An excused absence given to an Ohio student has gained national attention for its more than well-deserved reason.
R. Damian Nance, a professor of geological sciences, excused Charlie Winovich from class because he had tickets to game one of the World Series between the Cleveland Indians and the Chicago Cubs.
Winovich received an email Monday from Nance that said he had swiped into class, but did not sign the attendance sheet that was passed around at the end of class.
ROLL TRIBE @Indians pic.twitter.com/1Cz2L1McK5
— Charles Turner (@C_tWINO) October 26, 2016
“Can you explain this or should I take it as deceit, for which I have zero tolerance?” Nance said in his email to the student.
Winovich sent an email back to his professor stating that he swiped into class, but immediately left because he had tickets to the World Series. He attached a picture of himself at the game in Cleveland.
Nance sent an email back to Winovich saying that he was excused from his absence.
“That looks like an impeccable excuse,” he said in his email to Winovich. “No repurcussions. Go Tribe!”
Winovich tweeted the email exchange and, as of Thursday, it has been shared over 2,000 times.
The exchange has been covered by ESPN, Yahoo!, Fox 8 News and Complex Sports.
“I realized I had become twitter famous at 5:40 a.m. this morning when I got a text from my son Christopher in Barcelona, Spain,” Nance said in an email to The Post.
He said that after the exchange went viral, he has received thousands of emails.
“I just hope there is nothing important in there because it is going to take me weeks to get to it,” he said.
Winovich said that after the exchange went viral, he began receiving calls from friends all around the country.
“I was pretty shocked,” he said in an email to The Post. “But (I) knew that it was such a funny situation that it had the potential to go viral.”
Tickets to the World Series was reason enough for the excused absence, Nance said, but he granted him the excuse because he was honest.
“Such behavior should be encouraged, not penalized,” he said.
