Two diligent students faced an unusual dilemma when the Pope came to Paris -- and their professor wasn't much help.
There are many excuses a student can offer for missing class. A doctor's appointment is usually convincing. Transport problems are plausible. “I overslept” at least has the virtue of honesty. “I need to see the Pope” was a new one for me.
A few days before Pope Leo's visit to Paris, one of my students came bounding up to me in the corridor looking excited and concerned. He is diligent, engaged, and not remotely someone I associate with trying to wriggle out of class, so when he explained his predicament, I had every sympathy.
Pope Leo would be passing in his popemobile directly beneath his apartment at Vavin on the first day of his papal visit to France. Unfortunately, he would be doing so during my first lesson of the term where I set out the essentials for the year.
This presented us with a problem. At the school where I teach, attendance matters, and absences are taken seriously, and can be very detrimental to a student's class ranking. I couldn't simply wave a professorial wand and make an absence disappear because I happened to approve of the reason behind it.
My student knew that. He wasn't really asking me to bend the rules; he had already made his choice. He wanted to see the Pope, even if doing so meant accepting the consequences at school. I told him I understood completely and, although there was nothing I could do about the absence, I wholeheartedly respected his decision ... and actually admired it!
Then came student number two
On the day of the papal visit, another student approached me with a variation on the same dilemma. He needed to leave my class early because he was heading to the Stade de France for the vigil.
His approach was a little more entrepreneurial. Couldn't I perhaps mark him present anyway? As somebody responsible for teaching communication, I had to admire the attempt. He had identified his objective, understood the obstacle, and gone directly to the person he hoped might remove it. Unfortunately for him, his communication professor also has to respect school rules.
My hands were tied. Leaving early meant an absence, however sympathetic I might be to the cause. So Pope Leo had now managed, without ever meeting either of them, to get two of my students into trouble. And I found the whole thing strangely wonderful.
These are young adults studying at an art school in Paris. Their lives are full of projects, deadlines, friendships, parties, phones and all the other things that compete for the attention of people their age. Nobody had instructed these two to rearrange their day for the Pope. Nobody was offering extra credit for papal enthusiasm. Quite the reverse, in fact: both knew there would be an actual academic inconvenience attached. They went anyway.
Present and absent
Later, I found myself thinking about the peculiar language we use around attendance. Both students were officially absent. Their names appeared that way on the register, and according to the perfectly necessary machinery of academic administration, that was that. But were they really absent?
One was standing at Vavin waiting for the Pope to pass beneath the home from which he normally watches Paris go by. The other was making his way to the Stade de France to join thousands of youngsters for a vigil with the leader of the Catholic Church. Meanwhile, the rest of us were exactly where the timetable said we should be.
As a teacher of communication, much of my job involves encouraging students to look beyond what is immediately in front of them: to be curious about the world, understand the significance of a moment, and recognize when something happening around them is worth their attention. It would have been slightly ridiculous, then, to be offended when two of them did precisely that.
Rules still matter. With large groups of students, teachers cannot operate an attendance system based on whether we personally consider an excuse sufficiently interesting. “Pope passing beneath bedroom window” is admittedly difficult to beat, but once you start down that road, I suspect things could deteriorate rapidly. So the absences remain.
A blot on the register
However, I suppose what stays with me most is the fact that both students were prepared to accept the mark against their attendance rather than miss something they believed mattered.
There are moments in life that refuse to fit conveniently around a timetable. We don't always recognize them until afterwards, which is perhaps why I admired these two for recognizing theirs while it was happening.
Years from now, I doubt either will remember what I taught in that particular lesson. As their professor, I probably shouldn't admit that, but I have been teaching long enough to know my place in the grand scheme of human memory.
I suspect (and hope) one student will remember looking down from Vavin and seeing Pope Leo pass beneath his window. The other will remember being among the crowds at the Stade de France for the vigil. And their professor will remember reluctantly marking them absent while thinking that, in one sense at least, they might have been rather more present than the rest of us.
As for the little blot those absences have left on their academic records, I'll see what I can do about making sure their enthusiasm doesn't cost them too dearly. After all, it seems a little harsh to punish a student for being in the wrong place at precisely the right time.
