Professor slammed for BF during class

[indy and lara]

I bf for 14 months all over the place. I have no problem with bf. I still think her poorly child had no place in a lecture hall. Just as I used to complain about poorly prepared lecturers, I would complain about someone, male or female, bringing their child with them to a lecture. I wonder if people would be so understanding if I brought my daughter to school when I was teaching your child?

It wouldn't bother me one bit. There's more to education than book learning. A lesson these students clearly need to learn!

There would be an uproar if a teacher brought their child to school for the day because they were too poorly for nursery. My personal life, problems and family have no place in the classroom.

 

[Jaylynne]

I would have no problem if she breastfed in the dining hall, office, or other campus places. Not in a lecture hall with a captive audience. It's not her place to educate on breastfeeding a sick child during class. What a superioristic attitude. Many would learn in a more positive way just by seeing it verses having it in your face. The way she did it was negative.

And as for her bosses, most aren't around or have the same schedule so may not have even seen it.

Most professors grade on participation which is part of paying attention.

 

[alaskagrown]

Have you not noticed a majority of breastfeeding women say this is unprofessional?! Babies have NO place in a lecture hall. None. If your students are distracted too bad. In my university we were graded on paying attention as well as test scores and professors took cell phones til the end of class or kicked out students using them.

And I am in the US. I know how bad maternity leave is. That doesn't mean she can use her classroom as a sick ward. Obviously she wasn't paying much attention to her sick child if she got a paper clip in her mouth and a student pointed it out. Which meant the student wasn't paying attention to to lecture.

Get over the breastfeeding. Child shouldnt be there. Not professional. Who cares if it's one lecture. Students are still paying for it not paying for the mom to look after her sick child.

If a professor can't devote her attention to what she's being paid for she shouldn't be teaching. There's plenty of people willing to take her place in the US right now who would give 100%

What a horrible attitude. Perhaps this kind of thing needs to happen a lot more often as it appears many people need to learn some valuable life lessons.

If breastfeeding isn't the issue, why was she allowed to bring the child to class? Why did her employer not stop her before she reached the room? Why did the tweeting student not seem to care about it until she was breastfeeding? Why was it mentioned at all?

And, how on earth can students be "graded on paying attention" That is something that absolutely cannot be graded.

I'd rather have this woman giving lectures and as an employee than anyone who care little about other people.

LOL, to answer the first I'm sure she was not supposed to bring her sick child in the first place. To answer your second, because the dean of the university does not stand outside each individual classroom and ensure teachers are not toting along their sick toddlers. To answer your third, I'm sure the student body was in fact bothered by the one year old crawling around the room, the breastfeeding was the tipping point. And why was it mentioned? Uhh..because it's ridiculously unprofessional. Let's see your take on this the next time your dentist is trying to drill into your teeth while breastfeeding her toddler, the next time your lawyer is trying to defend you in a court case while breastfeeding her toddler, the next time you're checking out from the grocery store and the clerk is breastfeeding her toddler...

 

[fantastica]

I bf for 14 months all over the place. I have no problem with bf. I still think her poorly child had no place in a lecture hall. Just as I used to complain about poorly prepared lecturers, I would complain about someone, male or female, bringing their child with them to a lecture. I wonder if people would be so understanding if I brought my daughter to school when I was teaching your child?

It wouldn't bother me one bit. There's more to education than book learning. A lesson these students clearly need to learn!

What exactly were they learning though?

 

[Jaylynne]

I bf for 14 months all over the place. I have no problem with bf. I still think her poorly child had no place in a lecture hall. Just as I used to complain about poorly prepared lecturers, I would complain about someone, male or female, bringing their child with them to a lecture. I wonder if people would be so understanding if I brought my daughter to school when I was teaching your child?

It wouldn't bother me one bit. There's more to education than book learning. A lesson these students clearly need to learn!

What exactly were they learning though?

Exactly. They saw it as a negative experience. Not good.

 

[vintage67]

A nice little publicity stunt.

Her book that has been sitting rather still since 2009 now only has 18 copies left on Amazon.

She gets to become a lactivist hero; no doubt someone will have her name on a t-shirt or poster at the next latch on protest despite the fact that this issue has little to do with breastfeeding and more about professionalism.

Anyone that has any kind of problem with this, even her fellow breastfeeding mothers are all surely brainwashed or somehow self hating women, when in fact, she has probably hurt the cause of women. Will someone hiring a woman with a small child now be wondering if they will get a "bonus" mini employee at the office?

According to the Washington Post, her teaching assistant came into the room and was trying to bounce the baby to calm her down. The assistant offered to take the toddler out of the room and guess what? Pine refused.
She refused assistance from her T.A. And this was only the first day of class. Not the last day before a big exam, etc.

 

[lindseymw]

I cannot believe some of the attitudes here. And from mothers too. Are we still living in the dark ages??

It is entirely possible to take a baby to your place of employment and still be doing your job.

No I don't live in the dark ages, I'd say I was being realistic.

For my job, actually it would not be possible to take my child into work at all. It would be highly unprofessional. I work in mental health & take many phone calls from people who are wanting to refer to deal with their depression. Now I'm sorry but I cannot say half way through a conversation "Thanks for phoning us, I know you want to talk to someone about your depression but my one year old has just ran off with the stapler, can I call you back?"

My DH works on a blast furnace & deals with molten steel...I highly doubt it would be possible for him to take a sick child to work & still be able to do his job.

So I stand by my original point of the child should not have been at work with her in the first place.

 

[joshiesmum]

Defo a publicity stunt!!! Silly women..glad she wasnt my lecturer!!!

 

[robinator]

Interesting....

 

[Jaylynne]

That does shed new light now doesn't it. I would drop that class too if it were being run by a zealot trying to sell a book

 

[JASMAK]

I cannot believe some of the attitudes here. And from mothers too. Are we still living in the dark ages??

It is entirely possible to take a baby to your place of employment and still be doing your job. Especially giving a lecture at university. When I think of the quality of many of my lecturers, I can't help but think that a woman breastfeeding a child would be far more preferable to the ones who either talk at you badly for an hour, or are distracted by something else. During my maternity leave, I took part in many conference calls from home with my handsfree kit in whilst looking after my daughter. Mostly she was breastfeeding during them. If these meetings had been local and no conferencing facilities were available, I'd have taken her in. And if anyone had a problem with it, tough. If at any point she was becoming a distraction, I would have left the room or stopped the call.

These students should realise the world doesn't revolve around everything being perfect for them and they should have learned a great lesson in acceptance. And to say "they are paying thousands for their education so this is wrong" is ridiculous. Seriously? One lecture where a lecturer may not have been perfect? There are any number of things which are not worth the money students pay for education and this is definitely not one of them.

With the shockingly bad levels of maternity leave and pay provision for women in the US, this woman should be commended for doing something which shows she is trying to balance work and family, something the US badly needs to encourage people to do.

And I do suspect there would have been less of an outcry if she had been bottle feeding the child or had just brought them in in a pram to sleep through the lecture. This is to do with poor attitudes to breastfeeding, dressed up as an "unprofessional" argument.

The guy who tweeted during the class (not that THAT is a distraction....) only did so after she started feeding the child, why not when he first went it. And he later tweeted "...I don't do feminism, I'm a pro-male chauvinism type guy #makemeasandwich"

...and yet is is the professor who is considered wrong?

I have breastfed in public too. For me the issue isn't breastfeeding. The things that I don't agree with is taking a child that is too sick for nursery to a lecture theatre while she carried out a lesson. The child was not well they do not need to be dragged to a lecture while mummy works just because mummy refuses to take time off. When my children are ill I take time off work because my children's health and well-being is more important than my job. Yes I don't get paid but at the end of the day they are my main responsibility and a child that is too sick to go to nursery needs to be cared for at home x

This is my problem too...it was kind of mean to haul her baby to a class...clearly she should have been home. I have BF for 64 mths...everywhere....but not in the middle of work (court). That part seems odd. I have BF during work breaks!!

 

[Menelly]

I cannot believe some of the attitudes here. And from mothers too. Are we still living in the dark ages??

It is entirely possible to take a baby to your place of employment and still be doing your job. Especially giving a lecture at university. When I think of the quality of many of my lecturers, I can't help but think that a woman breastfeeding a child would be far more preferable to the ones who either talk at you badly for an hour, or are distracted by something else. During my maternity leave, I took part in many conference calls from home with my handsfree kit in whilst looking after my daughter. Mostly she was breastfeeding during them. If these meetings had been local and no conferencing facilities were available, I'd have taken her in. And if anyone had a problem with it, tough. If at any point she was becoming a distraction, I would have left the room or stopped the call.

These students should realise the world doesn't revolve around everything being perfect for them and they should have learned a great lesson in acceptance. And to say "they are paying thousands for their education so this is wrong" is ridiculous. Seriously? One lecture where a lecturer may not have been perfect? There are any number of things which are not worth the money students pay for education and this is definitely not one of them.

With the shockingly bad levels of maternity leave and pay provision for women in the US, this woman should be commended for doing something which shows she is trying to balance work and family, something the US badly needs to encourage people to do.

And I do suspect there would have been less of an outcry if she had been bottle feeding the child or had just brought them in in a pram to sleep through the lecture. This is to do with poor attitudes to breastfeeding, dressed up as an "unprofessional" argument.

The guy who tweeted during the class (not that THAT is a distraction....) only did so after she started feeding the child, why not when he first went it. And he later tweeted "...I don't do feminism, I'm a pro-male chauvinism type guy #makemeasandwich"

...and yet is is the professor who is considered wrong?

I have breastfed in public too. For me the issue isn't breastfeeding. The things that I don't agree with is taking a child that is too sick for nursery to a lecture theatre while she carried out a lesson. The child was not well they do not need to be dragged to a lecture while mummy works just because mummy refuses to take time off. When my children are ill I take time off work because my children's health and well-being is more important than my job. Yes I don't get paid but at the end of the day they are my main responsibility and a child that is too sick to go to nursery needs to be cared for at home x

Not only that, I'd be furious if someone brought a sick kid to class on the first day of school, because that carries the risk of everyone else in that classroom getting sick, which is why she wasn't allowed at the daycare in the first place.

 

[Jaylynne]

If it was a stunt, was the child even sick? Or did the mom take advantage of the illness.

 

[robinator]

The guy who tweeted during the class (not that THAT is a distraction....) only did so after she started feeding the child, why not when he first went it. And he later tweeted "...I don't do feminism, I'm a pro-male chauvinism type guy #makemeasandwich"

...and yet is is the professor who is considered wrong?

......So it's the student's fault now?

 

[vintage67]

You may or not be able to access the Washington Post articles without subscribing.

You can probably read this which gives an overview of articles from several sources.

https://theweek.com/article/index/233313/the-professor-who-breast-fed-while-teaching-inappropriate

 

[lhancock90]

For me the issue isn't that she breastfed but there seems to be a determination to make it about that, its that she took a child, who was sick, to her place of work WHILST she was supposed to be teaching students, who pay thousands for their education and deserve her full attention.

 

[Palestrina]

Have you not noticed a majority of breastfeeding women say this is unprofessional?! Babies have NO place in a lecture hall. None. If your students are distracted too bad. In my university we were graded on paying attention as well as test scores and professors took cell phones til the end of class or kicked out students using them.

And I am in the US. I know how bad maternity leave is. That doesn't mean she can use her classroom as a sick ward. Obviously she wasn't paying much attention to her sick child if she got a paper clip in her mouth and a student pointed it out. Which meant the student wasn't paying attention to to lecture.

Get over the breastfeeding. Child shouldnt be there. Not professional. Who cares if it's one lecture. Students are still paying for it not paying for the mom to look after her sick child.

If a professor can't devote her attention to what she's being paid for she shouldn't be teaching. There's plenty of people willing to take her place in the US right now who would give 100%

I'm not sure where I stand on the issue, and I haven't disagreed with your previous posts. But you are now starting to get very angry and insistent and rather cruel.

First, the bit in red. Who determines that babies have no place in the classroom? Is it a rule? Did you create that rule and therefore have first hand knowledge of it? From what I recall there was no disciplinary action taken on the teacher, nor do I recall a statement from the administration on their stance on the issue. The fact is that a university can be a lax environment, professors grade how they wish without anyone enforcing standards or expect them to teach in a cookie cutter way. So bringing her child to work is clearly not illegal. If she does it often, she may get a talking to.

The blue bit - how do you know the student was not paying attention to class? It's possible to pay attention to one thing and have your gaze averted from something else. Unless you can prove that the students were not paying attention in the class then it's arbitrary to claim that they didn't.

About the students paying for the class. Typical consumer entitlement. More and more in America I'm hearing the same kind of sentiment, "I'm paying for this! Do it right! This is MY time!" Just because we pay for something doesn't mean we get to control it, then more we continue to think this way the more this country finds itself in a rut. I don't even know where or how this type of mentality started and it's a shame it dictates everyone now.

Do you really believe that this mother is incapable of doing her job well or not able to focus? You think this is something she should be fired for? Do you want to throw stones at her as well or is stripping her of her livelihood so that someone more worthy can get the job is enough punishment?

 

[vintage67]

I agree on the nature of today's overly demanding consumer.

However, all of you reading this should realize that the tuition for ONE semester at this university is $18,777. That's a lot of dough. So many students take out loans. Don't you think nearly $40,000 dollars a year for tuition should come with an expectation of a professor not distracted or causing a distraction with a toddler???? Come on, that's Community College stuff at best and they deserve better as well.

 

[Ozzieshunni]

I'm sure you don't mean vintage that people who went to community college received any less of an education because they paid less, do you?

 

[vintage67]

Dipstics and doughnuts Ozzie! You just want to argue! For Toodle's sake, I have an Associate in Arts from a Community College!!! Twiddle Dee and Tulips and Drumsticks and any other silliness I can say without saying what I'm thinking!!!