I Study Breastfeeding Behavior. Here’s Why Nursing Teachers Have It So Tough
It was always an awkward declaration to make to a room full of young men: “When it’s break time, you’re going to see me run out of this room. I have to pump and I need every minute to get it done on the break.” While I have never shied from discussing breastfeeding in public (I have spent the last six years studying breastfeeding behaviors, after all), there’s something about announcing your plan to extract milk from your breasts to a classroom of 30 college students that seems to draw unwanted attention to your anatomy.
As a college professor, I was lucky to work for an institution with a designated pumping room. But while physical environment is important, physical space is only one piece of a puzzle that truly supports moms pumping. In my case, I was teaching back-to-back four-hour classes with a 10-minute break in between. We had a 15-minute break during each class, but with the designated pumping room a three- to four-minute walk from our classroom, I often ended up pumping under my cubicle desk during breaks, while shouting “look away!” to my male office mate who was horrified by the sucking sounds coming from my breast pump.
The situation is far worse for many K-12 teachers. Now that President Joe Biden has signed the Providing Urgent Maternal Protections for Nursing Mothers Act, or PUMP Act, into law, schools must take more seriously the needs of their nursing teachers.
Until recently, moms in salaried jobs, such as teaching, were exempt from federal legislation for breastfeeding accommodations. Surprisingly, in an economy in which hourly workers typically have the fewest rights, they have been federally guaranteed a private pumping location and reasonable pumping break times. And perhaps this makes sense: Moms in service jobs often have a greater need for workplace protections.
But with the signing of the PUMP Act, some 9 million salaried workers previously excluded from legislation will now be guaranteed pumping locations and breaks. This is a step in the right direction. However, as with many nursing protections, the bill’s prescriptions are often at odds with the day-to-day logistics of jobs—such as teaching—that don’t allow for leaving one’s post for the 30 minutes required to pump both breasts. With this new legislation, it will be important for schools to codify scheduling requirements of pumping mothers, so that moms don’t have to choose between breastfeeding and teaching.
Moms pump for three main reasons: to replace the milk fed to their baby while they’re away, to maintain supply, and to prevent discomfort. Breasts continue to fill throughout the day and can become engorged and extremely uncomfortable if not relieved. This can become especially embarrassing in the early months of a baby’s life, when lactating moms can leak through their clothes if they don’t pump.
My experience pumping as a professor was logistically challenging, but the time restrictions placed on K-12 teachers are even more at odds with the realities of pumping. Teachers I have talked to reported difficult conversations with administrators in charge of class schedules who don’t understand the difference a couple hours makes in the physical comfort and supply maintenance of a pumping mom. They reported missed team meetings and being forced to pump during lunch, which can be extremely challenging as many pumps are difficult to operate while eating.
Middle and high school teachers often have a hard time getting a prep period that is at the midpoint between the beginning of the school day and their lunch. Elementary teachers might pump during music class or P.E.—if these increasingly rare special classes still exist in their school systems—but these accommodations must be scheduled well before the start of the school year.
In many cases, teachers have to choose between finding coverage for their classroom or forgoing pumping. With one or two pumping sessions per day, this could mean finding coverage 40 times a month. And teachers of all grade levels reported being interrupted while pumping, by fellow teachers, support staff, and, perhaps most mortifyingly, students.
Some might argue that pumping is merely a short-term inconvenience for a few months of a child’s life. But the data on teacher attrition suggest that more, not fewer, accommodations are needed to make the profession appealing enough to properly staff classrooms. Teaching is a job that demands a good education without the exchange of a flexible schedule. It’s no surprise that, as of March 2022, the K-12 education labor market had shrunk by 4 percent from pre-pandemic levels. It’s also not a surprise that teachers reported pandemic-era anxiety levels sometimes higher than that of health-care workers.
If we are going to recruit and retain our teaching workforce under such circumstances, teachers need all the accommodations we can give them. That means that legislation such as the PUMP Act must be accompanied by scheduling accommodations at both the school and district levels so that the legislation for lactating mothers transcends paper.
To test the capabilities of artificial intelligence, Education Week asked ChatGPT to generate a lesson plan, a response to a concerned parent, a rubric, feedback on student work, and a letter of recommendation. Here’s what the chat bot came up with—and what real teachers thought of its work.
1. Plan a lesson
We asked ChatGPT to plan a lesson for 6th graders on the causes of climate change. It quickly generated an objective, a list of materials needed, assessment ideas, and an 80-minute lesson plan. The lesson plan included direct instruction, guided practice, and independent practice.
Lorenzo Worster, a 6th grade teacher at Sierra Expeditionary Learning School in Truckee, Calif., wasn’t impressed.
“To be honest, the lesson plan seems pretty outdated,” Worster wrote in an email. “Most science lessons today use the 5E format or start with a phenomena for students to explore and then finish with the instruction after a student grapple.” (The 5E model of instruction includes five phases: engage, explore, explain, elaborate, and evaluate.)
Worster added: “It also is just the framework and not the actual lesson. What I need most is the sources, facts, experiments with materials—not just the broad ideas from which to start planning.”
Still, other teachers say that the AI-generated lesson plans are a good starting point that they can build on to make their own.
“Your lesson plans are your recipe—you still need a chef. You still need a teacher to make that recipe come alive,” said Stephen Lockyer, a primary school teacher in London whose tweets about using ChatGPT to plan lessons started a lively online discussion. “If you’ve got a plan that’s bare bones that you can build on and flesh out and make wonderful, then that’ll save so much time.”
2. Respond to a parent email
We drafted an email from a concerned parent that said: “Dear Ms. Johnson, I am alarmed to see that Isabella is getting a C in your class. She told me that you won’t let her submit any of the assignments she missed, even for partial credit. Why can’t she? Please advise. -Jane Smith”
Then, we asked ChatGPT to respond, telling the parent that her child cannot submit any late work. The chat bot wrote out a lengthy, professional email within seconds.
Patrick Harris, a middle school English teacher near Detroit, said in an email that he loved how the ChatGPT took some of the heavy lifting off teachers’ shoulders by giving them a framework to build on.
“[The email] is written in a tone that does not match mine,” he said. “But it does give me a hint on what I could say, and I can revise it from there.”
3. Write a rubric
We asked ChatGPT to write a rubric for an oral presentation for 6th graders, including the use of a visual. It generated a 100-point rubric with four categories: presentation content (40 points), delivery (30 points), organization (20 points), and attire and materials (10 points).
The scoring guidelines are a good example of the time-saving capabilities of ChatGPT, Harris said. While teachers might need to revise and edit the rubric to better suit their needs, generating a template lightens teachers’ loads.
“When I was in my first years of teaching, I was overwhelmed with the amount of things piling up on my to-do list. The hardest part was not checking the items off my to-do list, but it was having the mental (and emotional) capacity” to get started, he said.
These AI-generated pieces of work are “a start but never the finish,” Harris said.
4. Grade a student essay
We asked ChatGPT to grade an 8th grader’s essay analyzing Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet.” One key point: The essay itself was generated by ChatGPT.
Romeo and Juliet is a classic story written by William Shakespeare about two young lovers from feuding families. The play is set in the city of Verona and follows the tragic fate of Romeo and Juliet as they try to navigate their love for each other despite the hate between their families. The themes in the play include love, hate, and the power of fate.
One of the most striking things about Romeo and Juliet is the way that Shakespeare portrays the love between the two main characters. Romeo and Juliet’s love is intense and passionate. It is clear that they truly care for each other and that they are willing to do anything to be together. Despite the fact that they know their love is doomed from the start, they continue to fight for it until the very end.
Another important theme in the play is hate. The hatred between Romeo and Juliet’s families is the main reason for their tragic fate. The Montague and Capulet families have been enemies for a long time, and their hatred is so deep that it cannot be resolved. This hatred is what ultimately leads to the deaths of Romeo and Juliet, as they are caught in the middle of the feud.
The power of fate is also a significant theme in Romeo and Juliet. Throughout the play, it is clear that Romeo and Juliet’s fate is predetermined. They are unable to control the events that happen to them, and they are ultimately helpless against the forces that bring them together and tear them apart. Despite their best efforts, they cannot change their fate.
In conclusion, Romeo and Juliet is a powerful and tragic story about the love and hate between two young lovers. Shakespeare’s portrayal of the love between Romeo and Juliet is intense and passionate, and the themes of hate and fate add depth to the story. The play is still popular and widely studied today, a testament to its timeless relevance and powerful storytelling.
ChatGPT gave the essay a B-plus. It said the essay was a “solid analysis” that provided specific examples to support the writer’s points. The chat bot did say that the essay should include more quotes from the text, offer a more in-depth analysis of the role of fate in the play, and give “an example of a universal relevance of the themes.”
Christina Torres Cawdery, an 8th grade English teacher at Punahou School in Honolulu, strongly disagreed with the chat bot’s grading. She said she would have given the essay a C-minus, citing its lack of supporting quotes or specific evidence, as well as poor and static sentence fluency. The conclusion was clear but shallow, Cawdery said—not the level of writing she’d expect from an 8th grader.
Her biggest concern is that ChatGPT said the essay provided specific examples to support the text, but Cawdery said she didn’t see any. “I don’t think it accurately analyzed this essay at all,” she said.
She also pointed out that the chat bot was unable to offer personal feedback. When grading, she strives to “know [the] writer’s voice and understand the kind of feedback that they need,” she said, adding that the feedback looks different for every student.
Also, Cawdery said she worried about the potential for bias from ChatGPT, which is trained in part through human coaching. Students who write in their local or cultural dialect could be dinged for not using academic language, she said, which concerns her.
5. Write a letter of recommendation
Finally, we asked ChatGPT to write a letter of recommendation for a student, James. We included three descriptors of James—thoughtful, hardworking, and curious—and added that he currently has an A in our Advanced Placement Literature class.
