A Texas teacher gained widespread attention on social media after a video showing her take classes from a hospital bed went viral. Stephany Hume, a Garland ISD teacher, said she was worried about her students falling behind their studies amid the Covid-19 pandemic.
Hume, who is a two-time cancer survivor, made her mother substitute for her class when the doctors told her she would have to go in for surgery. A few hours after the surgery, she resumed taking online classes.
"I am a two-time cancer survivor," Hume told NBCDFW-5. "I had put off going to the doctor because I didn't want to miss anything. It turns out I had to have surgery. I was asking the doctor, 'Can I go now? Can I go now?' And he's like, 'You have a temperature of 102. You have to stay."
Hume's mother Susie Harris told the network that she understood her daughter's eagerness to go back to teaching even though she needed to take rest after the surgery. While her students expressed concern over their teacher's health, most of them said they were glad to have a teacher that cared about them.
However, not many social media users were impressed by Hume's decision to take a class from a hospital bed. After her story went viral, social media users took to Twitter with some calling it "dystopian horror."
"Every parent, police officer, and politician that has relentlessly pushed the full responsibility of raising, protecting, and educating children is complicit in this dystopian horror. Approval of this kind of self-sacrifice is selfish and cruel. Support your goddamn educators," one Twitter user wrote.
"No teacher in the history of teachers at ANY LEVEL has ever been paid enough to justify going to these lengths. Doesn't warm my heart at all," another user tweeted.
Other users drew comparisons between how corporate workers were paid well but educators are often not given a good raise.
"This is barbaric, heartbreaking, and unacceptable. Let's be very clear and never forget: somehow, Wall Street was given $3 trillion to keep rich people's stock portfolios healthy in the pandemic while everyone else was told to go f**k themselves," wrote one user.
