Students with medical disabilities (again)

3 comments

1. Yes, because everyone knows medical (including mental health) issues only appear before class starts. You are one teacher. You have 500+ students, who each have a different life with different issues. Most likely, the university is notifying you as soon as they were allowed to by law. I highly doubt the university thought, “Oh, we need to tell teachers now!”. I’ve discussed this topic at length with my university’s head counselor. I asked why I only get notifications about certain students, it is because while they may be disabled, the university has not been informed about it. Once the university is, it needs to go through the proper committee which will discuss how the student’s needs should be met, then the teachers are informed.

   Yes, it can be tough to go back and evaluate the student based on new standards, but that is way less of a problem than the student is going (or has gone) through.

2. [deleted]

3. >By way of update, let me mention I got a similar notice from a different university two days ago. The final exam is next week.

   So the student applied late. As a teacher you just have to deal with it. Imagine the stress some students are under boomeranging between online and in-person classes, some of them (1st, 2nd years) never having experienced a normal year in higher education. They absolutely have it worse than the teachers (who can often find excuses to keep classes on-line/in-person, meaning that they get to have a consistent form of interaction while the students get screwed.)

   Also keep in mind that requesting this kind of accomodation / declaring a disability might be one of the required steps in order to defer by a year and/or receive other accomodation from the university as a whole.

   edit: typos