Professor Liu, the Grandma Killer

I have a confession to make. I am a college professor. I teach Communication, assign projects, and occasionally expect students to meet deadlines. Apparently, I am also a serial grandmother killer.

Nobody warned me about this in graduate school. My teaching training included no geriatric mortality module, and the university has never required a grandmother risk assessment before releasing a syllabus. Yet over the years, I have noticed a disturbing pattern: American grandmothers seem extraordinarily sensitive to academic deadlines.

I have developed a preliminary epidemiological model:

• First weeks of class: Grandmas are doing great.
• First major assignment deadline: Grandmas start getting sick.
• Midterm week: Grandma mortality skyrockets.
• Finals week: A national grandmother emergency. 💀

I teach Communication, not epidemiology, but the correlation is terrifying.

The Cancun Incident

Years ago, a student told me her grandmother had died. I was sympathetic, naturally. Losing a family member is serious, and I had no reason to question her story.

Then I happened to see her Instagram. There she was, in Cancun, partying on a yacht. The photographs appeared to have been taken on the very day of the supposed tragedy.

Perhaps I had misunderstood American funeral traditions. Perhaps Cancun had developed a thriving maritime bereavement industry. Perhaps the appropriate response to losing Grandma was champagne, sunshine, and a luxury boat.

Grandma dies. Student mourns. Champagne in Cancun.

Rest in peace, Grandma. And apparently, bottoms up.

An Academic Public Health Emergency

The longer I taught, the clearer the pattern became. Ordinary lectures were harmless, but major assignments appeared to trigger catastrophic family emergencies. Why grandmothers specifically? Why not Uncle Bob? Why were grandfathers comparatively resilient? Perhaps American grandmothers possess an unidentified biological sensitivity to grading rubrics.

It turns out academia had already investigated this crisis. In 1990, Mike Adams published *The Dead Grandmother/Exam Syndrome and the Potential Downfall of American Society*, a gloriously absurd piece of academic satire featuring mock statistics on family deaths around exams. Its fictional findings suggested that students with poor grades were particularly dangerous to their relatives.

Among its proposed solutions: eliminate exams or admit only orphans.

No grandparents, no dead grandparents. Brilliant.

Reddit's Grandma Massacre

Naturally, I looked for fellow offenders on Reddit's r/Professors. I found an entire community of academics apparently responsible for catastrophic grandmother mortality.

One professor reported a **100th grandmother fatality** on exam day over seven years. Even more remarkably, moving an exam from 8 a.m. to 11 a.m. supposedly reduced casualties by half.

Let Grandma sleep in.

Another commenter joked about killing the same grandmother repeatedly across semesters. Apparently, Grandma has unlimited respawns. In another story, a student's supposedly deceased grandmother seemed to become less of an obstacle once the professor offered to count the missed exam as a dropped test.

Forget modern medicine. The grading policy has discovered resurrection.

Saving Grandma, One Syllabus at a Time

Of course, real family tragedies happen, which is precisely why fabricated ones are so obnoxious. They make genuine grief harder to distinguish from academic theater. But I have no intention of becoming the university's Chief Grandmother Verification Officer.

My approach is simple: students who request extensions before deadlines generally receive them. I don't need an elaborate family tragedy as justification. After deadlines, the published policies apply. Compassion should not require an obituary, and an extension request should not require a screenplay.

Still, universities could do more. I propose adding Grandmothers Lost per 100 Enrolled Students to faculty evaluations. Institutional strategic plans could target a 25% reduction in preventable grandmother fatalities. Imagine the interdisciplinary grant proposals.

I can already see my next conference presentation:

From Midterms to Mortality: Toward a Grandmother-Safe University.

Until then, I will continue teaching Communication, assigning projects, and giving students reasonable opportunities to succeed. But I am officially retiring from the grandmother investigation business.

Grandma can finally live in peace.

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Further reading:

• Mike Adams (1990), *The Dead Grandmother/Exam Syndrome and the Potential Downfall of American Society*
• r/Professors: “100th Grandma Fatality on Exam Day”
• r/Professors: “Two weeks into the semester, and I've already killed a grandma”