Trigger warning: this post talks about death and processing it.

The last time I saw my great grandmother was the day before I was going to fly out and start my junior year of college. My grandpa had picked me up from the dentist (got to get those last minute trips in because my health insurance didn’t work out of state) and the bulk of my face was numb from getting a cavity filled. When I tried to smile, my face didn’t follow suit and I ended up looking kind of weird. My grandpa took me over to my great grandmothers house and I went over to the bed she was resting on. This was a weird sensation because I was so used to her being so vibrant and moving around the kitchen cooking meals for everyone, while judging their life choices en español. I couldn’t hold much of a conversation in part because of the numbness and in part because I still hadn’t learned much Spanish, but I remember thinking to myself that this was fine. I would see her at Thanksgiving as I did each year and I’d have the chance to be with her when I wasn’t in such a sorry state. I had already purchased the roundtrip on my credit card maxing it out so that I could come home at the important events.

At the beginning of November, I got a phone call. It was my family letting me know that my great grandma had died. I new I wouldn’t be home in time for the funeral. I could neither afford to come home early financially or academically. Instead, I continued to go to classes as if I was fine and I tried so hard to stay focused and turn anything of quality in. But I don’t really think I succeeded. I don’t remember what I told my professors, but I guessed that they’d assume I was a slacker.

This event has really shaped how I think about flexibility and late work in my classes since I don’t want my students to feel as lost as I did when big things happen. My syllabus clearly states how to get a hold of the Dean of Students and talks about how that might help a student. I have late passes for all students so that I can support those that would be too scared to ask for extensions. I also mention to students in the syllabus and in person that as long as they communicate their needs, I can accommodate them in a crisis. In the day to day, I try to check in with my students to find out how they are doing (after reminding them that they never have to overshare). I don’t want to force my students to choose between my class and their community. Especially since being with someone close in times of crisis can help the healing process. I am always talking to people to find out how I can support students academically when life happens.

When life happens, but you have to teach

In Spring 2022, I lost someone who I had loved as a sister. It had been a long Friday of back to back meetings, and this department meeting was the last. My big sister had just called me multiple times which was strange. I stepped away in order to take the call and she told me I’d lost a sister. I was reminded again that I could not afford financially or academically to miss work. My students had some of their hardest topics coming up in class, but I also knew I couldn’t just tough it out this time. My big sister helped me get a ticket home the following week. My Dean approved of me leaving and folks in my department helped me cover the classes I couldn’t teach virtually because I’d be at the airport. While home, I did continue to teach my students virtually when we weren’t doing funeral preparations. My grading fell by the wayside and I had to cancel all office hours. While home I got to see the myriad of bad responses people could have when their employee is going through a crisis. Several of my family members jobs did not take it well that we were grieving and would not perform at our usual levels. It was incredibly frustrating to deal with on top of everything else. My brother’s school and professors would also prove to be incredibly tactless in the year to come.

I have never done well with dealing with my own grief or others. I don’t know how to be there for others, and I don’t know how to sit and be sad because life doesn’t give me space for that. But I’ve thought a lot about what my job did well and what many of my families’ jobs did terribly, and what good support could look like.

• If you’re in charge of someone (Supervisor, Chair, Dean, etc); be kind. It’s really hard to think in those moments, so any super cognitive tasks like teaching and grading are just not going to go well.
  • Don’t hold this event against your employee in future evaluations or promotions.
  • Do help them find a substitute to cover their classes or allow them to have the flexibility to move the course to asynchronous or virtual.
  • Don’t expect them to recover in some short time period. According to all the many articles I’ve read on grief, everyone’s process is different and their is no timeline for “getting over it.”
  • Don’t police the person grieving by dropping by their classroom to make sure their teaching in person. Do you know how hard it is to not just cry at students for two straight hours when you don’t have a screen to hide behind?
• If you’re a colleague or friend, be kind.
  • If it’s in your capacity to take on a task like covering a class please offer.
  • If they are still in the area, offering food is helpful.
  • Don’t ask how the person died. It’s incredibly upsetting.
• In the benefits/faculty manual/contract:
  • It would be good to know the process for taking a leave or missing work for events like this. I always felt at a loss for what to do when I was sick, and so I really had no idea what were my rights in this situation. It’d be even cooler if this were mentioned during onboarding/training.

An ode to a dear friend

I was asked if I’d like to speak at Kenan’s Celebration of Life. I know myself well, and I knew I’d be a sobbing mess. I also haven’t got all my thoughts straight yet as I don’t want to believe they are gone. This post has been incredibly hard to finish. I started this back in December, and I’m barely returning to it today. Kenan was my role model when I joined Westminster. They had started all the things I had wanted to create once I joined a department permanently. I had the luxury to build on the foundation they had laid down. The first calculus course I taught was modeled after their standards based version. We’d talked about what had worked and not worked with the students and so I was able to start strong. And since I wasn’t the only one in the department to use standards based grading, my students had more buy in. Kenan walked so I could run, as you say.

I was lucky enough to get their students in follow up courses and they would gush about how Kenan had changed how they viewed themselves in mathematics. The fact they were taking my course at all was entirely due to having had Kenan the year prior. I want to be like them and inspire students to see themselves in mathematics and so we’d talk about best practices for including our students and teaching justice in a math classroom. I inherited their course Social Justice by the Numbers and their book Quantitative Reasoning for Social Justice and will continue to implement their teaching strategies so that my students can be themselves in my class. This is all because of Kenan.

We met virtually through the pandemic so many times to discuss research papers around culturally relevant pedagogy and having difficult conversations in the classroom. We’d talk about the best way to use statistics to introduce justice topics, and would bounce ideas around when we realized that traditional stats tests didn’t apply to the data we were finding. We’d talk about the different chapters that would become QR4SJ, and I wanted to contribute a chapter on topics I’d been playing around with in the classroom. They checked in on me during my promotion review because they saw that I was close to burn out from doing too much and talked to me about what I could roll back on so that I could continue to do good work, but still value myself. They modeled this by having boundaries with colleagues and students. And I want to go on an on about how this friendship has been foundational for me and how I work in higher ed. How their leadership pushed me to do more for my colleagues and students (while still caring for myself). And I also know I can’t go on and on, because I got that dreaded phone call again. This time it was June, and just a week prior we’d been chatting about the book and the day before I was thinking about emailing them for a quick tutorial on how to Pretext and github in a more sensical way (it’s like ~nonsensical, totally a word now). I miss them.