Thursday morning: the student previously absent, due to a rather unpleasant ailment, returns to the campus grounds, only to be greeted by mounds of notes and makeup work. Everything on the notes and homework is hieroglyphics to them, and all the work is expected to be completed and turned in to the teacher within the next day, with virtually no direction.

The matter of the fact is that everyone, no matter how healthy or unhealthy they are, will be the victim of the common cold, fever, or even the flu. It’s common sense. The human body becomes ill and needs some time to recover. This often calls for staying home from school/work, resting, and drowning in medication for the rest of the day.

Most people dread returning to school simply because they know what awaits them: a pile of makeup work from all classes. The accepted rule is that students get as many days as they have been absent to make up all the missed work. Often times, the complication that arises with this is the lack of direction teachers offer when initially retrieving missed work. Some teachers seem to push the responsibility of learning unseen lessons to the students themselves. Unfortunately, this can cause confusion and misinterpretating the lesson without proper guidance.

Something that is quite puzzling is the fact that only seven absences are permitted a semester. Despite the fact that these parameters are in place to keep a student’s attendance percentage from falling below acceptable average, life strikes, and it can strike hard. Whether it’s the tragic death of a family member, injury, or anything requiring time off, must it be limited to just seven measly days?

Education is important, albeit, sometimes the world takes away from that. Leave time should be more lenient and more action should be taken on the instructor’s parts. Provided that teachers do offer after school tutoring sessions, the daily life of a student could prohibit them from partaking in these sessions, like after school sports or even work.

Do the consequences of missing school have to be such a burden? Students should be eased into missed content after being gone, not viciously thrown into them like a ragdoll.