When you’re in good health, the five-day work week is filled with classes, meetings, homework and various other stressful and time-consuming commitments; it’s hard not to count down the minutes until the next mug night.

And nothing changes when your temperature breaks 101 and your mucus turns yellow.

Gross, I know, but it’s an indicator that your immune system isn’t just fighting off allergens that the body has mistakenly deemed a threat to your well-being. And it’s one of the first signs that your week is going to be filled with a lot more than just overbearing oral presentation partners and pop quizzes.

So health vs. homework: Which is your priority?

This seems to be an easy decision. Without your health, there can be no homework; so why is my first concern when I’m sick how much class I’ll be missing, rather than what I can do to avoid having four packs of tissues on me at all times?

Part of the problem is the attendance policy established by professors, demanding students to attend all but two or three classes until unexcused absences make your grade vulnerable. It’s one of the most suffocating and stringent criteria used to calculate a final grade.

Theoretically, attending class should be vital. It should be, if nothing else, a learning experience in which the professor or instructor provides their students with new information, whether it’s the practical or conceptual type.

But theory does not equal reality (surprise!). Class has transformed into a compulsory babysitting experiment, with professors as the authority and students the feisty 4-year-olds who would rather play with their blocks.

There are different kinds of babysitters. There’s the kind that gives pop quizzes to test your allegiance to the obligatory one-hour-and-25-minute lecture during which you usually do work for other classes. There’s the kind that requires you to turn in homework assignments to be graded and counted as 5 percent of your final grade. There’s another that takes attendance at the beginning of lecture but doesn’t remember your name.

And perhaps the rarest species of all is the kind that actually teaches and engages the class, making it impossible to pass by relying on the readings alone.

But it doesn’t matter what kind of babysitter you have if you’ve enjoyed more absences than allotted in the syllabus.

Living in Binghamton makes it virtually impossible to avoid contracting some type of illness, and the absences permitted to students are presumably a mechanism to account for potential sick days. However, the world isn’t perfect, and sometimes our personal health and personal lives don’t fit into the cookie-cutter mold created by the syllabus, which technically acts as a contract between the student and professor.

Intimidating students into attending class regardless of their physical well-being is dangerous. It threatens the overall worth of the class, indicating that attendance is more important than actually learning, while jeopardizing the health of already run-down college students attempting to maintain a social life and a 4.0 GPA on top of trying to get some sleep (which we all know is hopeless and unfeasible).

Don’t abuse the babysitter. Most likely they’re structuring their class the best way they know how. But don’t compromise your immune system for a nursery school tyrant that doesn’t have enough compassion to wish you well when you’re running a fever, or zeal to captivate a class.