about you. But, if I had withdrawn I probably never would have gone back and finished. I have this problem for life, I had to do the best I could do.</p>