When an employee becomes a parent, they’re entitled to 12 weeks leaver, per the FMLA. How would that work for a teacher? I mean, they know the material, the cadence of the class, tests etc. IMO it’s even more problematic at the college/university level.
Long story short, they get a sub. Ideally a long-term sub, so that the same person is teaching every day. Easy enough to do as far as I’m aware at all levels of education up to graduate study. If a long-term absence happens out of the blue, it can be quite detrimental to the students since there will likely be a string of different subs or even canceled classes until everything gets sorted out.
As for college in particular, it isn’t particularly a problem at the undergraduate level, since (except in rather rare circumstances) what the undergraduates are taught are things that everyone in the department, including the grad students if there are any, should already know or would be able to fake. At the graduate level, I couldn’t say what would happen, but I would hazard a guess that if some unexpected event occurred where the professor couldn’t be present but was mentally all there (and the course material were such that another professor really couldn’t take over), the class would work around that, say by meeting the students by Skype or meeting at the professor’s residence. If the professor isn’t mentally all there, the class would likely be canceled and rescheduled for another semester.
Thanks Pi. Radical! The sitch I was thinking of was parental leave. Forgot that professors tend to be fairly versatile in a field.
It is somewhat easier the more rigid/detailed the curriculum is (if your curriculum says “calculus” that’s very wide, if it says “derivatives for…” and a list of functions there isn’t much to think about; you can teach more stuff but you have to teach each of those derivatives), or if there are several teachers for the same subject which design the specific setup together.
Some of my HS courses were completely different depending on which teacher you got, but for others, if one of the teachers was sick the other ones knew what “the plan” was. My college publishes the updated curriculum every year, so if a professor was fallen by a lightning bolt, his replacement would have “last year’s plan” at hand.
I’d imagine maternity/paternity leave would be one of the easier kind to set up since they’d have so long to plan for it, as long as there is a long-term sub available. I’d hope they’d go over the course plan and any special instructions before hand.
In practice, it’s pretty much a nightmare. Subs, even long term subs, don’t make much. It’s possible to leave worksheets and such to keep kids busy, but, depending on the subject, it’s hard to have them advance much. It’s easy to talk about preparing in advance, but if the courses could be taught through pre-packaged assignments, they wouldn’t need the teacher in the first place: it’s the teaching, not the work, that matters. This isn’t just the presentation in class, it’s the monitoring small group work, the grading, the tutoring, the adjusting assignments and presentations based on how the kids respond.
It’s sort of like replacing a professional chef with a fry cook. Yes, he may have access to the recipes, but you aren’t going to get anything like the original product.
My case was especially bad: I teach AP English and AP Economics and at any one time have 160 kids in those classes. It was impossible to find anyone qualified to teach those things and willing to put in the time to do so all for a temporary gig that paid under $100/day with no benefits. I went back the day my son turned 7 weeks, and I only felt okay about that extra week because we had all of Thanksgiving week off. Now I am scrambling like mad to get these kids ready for the exams in May. Bottom line, though, is that some kids got a little screwed because I had a baby: some won’t pass the exam that would have, some will pass but with a lower score. I don’t love it, but it’s just how life is.
Most teachers really aim for the May baby, but it’s not always possible.
re: aiming for the May baby
One of my college professors was due with a May baby. She told us on the first day of the spring semester what the plan was for finals and such.
And then in March, she went into labor, and ended up spending at least a month on bedrest before baby was born.
As students, we were not especially screwed, because her classes were taken by other professors in the department-- the class I had with her was part of a series, so the professor teaching the next segment got us early. But there were some oddities in the grading of our first major assignment.
We often have retired teachers do the maternity/paternity leave substitute teaching. Yhey know the curriculum and have no problems walking in at short notice and picking up the material.
The students do have to adjust to a different style of teaching, but they have to do that all the time when they have a student teacher. I live in a university town, so most kids have a student teacher at least every other year if not every year, which can be a problem. A retired teacher knows what he or she is doing, but a student teacher doesn’t always know the material, and that’s hard on the kids. I taught math and often had to teach the student teacher first.
It’s easier at the college/university level in at least one respect: classes tend to run for a semester rather than a whole year. So if one faculty member is going to be out for a while with a newborn, they’re just not scheduled to teach any classes that semester, and the classes they would’ve taught are assigned to other members of the department, or to adjuncts, or just left off the schedule until the next semester/year.
Not necessarily. Someone in the department, sure, in most cases. Everyone, no, at least not for upper-level courses. As a Shakespeare scholar, I wouldn’t trust myself to teach my colleague’s African-American literature class, for example, much less something like linguistics, creative writing, or teaching English as a second language. (I might be able to fake African-American lit if I had enough lead time to put in some heavy reading, but the others are flat out.) Similarly, there are only a couple of other people in the department who would definitely be able to take over a Shakespeare class in a pinch.
I’m a teacher and I’ve taken one. Mine was only three weeks, but I work with many women who have taken 12 weeks. It works like this:
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They must use their own sick days if they want to be paid. This requires about 60 sick days, which is a lot. If they want to be paid and don’t have those days, they may borrow from the pool, but pay them back over the years after they return.
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They must hire a long-term sub who is certified in their area. Teaching jobs in Michigan are so highly desired that we usually interview several people for even this temporary job.
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They must develop and write-out a full lesson plan for all 3 months. No “time killing” plans. It’s way too long for that.
That’s it, really. I do the same thing for 3 weeks, but it is a lot easier. I just take a unit of class and give it to the certified sub.
If several ladies are pregnant at once in a building, it can be quite the odd situation when 2-3 subs are in at once.
In grade school I had a long term sub, for almost three months and that way over 20 years ago
In Canada, most people take 6 months to a year off, so staffing-wise the sub takes over the class and (from the point of view of the reference consultants) are advised to make the classroom theirs and teach the curriculum in their style. Same for emergency replacements that become long-term; a sub cannot effectively teach for an extended period of time based on someone else’s rules - they need to establish authority and take control of the class and responsibility for the material on their own.
Yeah, it sounds a lot easier than when a teacher is arrested for aggravated arson, which happened to one of my high school teachers. (For the four or five weeks she was out (the charges were dropped), the school wasn’t able to find a long-term sub, so we just had a succession of new faces.)
Fair enough. The farther you get from your specialization, the harder it is to come up with a lesson, especially quickly. It seems your department is more varied than mine is, though. In my department, which is a French department, there isn’t a lot of linguistics (although some French departments deal with that fairly extensively) and everyone has had some experience teaching French as a second language because it’s how you pay for grad school. So, I may have been a bit myopic in my scope.
I once had a college professor disapear in just after mid-terms without any notice and without turning over any of his grading or attendance records or any of the assignments he’d hadn’t returned to us (including the mid-terms). Naturally the adminstration wouldn’t tell us what happened to him (other than he wasn’t dead, & I over the dean mutturing something about him never getting another teaching job), but they were really pissed off about the situtation.