Well, she did:
Um…Sick day, anyone?
Dude, you’ve been here 11 years. What’s the debate?
This seems like more of an IMHO topic.
At first, I admit I was ready to lambaste this woman for dragging her sick baby to work, but the more I think about it…why not? Every one seems stuck on the fact that she breastfed him in front of class, however, if a group of college students is offended by possibly seeing a woman’s tits, they probably shouldn’t be in college. Bringing her baby one time to class when she was in a jam for a less than 2 hour lecture isn’t that big of a deal and it surprises me it has become such. The baby seems to have had a mild cold according to the reports and posed no serious risk to the students or himself by being on campus. It’s all such a non issue.
Oh, I think suck was there long before she came along.
Reading the prof’s essay, the prof seems to have a huge chip on her shoulder regarding gender issues (big shock in a prof teaching a class of that sort). I especially think that based on her reaction to the journalist’s initial email which was clearly intended to be polite but which she interprets as being anti woman.
I do think breast feeding is good for babies generally but I also think it’s unprofessional to make a spectacle of it in front of students. It would also be unprofessional if a male professor took his shirt off in class. One of my coworkers pumped at work and we all supported that…but not in front of us!
I was actually more bothered by the sick baby crawling on the classroom floor, getting a paper clip in its mouth, and getting too close to an electrical outlet.
As I understand it, those who work on a campus or attend a class are covered by workers’ comp (and whatever the equivalent is for students), but the baby wouldn’t be since it is neither a student nor an employee. That’s another problem.
Yeah it does seem like a bad idea to let a kid crawl in a non babyproofed room.
Her very hostile attitude towards Heather the student journalist just seems so out of proportion to me. Even if the way Heather phrased things was ‘annoying’ or she didnt send her email asking for an interview early enough…well, these are kids trying to learn how to be reporters - what do you expect from someone who’s still learning?
As noted at the end of the article, I would’ve been more concerned about catching what the baby had. Everyone knows that kids are disease vectors pare excellence.
That and the distraction of having a kid in the classroom.
(Though when I was in high school, one of my classmates walked into the room with a box with a kitten in it. That I kinda didn’t mind…)
ETA: Although it seems the kid just had a cold, I doubt the mom knew that at the time, or she probably would’ve been more inclined to go ahead with her usual plans.
Since when is it ok to bring your children - much less a baby - to work? Breast Feeding is not really the point IMHO. Very unprofessional. She is being paid to teach.
Also, if the baby was too sick to go to daycare, it was too sick to go to class. If she was really concerned, she should have stayed home.
I had this exact discussion with a friend of mine on FB. At first I was in the camp of “how dare she!” But then I considered the other hand. I would have loved if I could work in an environment in which I did not feel the need to have to stay home and miss work for a day just because my child was slightly under the weather and couldn’t attend daycare or school. It would be great to be able to bring them to class or work and have them with me while I still pursued my eduction or earned income. Sick days are valuable, but I hate to waste them on something that can easily be dealt with while I am at work or school. I think mothers in particular are just automatically expected to compromise their own pursuits in order to be seen as properly taking care of their children or they are “bad mommies”. I think she was being responsible by keeping her baby with her AND teaching class at the same time!
Since it was expected that women have to choose between work or taking care of their children. There were and still are plenty of employers who do not mind you bringing your child, especially a infant or small child who may still be nursing, to work with you.
Until large US corporate employers become enlightened enough to start providing onsite child care to their employees as a regular practice, parents are constantly faced with the dilemma of losing income to stay home with their children or being made to feel like bad or neglectful parents for placing them in daycare.
It’s not necessarily about being offended by tits, it’s just a lack of professionalism. I wouldn’t be very impressed if my prof was breastfeeding, but I also wouldn’t be very impressed if they were eating a big juicy steak during class, or if they lay down on a comfy couch while they lectured. Neither of those things are really offensive, but doing them during class would be inappropriate. The prof is clearly going to be distracted and so are the students.
Or maybe it was a fantastic life lesson about the struggle working mothers face on a daily basis to balance work and home life. It was college, and from what I remember the more unorthodox the teaching method the more I retained from the class. Boring slide show lectures left me brain-dead and never more informed.
The baby might very well have been well enough to go to class. Babies run fevers and otherwise exhibit mild sicknesses, and it’s OK to take them somewhere in an emergency, like to a clinic. However, if I were a student, I’d worry about catching whatever Baby had. And even a completely healthy baby doesn’t belong in a college classroom, even if the class IS focused on feminist anthropology. I’m also concerned that the professor thought it was OK to have her baby roaming in the classroom, it’s really not safe at all.
I say this as a feminist who nursed her own child (not exclusively) for a little over a year. The professor can’t just merrily cart her baby into class whenever the baby runs a fever, she needs to have a backup plan, even if the plan is to just post a note on the door telling her students that class is cancelled for that session.
The thing that bothers me the most is that she exposed all of her students to her sick baby’s germs. That’s pretty inconsiderate.
Does anybody really think it’s a good idea to bring your baby into a classroom? Babies cry, it’s what they do. That’s obviously going to be disruptive to the class.
This sounds like it was some sort of intentional political statement/publicity stunt to me. Remember, this took place at American University, and people at American University only stop being politically active for the occasional pansexual orgy or to sell drugs to students from Georgetown and George Washington. And half the time there’s even political tones when they’re doing that.
Breastfeeding in front of 40 undergrads is not an unorthodox teaching method. She wasn’t trying to teach them any kind of lesson. Anyways, that ‘life lesson’ stuff is for the high school set, not university students who are paying a lot to actually learn about the subject at hand.
I appreciate that being a working mother is difficult, but I think that’s a perfectly well known fact and one that said working mother should be prepared for. She should have had some kind of backup plan - it’s not exactly unusual for a kid to be sick, did she never think about what she would do when that happened?
Pfft, big fucking deal. The main reaction seems to be against the nursing, not in bringing the kid to class.
Some people are trying to frame it as a health issue, which is transparently bullshit. No one would even have noticed if the teacher had come to school with a cold unless she were literally streaming snot from her nostrils and coughing between every other word.
Don’t pretend it’s about the germs, because you’re completely full of shit if you do. It’s about her whipping out a tit and sticking it in her kid’s mouth. Breast feeding makes some people uncomfortable even though that’s what boobs are for.
As far as I’m concerned, it should be considered completely normal for women to breast feed anywhere, at any time. I would have no problem with women bringing their kids to work — even in an office environment — until they’re old enough to move around and need more attentive supervision than someone tied to a desk would probably be able to provide.
It should be acceptable — even encouraged — for women to bring their children to work. The way it is now in many industrialized countries, many babies are effectively raised by strangers in creches from the age of about 6 months. Think that has no impact on later social development? If anyone did a good study on mother-child contact up to about age 2, I would be willing to bet a big chunk of my annual salary that they’d find it has a huge effect on the child’s attachment to their parents, baseline anxiety levels, aggression, and the development of empathy.
Man, the longer I live overseas, the weirder people back home seem to get.
Babies who are cared for in daycare get many colds in the first year until they develop better resistance. They get fevers and most daycares won’t allow them to attend, so one of the parents or a sitter will have to take care of them. Most of the time, the adults have greater resistance, and so we parents do not catch as many colds from them. She was not negligent in “exposing” her students to the baby’s fever.
She’s a single parent, and didn’t have an alternative lined up. A bit naive, perhaps, but if so, then she’s got plenty of company.
As far as if it were professional or not, she had an emergency and she dealt with it. It’s not an ongoing issue, she’s lined up a baby sitter for if it happens again.
There does seem to be a huge hang up in America about breast feeding. It’s no big deal. I can’t imagine who would go out of their way to contact the school paper to report it.