When a student showed up to Nathan Alexander’s maths class with their baby girl, the lecturer wasn’t fazed. In fact, rather than watching his student struggle to take notes while rocking his daughter, Professor Alexander offered to hold the little one throughout the class.
Wayne Hayer took his his daughter Assata, to his lecture at Morehouse College in Atlanta, US, when he couldn’t find anyone to watch her. Hayer’s classmate, Nick Vaughn, posted a photo of Alexander teaching with the baby girl in a papoose on Twitter – and it went down a storm.
The tweet had more than 300,000 likes at the time of writing, and hundreds of people praised the teacher’s act of kindness and the father’s dedication to learning.
Vaughn explained on Facebook that Prof Alexander spent the class holding five-month-old Assata, and carried on doing so as he stayed afterwards to help those with questions about the lecture.
“It was beautiful,” Vaughn told HuffPost UK. “But it didn’t seem like a huge achievement or big act, just simply something that had to be done.
“Dr Alexander didn’t have to allow Assata to stay in the class, but he did. And I feel like that is a testament more to what a great person he is and how well he was raised.”
Hayer told CNN he was nervous to attend class that day. “Morehouse is an all-male college and [having] a baby strapped to me would make all eyes be on me,” he said. But it turned out he didn’t need to worry at all. Baby Assata was perfectly well behaved and, towards the end of the lesson, she drifted off to sleep.
Many people on social media were touched by the story, and some even shared their own videos and stories of teachers they’d been privileged to work with.
Prof Alexander told local news site The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that he’s “not an exception” among his peers: “We have teachers who assist students in similar ways every day.”
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