Instructors Are Individually Pressured to Cancel Class and Substitute 'Independent Holiday Assignments,' Eroding Instructional Time They Are Held Accountable For

Summary

Instructors are flooded with student emails asking whether class is canceled around holidays and are pressed — informally, with no policy backing — to cancel sessions, move them online, or hand out 'independent holiday assignments' in a term that already has too little remaining contact time. The burden is absorbed one instructor at a time: each must personally justify holding class against a syllabus they already published, while administrators quietly create 'non-teaching days' that validate the expectation of lost instruction. The paradox is direct and unresolved: everyone laments the decline in student engagement and willingness to do the work, yet the institutional culture actively trains students to expect class to disappear and work to be optional. There is no mechanism — no shared scheduling standard, no defensible attendance/instructional-time policy tool, no way to communicate expectations at scale — that lets an instructor hold the line without being framed as the unreasonable one. Existing LMS and calendar tools schedule content; none of them addresses the social pressure dynamics that determine whether class happens at all, and instructors are left carrying the engagement problem they are simultaneously blamed for.