Adventures in Teaching: Home Sick Edition

"Gosh, I'm not feeling all that great today. I think I'll call in sick from work," said no teacher ever.

I'm on day 3 of missing work for my current illness, a viral infection somewhere along the line between cold and flu. I think I'm finally on the mend because I am sitting up-right and typing without disastrous results and my fever seems to have abated.

But that means facing the horror of what may or may not have happened over the past three days at school. Talk about an adventure.

Teachers will tell you, repeatedly and without your urging, that it's easier to go to work sick than to miss a day. Sub plans, especially those drawn up at the eleventh hour and usually with a pounding headache or between bouts of nausea and vomiting, are challenging to craft. On any given day, a teacher has not only classes to teach, but meetings to attend with colleagues, administrators, and/or students, materials to prepare, emails to carefully craft or respond to, papers to grade, and plans to develop for future classes. Miss a day, miss a lot, as they say.

It's easier to stay home if you are literally unconscious rather than mildly incapacitated.

Today I am beginning to face the music: an email from a parent that came in on Monday, details from guidance about four different students, department requests for materials (I'm a department head),  messages from three students who tried to find me at some point during my absence, and looming deadlines for college recommendations, professional development planning, and a stipend position application I have yet to fill out. Not to mention all the planning, teaching, and grading I didn't get to in these three days. I am very grateful to have colleagues who teach the same course as me and who are willing to step in to make copies, share lesson plans, and even teach my kids when their schedules allow. They are as busy as I am, but they, too, know what it feels like when suddenly you can't make it in.

Like I said, being knocked out cold is easier.

But therein lies an important truth: if I hadn't been able to send a few quick messages about plans and coverage, about rescheduling meetings, about notes to share in the meetings that went on with out me anyway, the world would have kept on turning just the same. I'd be facing most of the same music today.

Kevin kept me company while I was stuck in bed for three days.

When I was lying in bed, binge-watching AP Bio on Hulu*, I was lucid enough to be fretting all the things I was missing, but I really wasn't capable of functioning in the world of other human beings. I couldn't even read. But in my calmer moments, I was able to remember what one of my former department heads said when I told her I had to miss work: "Take care of yourself. The students will be fine." And she was right. My missing a day or two or three of school is not likely to impact the lives of the students in any measurable way. It will be annoying to fall behind, but I'll get us caught up. It will be annoying to reschedule meetings, but they will still happen eventually. I may have a miserable weekend spent on work that didn't get done, but come next June, summer will arrive and I won't have anything left to grade or plan for. And that's the truth regardless of missing a day or not.

Teachers feel bad about missing school because a) we don't like letting our kids down; and b) we don't like putting extra work on our colleagues. Teachers, on the whole, are pretty noble lot.

Well, imagine my surprise when I stumbled upon this little nugget of an article from The Washington Post: 1 in 4 U.S. teachers are chronically absent, missing more than 10 days of school.

Say what, now? Here I and my colleagues regularly bemoan being absent, but this article discusses teachers who feel so unsupported and anxious about working, that they miss school enough to be categorized as "chronically absent." And that does have consequences on student achievement. 

I'm pretty lucky that I want to go to work each day (well, most days—I'm not a saint). My colleagues are rock stars and my administration is supportive. 

I must not be 100% yet, though, because I wrote this blog entry instead of grading the papers that came in last week...guess I'd better get to it.

*Thought for future post--the representations of schools and teachers in mass media. I should probably hate AP Bio (the show, not the actual subject), but it entertained me greatly. I'll have to determine if that was fever-induced or for real!