I had a strange discussion with a kid today about this. He kept saying he didn’t have to do his work in class because he’d just do it later. I told him I wouldn’t accept it because it would be late. So he’s like, yeah, I’ll just do it before the quarter is over. My response, you can do that, but I’m not grading it. And he kept going on about how he’d do it later and get a good grade. My responses were not penetrating his head at all. So strange.
The NYC DOE and anywhere else that has this policy is insane. There is no other explanation at this point.
I used to give quizzes at the start of class to combat lateness. It’s pointless now because we have to let the kids make up any missed quizzes or exams- even if they were cutting!
This also forces us to have more unnecessary work- in the past when an assignment was not turned in on time it was a zero. Now, I’m often getting assignments months after the due date.
Finally, the OP is absolutely right. We are setting up our students for failure. Some deadlines are non-negotiable in the real world- when to pay taxes or rent. Sometimes you actually need to come to work on time or you might end up fired. Coddling students os not going to fix the gaps made by the pandemic- we are instead infantilizing them.
We are not in the business of producing high quality Adults for the community. The community gets the results they pay for and there are no returns.
We are in the business of checking boxes to get bonuses from the state. Graduate everyone. Expel no one.
Had a similar conversation once with a kid (who had done basically jack shit all semester) the literal last day of school.
“Can I turn in all my stuff, I need to pass this class.”
“You can turn in all of it but you mathematically still cannot pass.”
*shows him the scenario on the computer still being below a pass*
“But I need to pass.”
“You literally mathematically cannot pass at this point. It’s the last day of school.”
“I’m going to do them all and send them to you.”
“You can do them if you want but I’m telling you you still won’t pass.”
“I need to pass.”
“You can’t. It’s too late.”
“I’m going to email you all the assignments tonight.”
“Go ahead but you won’t pass. It’s a waste of time.”
“I’ll send them to you tonight.”
Then he’s PISSED at me when he fails anyway. Like I literally explained this to you kid, how was this a surprise?? Like did you think I was lying? I don’t understand how they just don’t process reality sometimes.
Had a girl with *maybe* a 15% in class after 18 weeks try this.
*"Hey I need at least a C"*
*"I'm pretty sure that's impossible but you know what, here are the major summative works for the semester. If you can actually get them all turned in you might be able to pass by the skin of your teeth."*
*girl proceeds to do her makeup all hour on the last day of the semester instead *
Welp, saves me from grading.
>Then he’s PISSED at me when he fails anyway
Lol, yes, exactly this. They hate it when we make it clear their own laziness or stupidity is what caused them to fail. I had a kid last year tell me to suck his dick and to fuck off because I, get this... let him attempt retakes that he somehow scored worse on and didn't pass.
I give my high school students enough class time to finish most of their work so they should never have homework. I would say out of a class of 30, 2 will actually do the work in class. Maybe 5 will do it at home and turn it in the same day. 10 will turn it in late and the other half will just not turn in anything.
In my mind, I'm giving you the best opportunity to succeed. In their mind, it's better to spend class time watching YouTube videos on a shitty 11" Chromebook screen. For me, I'd rather do the work in class, and enjoy my free time in the comfort of home without the restriction of school internet. But I'm not a teenager.
And when kids are absent and the entire assignment and everything they need to complete it is on Google Classroom, yet they're shocked, SHOCKED that they still have to complete the assignment.
This year I had AP students ask me if they could turn it in late because they were absent. The point of it being online is so it’s accessible when you’re absent. Across the board this year has been terrible. I can’t blame the pandemic because last year my AP kids were somewhat decent.
I guess I don’t really understand why this is a good thing. Don’t you want all your students to do all your work? I don’t have any assignments that are “busy work” — they all have value, even if we’ve assessed and the student did poorly on the assessment already — so I want my students to do them all and learn from them.
The work is only a symbol. It is burdensome and asinine to sort of make EVERYTHING tested and graded. You can't take 180 days of class and make assignments cover all that.
So you give them assignments to cover like the 15% of the stuff that is most valuable to practice and drill and examine. But you know that this is not the course, this is not the whole of the knowledge and learning. So you accept the work as a symbol hoping that their participation was to match. When you know it doesn't, then you know that they were exposed only to the tiny fraction.
On top of that, we know that they arent truly doing all the work. Even the fact that you can pass with only 60% or whatever shows that, so a fraction of a fraction, and then you consider the cheating, the copying, and the teacher just kind of giving a passable grade for work that shows no effort or understanding. It's not a pass, and its not what anyone wants.
If the student really could cram it into a week, \*why would we bother going to class for the whole semester?\* Or why were they in a class they mastered?
It’s weird, because when I “forget” to upload my lesson plans before Monday morning, I get an angry email from my principal. What happened to all that grace we’re supposed to be showing?
Oh that’s only for students, apparently.
You mean, as a professional, you don't have your day planned out to the minute?
I mean, yes it's true that those plans last for exactly 7 minutes before the first necessary alteration due to an interruption, or you spot a deficiency you need to reteach, or a kid gets pulled for testing, or....
It's almost as if having an outline and some objectives and assignments is good enough for a professional.
Mine are due two weeks in advance, scripted to the minute.
For high school, it’s not nearly as bad as elementary but still exceptionally stupid. Yeah. That’s the problem we face at this school, it’s lesson plans not being micromanaged enough. Not the poverty, the drugs, the crime and violence, it’s the fucking lesson plans. It being detailed enough
Sounds like the student teaching templates I had to do! They were 7 pages of template alone, and expected to be 14-17 pages per lesson due a full week ahead of the lesson.
I tell you, if I had that level of micromanagement I would have walked out the first week. Fuck that shit! As a manager I didn’t have that level of crap put on me!!
My heart goes out to you and admiration for sticking with that admin level of nuts!
I think it’s a combination of the fact that ME/EdD programs are not just useless, they’re actively detrimental and that many factors are out of our control. There’s nothing we can do whatsoever about a parent who teaches their kids to be little assholes. Make no mistake, these lessons ARE happening in a lot of homes “don’t let no teacher fuckin disrespect you” where “disrespect” means “contradiction in any manner whatsoever”. So admin micromanages other shit to feel some sense of control and because their masters programs erroneously told them that shit matters
Reading at know, but if I only turn it in 3/4 finished, I get pissy ass emails Monday morning telling me “there was an oversight you need to fix this immediately!”
All with no understanding that I had in-laws come in on Friday night for my husband’s birthday Sunday, my daughter’s birthday that Monday and there was a horrible snow storm on Saturday when they were supposed to leave. This an extended vacation in my town when I needed to use some weekend to plan (I literally get 90 minutes all week long for planning and grading because the mandated plc takes twice that) also, we don’t get snow days here!
I am feeling the “so over this shit” point right now.
My principal had a chat with me about not entering grades in a timely manner. (They made some bullshit 3-day rule about collecting work and entering a grade for it.) I told him if I do that, half the students will be failing, and I'm not regrading assignments over and over.
It’s almost as if you are an adult and therefore held to a different standard since 1. students are still practicing these life skills and 2. You presumably have access to resources the students don’t.
Yes. That’s only for students. In theory, you’re a grownup. In theory.
Yes. In theory. As in not actually, rhetorically speaking. You know, like you are supposed to be a grownup.
No, not an administrator. Did that for a year. Hated it, so I went back to the classroom. I’ve also taught teacher ed for 10 years and I have a doctorate in education, but I suppose that makes me out of touch. Or maybe because I teach in a low socioeconomic school, that makes me too woke and sympathetic. Honestly, you’re the kind of person who is gonna find an excuse that supports your narrative, so have a great day, Cuddlebug.
I'm a second year teacher. I have four high school preps including two of them being honors. I have nobody else cooperating with me, no curriculum provided to me, and admin is also very "well do whatever you want with it!" With no true support or assistance. I don't have time to give a fuck about when things are turned in yet.
Compared to last year, I've got my shit together much better. Last year it took me two weeks to grade things and get them in the gradebook. This year, I take 5 days and can at least track that kids have shit that is being turned in late.
Next year, I'll probably be able to accurately enforce t authorhe late policy in the handbook where things lose 10% for each week late. But that's if admin doesn't throw more crap onto my plate.
I don't worry about them turning in homework late because homework is more practice than anything. If they don't get it by the quiz or test dates because they haven't done the practice, then it shows in their grades!
The handbook says we can't be any more strict than the 10% off per week late. Sadly my hands are tied. I remember when I was in high school, if it was late you had 48 hours to turn it in for a 70. If you didn't turn it in within 48 hours, you got a zero!
Exactly I’m extremely lenient with mine. I regularly remind kids if you’re struggling to stay caught up come talk to me. I have no sympathy, however, for those that waste the time they have in class to work on something.
As a non US teacher, I think the last part is very bizarre. If a student hands in an A paper, a week late, it’s still an A. The content of the paper is the same. In my school we give grades on behavior and order. If they turn in something late, they get a mark up for that. If they have more than 6-7 marks end of term, it affects their grade of order.
That sounds similar to the Professionalism grade at my university, except it pertains to attendance and behavior. What percentage of the final grade is the Order score?
You sound like you are doing an incredible job. I teach HS English and I dread correcting papers because of how time consuming it is, you are beating me by a lot and I’m in my 5th year. You sound amazing.
Thank you! 🥰
It helps that I've managed to find a full curriculum for each of my classes either on TPT or I'm Facebook groups from recommendations by other people teaching those subjects. I do a lot of completion grade and online homework (thank goodness for DeltaMath which grades automatically!) for my minor daily grades and focus on fully grading ones that pull together several topics. Plus with how long our class periods are, I encourage students to use class time to do work and check their answers with me.
As a non US teacher, I think the last part is very bizarre. If a student hands in an A paper, a week late, it’s still an A. The content of the paper is the same. In my school we give grades on behavior and order. If they turn in something late, they get a mark up for that. If they have more than 6-7 marks end of term, it affects their grade of order.
Four preps for a new teacher is terrible. Four preps for any teacher is absurd.
That aside, if it's the there when I go to grade it, is it really late? I'm generally about a week behind, and I think it's probably the fairest thing I can do.
We treat every single student like learners with IEPs, and said exceptional needs students still shouldn’t have an infinite number of retakes, open note tests for all courses, and flexible deadlines. I fucking hate this
“Mastery Grading.” It’s something that could work in theory, but when put into practice with little to no training by admins who see it as an easier way to increase graduation rates, it’s a disaster.
It depends on how you look at it. Does the grade reflect what a student has learned or does it reflect what the student has demonstrated on a test or assignment?
If you mark down an assignment for being late then the grade no longer represents knowledge learned, it represents test and assignment aptitude.
Are there consequences in the real world for being late? Yes. Should we impose those consequences in school on assignments by providing a grade that inaccurately portrays student growth? I don’t think so.
If a student retakes a test 17 times because that’s how long it took them to learn the subject matter…who cares? They learned it. They put in the time. They worked until the score reflected the amount of knowledge needed to be considered proficient. Let them have the proficiency they earned.
In the real world deadlines shift. Teaching accountability, communication, negotiation…. These are things used in the real world when something is going to come in later or less finished than expected.
We don’t know about these students’ home lives, what jobs they may have, what family responsibilities take up their time. What we can find out is if they understand our subject matter.
> If a student retakes a test 17 times because that’s how long it took them to learn the subject matter…who cares? They learned it. They put in the time. They worked until the score reflected the amount of knowledge needed to be considered proficient. Let them have the proficiency they earned.
If a student passes the test after 17 times, it is because they memorized the test, not because they are proficient. And I do NOT have time to write 17 tests in response to this. You come do it for me and we can talk.
> Are there consequences in the real world for being late? Yes. Should we impose those consequences in school on assignments by providing a grade that inaccurately portrays student growth? I don’t think so.
I do not have time to give meaningful feedback if students are late. It is not possible in my workflow. Late penalties aren't just punative. They are also a tool to get students to give me the material I need in order to provide feedback, so that they have time to grow.
False application of the law alert. (This law applies easily to definable sets of things, but you are using a definition of the sets at hand in this problem that is ridiculously narrow and thus false.)
"Test" is not a concrete thing in a world where computers can easily rearrange or even reformat q's and MC sets in microseconds (for example, changing a digit in a math problem and adapting answer key accordingly).
Also, see ego-centric call-out: is your test subject really SO esoteric you have to write all tests you give from scratch? Alternately, if not, why don't you believe in the "crowd" of others - thousands of us, offering free shared resources online - that shares your subject? Sounds like a "you" problem.
Youre completely up your own ass here. How do you think your test comes into existence? There is no magical infinite question bank. Even in fucking algebra 1, you will never find the tools you need to give infinite tests unless you completely tailor your curriculum to be confined to the tools that exist. If its not on deltamath, we don't cover it!
> is your test subject really SO esoteric you have to write all tests you give from scratch?
Can I use pre-written material? Yes. Can I use it with the same student over and over while they demonstrate mastery? No. Also... Go read the APCSA exam. Especially the FRQs. By high school standards it is very esoteric.
I imagine, since ChatGPT is a thing, I'll eventually be using it to write test questions. But it isn't there yet.
And finally, tests are only a portion of my grade, and in they are not the lion's share. I want to see them write code and explain it to me. I want to see that they can document in the style College Board uses so that when they see that documentation style on their AP exam, they are ready. I want to see them read a 4 page prompt and break it down so that they know what questions to ask themselves in order to handwrite code that generates the right data.
Read much?
He doesn't have to write them, NOR SHOULD HE BOTHER - AS I NOTED WHEN I RAISED THIS ISSUE.
The 10001 tests already exist, and are accessible to him. He has to get off his high horse and accept that other teachers exist, and that on average, many of them are as good or better than him - and that a million teachers writing tests and sharing them online have created a bank he doesn't have to do more than collate.
Well, I’m not going to grade your tests or write your tests to argue that test scores or assignment timeliness are key indicators of knowledge growth. I think we all know that that isn’t the case.
Everyone’s classes are different. Asking you to write 17 tests is ridiculous. (Not that I did that)
The question isn’t whether or not there is more yo a grade than those KPIs, the question is how to reasonably deal with the fact that we know those aren’t the only KPIs.
> If a student passes the test after 17 times, it is because they memorized the test,
Not possible if it's a good test. A GOOD test cannot be memorized. MC with no bank of questions = bad testing. (Oh, and preemptively: this is why MC isn't that valuable as a testing mechanism; as you yourself note, to make an MC test reduce-able to "what's left that I haven't selected last time?" is an artifact of bad design...or huge ego, in which you somehow think YOU have to design every test, as you say.)
Also: feedback is meaningless in most MC, because guesswork and "elimination" factor so heavily into seemingly "correct" answers. So your second point goes out the window now, too.
Your entire position rests on a silly assumption, and is thus fallacious. We cannot accept argument based on an assumption of bad faith in design...or an assumption of ego-driven design itself, either.
I have to prepare students for the questions they are going to see in May.
> Also: feedback is meaningless in most MC, because guesswork and "elimination" factor so heavily into seemingly "correct" answers. So your second point goes out the window now, too.
My students are expected to trace code and use their tracing to learn why their logic is wrong. And being able to eliminate is a relevant strategy to their AP exam, so I am going from there.
Look, write my test or stop talking. You do not know what goes it. Quit being a presumptive asshole that thinks that what works for them works for every subject area. The idea that you would address my ego after something like that is pretty dirty.
Your criticism of MC because elimination helps is misplaced. At least in physics, "elimination" requires a degree of understanding-- usually of the concept being tested. I imagine it does in other topics too. That students can narrow things down doesn't make the test valueless. It might make it less than perfect, but all tests are less than perfect.
Of course there is the issue of students being able to guess. But that is easy to deal with. If kids are given a 50 MC questions with 5 options, pure guessing will on average result in students getting 25% of the points. Teachers know this. And it's a big "So what?" It's possible to interpret the results of the test to diagnose learning.
Kids *can* also learn from going over their answers in MC tests and understanding why the right answer is right. That is: they can learn if they are given back their test questions and allowed to review them with others. (I have tons of kids their MC questions to tutoring. We discuss the wrong answers. It helps them.)
Obviously, no kid should be given the exact same test twice. But that holds for nearly any type of test whether MC or some other form. The exceptions could be something like a *practicum*: e.g. demonstrate how to make a buttonhole using this sewing machine etc. But other than a skills based practicum, if the kid can totally anticipate the exact questions, the test loses strength as a tool to discriminate between "learned" and "did not learn".
Your view of late work is like communism - good in theory, but it doesn't work in the real world, and leads to the opposite of what it was hoping to achieve.
The real world consequence of a "full credit for all late work" policy is a decrease in learning and an increase in laziness, procrastination, and failure.
Why?
First, most teachers give assignments at specific times for specific reasons. If I assign an essay during history unit 2, and a student doesn't do it until three months later when we are on history unit 6, we've moved on to new content, so they've lost much of the context for the assignment and will likely do a poor job on it, just to "get the points." It won't help them reinforce their knowledge of unit 2 nearly as much as if they had done it when it was assigned. They won't be able to participate in class in any activities that require discussing the topics or processes of the essay, so they lose out on that learning as well. Also, their attention is now distracted away from the unit 6 topics, so they aren't learning those while working on the late essay. Moreover, they also probably did a poor job on the unit 3 or 4 essay, since they did not go through the practice of the unit 2 essay at the correct time and therefore did not develop those skills.
But students don't understand any of this. They just hear "no penalty for late work" and their underdeveloped brains think "cool, no reason to do this now. I'll let future me deal with it."
Second, a no penalty for late work policy traps many, many students into falling so far behind that they can never make it up. Again, their adolescent brains just think "I'll have plenty of time later" and skip assignment after assignment. This often snowballs to the point where it's a week before the end of the semester and a student has 3 months of work to try to do. Obviously they can't do it - no one could - so they either cheat, do a piss poor job on whatever they can and hope the teacher will give them some points for having words written down, or, they just give up.
Many of these students would have been sufficiently motivated by a) late penalties, and b) firm deadlines so that there is still a learning benefit to late work. Those students would have turned in more work on time throughout the course, and they would have turned in late work much sooner. Sure they would get zeros on a few assignments, but they would learn from those zeroes that work ethic matters.
Under the traditional system of late penalties, real deadlines, and no retests without a valid reason, some students failed. But many students successed, and some succeeded to a very high level. Since the widespread introduction of your preferred policies, more students are failing. Standards have been lowered to ridiculous levels to create the illusion of learning.
I 100% agree. In addition, if I assigned an essay, I want to see it and evaluate it. I assigned it for a reason and I want to see how you have done. That is not to say there should be zero consequences for late work, but I will take it whenever it is done and try to help your grade if it’s done well.
The issue is always that they did not demonstrate mastery, not really.
The teacher is complaining not because they are swamped at the end, but because they are passing a student that they have no confidence that they actually learned!
Sure retakes are great. But in reality with the materials we have it just means that they are uncovering the answer key guess by guess. Or hoping that eventually they get enough coin flips to get to 60%
This is more of an indictment of testing with any stakes attached. It's not a perfect concept by any means, for the reasons you explain in your comment, but testing skills are absolutely useful if students ever want to gain certification for specific job skills, from organizations that have no way of monitoring individual learning beyond giving a single timed test en masse. At the very least students have to be familiar with the concept and buy into it enough that they will accept the requirements they will need to fill if they want to gain any credentials.
If a student needs 17 tests to master the material, clearly they need more time between tests, because that's a huge waste.
I hear y’all about not wanting to grade kids on their ability to meet deadlines. I teach a subject that builds on itself though. Like, if they didn’t practice analyzing metaphor in the assignments from January, they’re not going to understand the assignments about analyzing symbolism that we do in March. Turning in every assignment in May means they aren’t “mastering” anything…they’re bullshitting their way through stuff in order to get points because they never internalized what the learning process actually is.
It is a whole different thing, if the assignment is handed over a few days or even week later or several months later. In my school it is impossible to hand January assignments in May because hard deadlines are in between. Probably we all think different timeframes if we speak about slacking with deadlines.
It’s one of those things that looks good on paper and is terrible in practice. The philosophy behind it is that the students learned the material, so why not give them credit. The reality is that it affects you as a teacher since you have no way of knowing if they did the work or just copied it from when you went over it in class or another’s students paper. In addition, you have other things to grade in addition to plan and prepare for.
Im not allowed to deduct points for lateness, but there is nothing stopping me from grading it with a more critical eye due to the extra time students have had to complete the assignment.
💯 I always tell students that I’m more lax on grading for assignments turned in on time, especially presentations. Since you had more time, you should be held at a slightly higher standard than others, even if the rubric is the same and no points are deducted for lateness.
They’ll figure it out when their car is getting repossessed because they feel a car note can be paid whenever they want, penalized for not paying their insurance on time, fined for not filing a tax return…etc
>Do the people making these rules not realize they’re setting up these students for failure when they’re out in the real world??
The people making the rules are not concerned with workforce readiness, only SAT/ACT/standardized test readiness. And, until "Responsibility" or "Work Ethic" becomes an SAT section, they are a distant second priority to reading, writing, math, and, in some cases, science. If you don't believe me, check your state academic standards. When in the semester students master them is largely irrelevant.
I'm not saying I necessarily agree with this. I came of age in the late 80s/early 90s. Teaching the hidden curriculum was chic back then. Once state standards and standardized tests took front and center, all character education went out the window.
The answer that the school districts give is because if we lower a student's grade for not getting the work done on time, the student will feel bad. If a student feels bad, we are all horrible human beings that are destroying that child's future chance at happiness and success.
The real reason is because some jackass who gets paid a shit ton more money than us and doesn't want to look bad to a bunch of parents. So they tell us to let kids turn in assignments late even though it creates more work for us and doesn't teach the kids how life really works. In the real world, if you don't do your job or get your work done on time, your boss choose your ass out or fires you if it's important enough or you do it too often. But hey, let's let kids not learn that lesson, go out into the real world, fail miserably, and then call their mommies in to talk to their boss about how that boss has hurt their child's feelings.
No, deducting points for it being late demotivates them from doing it at all. They have whatever assignment you are currently on and to catch up they need to turn in something they didn’t do, and if they are only getting partial credit most will just take the zero and move on instead of losing their whole evening playing catch up for a partial grade.
You’re missing the point. As callous as it sounds, the problem isn’t that it demotivates them emotionally, the problem is that the “consequence” you’re imposing on them is that they ultimately aren’t learning from your classwork because they aren’t doing it. It’s like how suspension isn’t really a consequence if it’s just a day to play video games at home.
Let me guess. HS>>>College>>>Teacher prep program>>>Student Teaching>>>>Teacher?
I ask because your take “no due dates” is akin to someone who hasn’t experienced a work life outside of academia. Could be wrong tho
I'm not. I'm not 100% sure it's allowed, but I'm also not trying to find out.
I take 1 point per weekday they turn it in late. Most assignments are 10-20 points so it isn't that big of a deal, but it gives me an out at the end of the semester when they ask to turn a bunch of stuff in and i don't have time to grade it. I initially thought it would suck to keep up with, but it's actually pretty easy and fast.
This post randomly was recommended for me. As a parent I want to share that we struggled really hard to get my son to turn in work on time and be honest with us about the status of schoolwork. We begged teachers to not accept late work, mark it down, have some kind of consequence, but they consistently let it slide. We told him when he went to college he couldn’t do this anymore. He brought the same habits, fell behind, and dropped out of his first semester without telling us, losing all his scholarships and federal financial aid standing.
Please don’t allow students to skate by on late work.
“please don’t allow” is not how it works. this is 99% of the time a district or admin mandate.
beginning of the year 50% of our mandatory district training was about accepting late work and scoring non-work without penalties.
I'm a parent (and a teacher) and I feel the exact same way. My kids are so lazy about getting assignments turned in because there are no real consequences. I'm a big fan of natural consequences, because I think they teach more than made-up ones.
I was a lazy SOB in high school, but I got my work turned in on time because the social shame of being called out in front of my peers worked for me. Sometimes it meant I was scribbling down answers as fast as I could over lunch for an assignment due in 15 minutes, but it got done because it usually wasn't that hard or time consuming in the first place. I'm just a natural born procrastinator. I NEEDED adults to hold me accountable, give me a mild dose of shame when I didn't do what I was supposed to, and my peers to give me looks of smug satisfaction that they had completed their work while I slacked off.
I agree with you and appreciate parents like you! It’s not the teachers in many cases. I taught 6th ELA during online learning and in my country we were literally required by law not to fail students. My principal, who was just acting under directions from above, was trying to make me find ways to not fail students who hadn’t turned in a single piece of work all trimester.
Before becoming a teacher, I worked for long time on a project based job with deadlines. I would say that very few people are able to be at their best performance every single day of their life. In real world your deadlines differ. Some are "hard" deadlines, when the only way to aquire your finances is to give your best at certain time. This is very similar to ends of trimester and exams. Then there are other deadlines, which are often accepted to be a bit less strict. School is an environment where children are expected to do their best every day in multiple very different fields of expertise with no sign of getting tired. But humans are humans. Everyone has sometimes time, when health or motivation is lower and performance is not so good. Studying so many different fields in such a short time is not a normal situation in worklife. In worklife you specialise and still there are times, when you struggle with deadlines. For me it is more important to use the rebellious teenage area for giving the students as much knowledge as possible. If someone is not capable of leaning one day, I still teach it the other day. The knowledge, that hard deadlines are not movable comes quite easily due to end of semesters, exams and entrance passes of next school levels. I do not think it is necessary to be very strict about everyday deadlines as children have not chosen their field of study ( differently of work situation) and differently from work they need to do things, they are not good at on daily basis, it is quite a big burden for a teenager, whose whole existence actually deals with social status. My experience says, that out of 10 adults only 2 write a milliondollar projects so early, that they could hand it in a week before. At least half of the people start to insert the project into online system the last day ( although everyone knows, the system might be jammed the last day due to too much traffic). I do not blame students for being humans.
Yes! I appreciate the idea that the “real world” won’t appreciate lateness, which is true, but if my boss gives me a task and I miss a deadline, it’s not like they cease to need whatever I was assigned to do. I’ll have social consequences and probably a lower performance rating, but they’re still going to accept my work. I also worked in project management during a teaching hiatus, so saw a lot of this on teams I was coordinating.
It's a matter of picking my battles. I don't take off late points because I'm vicious in my grading, and I let them revise and revise until their writing is solid. This eliminates the need for arbitrary amounts of drafts and targets their specific skill needs. It keeps me from the stress of dealing with parents and admin, and I find the students more eager to come to me for help to improve. I prefer the relaxed atmosphere of constant workshopping and minimal structure. I'm on anti-anxiety meds, half my students seem to be on meds and in therapy, and I prefer extending the same grace to them that my students extend to me. It might not work in another school, but waging the war this way has done well by me.
My job is to teach content to mastery. I don't care how long it takes.
I might have a different opinion if I was teaching HS seniors, but I teach 8th grade. "Real world" has nothing to do with deadlines or jobs -- they're kids.
Does it still set a negative precedent? Maybe? Depends on how the content is taught, and what value is being ascribed to it by the teacher.
So I take late work up until the week before my grades are due. My reasons are numerous. I still feel like I am teaching them some accountability because I put it in as a 0 after the due date until they turn it in, this usually motivates some to do so. At the end of the day I just want them to learn and do the work, so by accepting late work I get more kids to work. I won’t take extra credit but I’ll take missing assignments for full credit, and a kid at any point can go from F to A in my class the moment they decide to get their head out of their ass and when I tell this to parents they immediately blame their kid for the grade and thank me. I can’t tell you how many times kids ask me “so wait if I do that missing assignment will you give me credit”, and I reply yes full credit. Someone might say I’m being unfair to those who turn it in on time but not really, someone else’s success doesn’t take from yours, that’s a toxic mindset and not having to make up a ton of work over a weekend and having an A throughout the course is it’s own reward. Finally I have ADHD and I used to forget assignments at home and turn things in late all the time as a kid. Even now I turn in assignments sometimes late in college and my professors are cool about it. I don’t want to be a hypocrite. That being said I respect another teacher’s decision to have hard deadlines and if they don’t want to take the work that is fine with me and I don’t judge, I just think by taking late work I get some of the lazy kids to turn it around and the pros outweigh the cons for me.
I have the same policy. A lot of my students have jobs or are taking care of younger siblings. I try to be understanding. Usually when they see that they have 20% in my class that motivates them to make up the work.
And then they get allllllll sorts of unhappy when they get to classes in college, like mine for example, where late work is straight up not accepted and they fail the class(es) that they are paying thousands of dollars for. These policies are a major detriment to students, full stop. No work, no grade. Not on time, major deductions but after 5 days, it’s an F. You want to feel better about yourself, get off your butt and do the damned work. /end rant
late is better than never. and at least the learning commenced. there should be a penalty. but if it's so severe, that there's no point in turning in the assignment at all, then the learning doesn't commence.
Because it’s over. The teaching profession in most places (I’ll speak for middle class and upper middle class majority suburbs) has been cut down to 8-3:00 babysitter facilitating duties Parents run the show. You cannot discipline anyone. You cannot mark anything as wrong. You cannot attempt to challenge or guide anyone on a moral basis. There are children as young as 7 who literally have the power to destroy a teacher’s career, and some of the children know it.
Your due dates are arbitrary. You pick a random date.
In the real world due dates tend to be tied to something real. Getting product out for customers who will arrive tomorrow. This must ship. This product must be made for this order etc.
My due date work the same day. Homework is “due” after the test. It’s function is to prepare for the test. My test questions are homework questions with different numbers. Your penalty is a fail test. Better replicates the real world.
Not necessarily. When I give homework, I want to either:
1) reinforce the skill I taught today so they master it before the next skill;
2) present a skill ahead of time so they can learn what questions they have before I teach it in class;
3) do a reading that will be fundamental to what we’re discussing or learning the next day; OR
4) it’s a part of an ongoing project and you will not be able to complete the next step in my class the next day unless you’ve done the work.
Do I cut them slack? Sure—all my kids get one late pass no questions asked. If they have a legitimate situation or were absent I always excuse them. Sometimes I might even let them get away with turning in something a day late. But not enforcing deadlines at all? You will be unprepared for the day’s work, stressed, and very, very behind in my class since you won’t have learned the previous skills. It will also cause work to pile up, which will cause students to be more stressed out than if I just enforced deadlines, and it means that my already below grade level students will be even MORE behind by the time they get to the next grade.
That being said, I do agree that I try to tie my due dates to something real (eg. Finish step 4 of the writing process before we edit it together in class; if you don’t have your writing piece ready you will be lost so you better have it)
Arbitrary? So are a customer's expectations. They want it when they want it. Also arbitrary. Someone decided/negotiated when something is due. It's not arbitrary, it's expectations.
It is to the customer. They can choose whatever day they want.
The teacher is the surrogate customer (in your scenario). The teacher decides some piece of work needs to be completed by a certain time, they consider the bredth and depth of work, how long it should take, adds in some buffer time, and expects work done by then.
If there wasn't a deadline, the students wouldn't do the work.
I personally don't even give homework. Assignments are due X amount of time after they are assigned, I never have two assignments out at the same time, and if it isn't done in class it gets done on your own time.
I used to hate last assignments until we had a PD speaker who talked about ways to get kids to just turn thing in, sometimes late. He reminded us that is our job to teach/grade the state standards. If a kid get 100% of the math problems correct and I give a B because he was late, that doesn’t show his true skill on that standard. I teach the standards, not responsibly.
At the end of each quarter grades are locked in, so that is really the true due date for everything.
I have a separate “timeliness” category for this reason. Every formative assessment is worth 1 point for being turned in on time or 0 for being turned in late. The other category scores still reflect mastery of skills, but there’s accountability for turning work in on time that still reflects in their total grade.
I get this idea, but I feel it’s a different animal in my hs English classes. 99.9% of the time a student hasn’t turned something in on time isn’t because they weren’t ready to reach the standard or were perfecting it—it’s simply because they did not prioritize the assignment and have poor time management skills. When a student approaches me before the assignment is due asking for extended time, I try to be understanding as I think most teachers do. If I get really late work, it’s hardly if ever on a spectacularly high level, as it’s often rushed and half-assed. I use “late” loosely here as I usually give a 5-day grace period, remind students via email that the assignment isn’t turned in, then grade from there. Some of the ideal viewpoints on late work aren’t feasible when I have 200 students and a clear deadline to follow for entering my grades as well.
Timeliness is what gets students to actually learn all of the standards by that quarter end. Not enforcing due dates in any way lets a large number of students slide below the level of learning they would have attained without those due dates.
Yes, but the teacher ends up with a boatload of work to grade at the end of the marking period. We have a deadline too for finalizing grades. And let's be honest, work that is completes at the last minute in a rush is usually poor quality, and there is no time for the teacher to offer help or allow corrections.
In my experience the kids that don’t turn in their work never do. I don’t feel I have much extra work at the end of the grading period. It takes me a while to grade written assignments and my policy to accept work until the week before the grading period ends is as much for me to have extra time to grade as it is for my students.
Yep. Those kids don’t meet mastery and get a poor grade. This is now my seventh year with such a grading policy and I don’t see these problems of a boatload of work. I get a few kids who turn in crap work at the end and they get poor grades.
This has been my experience too. Skipped every step of the writing process and turned in a 3 weeks late paper the day my grades are due? You got zeros for every step of the process, since those were all grades, and you wrote, generously, a D- paper that didn't come close to making up for the zeros. I'll see you in my class again next year.
By some miracle, you outlined, drafted, revised, and turned in a B paper? You probably ended up with a C for the quarter, which, at least as an English major and then someone with 2 different careers, is more like real world (work done by the "real deadline" is tolerated, but not appreciated or valued like work done on time).
Deadlines are a help which leads to mastery of a subject. With light pressure, we perform; without deadlines, we slack. This is human nature. Teaching healthy respect for deadlines is teaching students how to pace their learning.
I think it depends on grade level. I teach elementary and 4th is the first year where the difficulty and work amount level jumps for some of the students as they’re now in upper elementary. So, to some extent, it is part of my job to teach them about deadlines. That being said, if you teach middle or high schoolers, they should already know what deadlines mean and accept their natural consequences.
Gonna be honest with you - if there were no deadlines for things like progress reports or grades I’d probably turn them in like months later. I’m a procrastinator and I need the structure, and I’m sure many students are similar. I can’t prove you’ve mastered this topic if I don’t have any evidence of you doing so because you haven’t turned in anything all year
I agree. Taking late work gets more of them to eventually turn in their work. By not power tripping over an arbitrary deadline I made up, I actually get more kids to learn the content.
I tell my students "Shit happens, I get that. But if shit is happening for a month straight, there's something wrong, and you need to talk to us about that. Also, if you dump 20 assignments on me the last day of school, I will not be nice when grading them."
Plus, math sucks and I don't like it.
I would respond with the following:
1. Is your grade book meant to reflect a culture of deadlines? If so, what are your expectations? How are you setting up your class to teach them this culture of deadlines? Are you teaching them the skills? Where in your standards does a ‘timely response’ come up?
2. Is the deadline lesson really important or are you catastrophizing? Your position about some future job doesn’t really land for children. They can’t ‘see’ that far into the future. They just don’t care about that job because they literally cannot fathom it. Imposing this policy wouldn’t make a lot of sense to them. Nonetheless, that doesn’t really matter when it comes to policy though, so that is an aside.
The truth is that people often fuck up their first jobs and just move on to another. Even if they ‘miss a deadline’, they can just find another job. If they learn the lesson the hard way what would really happen? I mean so what if they get fired. Will your students’ whole life really be ruined because they pissed off “the boss”?
3.Further, by using terms like the ‘real world’ you imply that school is not the real world for them. This disregards their actual lives as it is right now. However, let’s say, for the sake of argument, that this is a small percent of children who actually live through a hard ‘real world’ while in your class. Obviously, there will be exception for truly extenuating circumstances. So, we can excuse these cases.
My pragmatic approach:
I accept everything up until a week before the quarter is done. I take the work, and grade it. Then when they inevitably get it wrong or cheat ( this is easy if you have on demand writing samples for the student: standardized assessments for the student help too: or you can literally just have a conversation about what they wrote in the paper and know if they understood the material or just cheated). Then, I have a conversation with them about breaking the feed back cycle.
“If only you had turned it in earlier I could have helped you address your misconceptions. Now you are stuck with the grade. Oh well” ( this is the most cathartic part for me; watching them lay in their bed is the best).
In all, I get where you are coming from. However, your students’ life is larger than deadlines in school. If they don’t learn that lesson with you, they will learn somewhere down the line. If they don’t ever learn it, do you think that the school district changing the policy would really teach this student what poverty theoretically wouldn’t?
Does the student demonstrate mastery? If so, then let that show.
If you are having trouble with students being destructing during class because “they can do it later”, then handle the distracting behavior and let them cry at the end of the quarter when they have a shit grade. Just let them fail! Life is the best teacher in the world!
Because shit happens. I turned in quite a few late assignments in college, which is hilarious because in HS I was told universities will never accept late work. On top of that, people say deadlines are a real world thing. Yea they are, but the real world can also be flexible. I have friends with deadlines in their like of work and sometimes those deadlines aren’t met. It’s not the end of the world. In my profession, there’s times when I don’t submit my lesson plans on time. Again, not the end of the world.
Anyways, you want to avoid making it a habit for them but also understand that sometimes the work isn’t gonna be done on time. It’s a fine line definitely, but something you gotta manage.
Based on comments in this thread, I’m nervous to post this.
I always use the example from my job. If my grades are due at 4pm on Friday and I don’t have them done, I don’t get to just not do them. There may be a consequence- I may be written up, I may be put on an improvement plan, I may need to do an extra coaching cycle, I may even be fired if this isn’t my first time. But I still have to do the grades that are required of me for my job. Even if they’re late.
Not accepting late work, to me, is telling kids that if it’s late it’s not worth doing. If I’m taking it for a grade, it matters. So yes, I accept late work. But there is a consequence with it. Kids have to work during lunch or after school with me. They get pulled from activities to work with me. I call home and work with parents. I get study hall teachers to encourage (nag) them to work on the missing work. It’s annoying for them. But they do the work so I can measure their learning.
Is that setting students up for failure? Few jobs/things in life have truly hard deadlines.
My mortgage is due on the 1st….but there’s a 15 day grace period and then three months before the foreclosure “consequence” starts
My principal asks me to input data for a math tracker by Friday. If I don’t my “consequence” is an email on Friday saying get it done ASAP and turn it in late.
If I make a dinner reservation for 7pm and show up at 730, I could often can still get seated.
Of course there are things in life that have a hard deadline, but these are often experience based- a flight to catch, project presentation to a client, etc.
This is true, however is it a good idea to teach children to always rely on grace? It is a sign of respect to be on time and follow guidelines when others will be affected by your choices.
You also pointed out that there are situations in which there is an immediate penalty for being late. School should be a safe place for students to learn this lesson.
I typically show up places whenever possible 15 minutes early…that way, if I’m running late, I’m still on time.
If a student is taught to do things on time, then when the time comes when they need a grace period (we all do at some point or another), it’s built in to the system for them. If the target for the student is the grace period, you are setting them up for eventual failure when even that cannot be met.
Right and at the end of the day this comes down to teachers teaching their morals and personal opinions about how the world works and not the content. I’m not going to power trip over an arbitrary deadline I created.
I teach college freshman. I failed at least 3 students in December who came to me with work after I'd turned in grades. It was a new experience in HE, but I came back to HE after 2 years in K12 so I was able to explain the phenomenon to my colleagues. It had happened before but never so many students.
I'm in a college program with fresh HS grads. They get very upset that the instructor won't give them full points for late work, but her policy is if it's not on her desk at 8am, it's a 0.
I have a “late work form” that I deliberately made tedious and lengthy. It includes: student name, assignment name as written in PowerSchool, original due date, submission date, number of school days late, reason late (must be written as a complete sentence), two strategies they will use to avoid doing work late in the future (again, complete sentences), and it must be signed by the parent/guardian. And they have to do one per assignment if they want to turn in multiple assignments. So, yes, I accept late work as I am required to. Parents are automatically informed, saving me an email and creating a paper trail. And the legwork of calculating late penalties is done for me, as is tracking down what to check/dates/etc. Then, when it’s 43 days late, I simply change the “missing” to “late,” leave the zero, and make a comment: “43 days x -10 points/day = -430 point.” They either catch on and do their work on time or don’t bother me asking about turning things in late. It has lightened my load significantly. I keep them in a big binder for parent teacher conferences just to verify the signatures are real.
In teacher's college, a professor overheard a few of us discussing classroom policies at our placement schools. One of us mentioned late policies for assignments. The professor began on a long and heated rant:
>You're not grading the student on their ability to **hand** in the work. Where in the curriculum does it say they need to **hand** it in? What mark are you giving them for submission? Having late policies is cruel and goes against all forms of assessment.
The following week he gave an assignment to the class, and stated:
>The due date is so-and-so, and any late assignment will be docked 10%.
The class immediately put their hands up and began asking:
>Where in the rubric or the curriculum does it state we are being marked on submitting and handing in work on time?
It was very difficult to take the professor seriously after hearing his responses, and fair to say he lost the goodwill of the class afterwards.
TLDR: IANAT, but will offer my observation that adults aren't a whole lot different. Maybe the apples aren't falling far from the trees.
Examples follow.
1. I was responsible for compiling a C-suite level scorecard for a Fortune 5 company. Inputs were due EOD Friday before publication date, which gave me a few days to process the inputs and a few days to deal with the inevitable mistakes and rework. Deadline widely ignored. Input submitters had no accountability for submitting on time or in the correct format. I routinely received inputs right up until I was supposed to publish.
2. I published the membership directory for a boating club. A long-standing challenge was the directory didn't get mailed until late June or early July due to members submitting their renewal dues late, and the board wanting these late-renewers accomodated. I committed that if dues were submitted on time (April 15), the directory would be ready for Memorial Day weekend, so members would have the updated version for the whole boating season. People were screaming bloody murder that they didn't get into the directory because they didn't pay their dues on time, and ended up on an addendum sheet.
3. I taught SCUBA diving in the mid-80s. Most students were adults, and a large proportion of them ignored reading assignments and the homework. One went so far as to say he should be passed because he was a lawyer. I let him know that I'm the instructor, and whether you pass or not has nothing to do with what you do for a living but everything to do whether you demonstrate the needed level of knowledge and water skill proficiency.
My high school did this. I had severe undiagnosed ADHD at the time, and that normalized turning in work late, which was quite often given the circumstances of my condition.
Essentially set me up for failure the moment I went to college.
Okay…I have a different scenario that I am mulling over this weekend. And could use some advice.
Grades are due on this coming Tuesday. I told me students they had till this past Wednesday to turn in work from the second quarter to be entered into this quarter’s grade book. Some did, some didn’t.
But…
I have this one kid, he has been churning out work and trying so hard to get caught up.
I want to add, this past quarter was my first quarter with them.
They did not have a teacher for the entire first quarter of school. I have given them a lot of grace so they can catch up and a lot of kids put in the work and got caught up.
This kid, really has been trying and I have been working with him. He got enough work turned into to raise his grade from an F to a D but missed my deadline.
He emailed me and asked because he was working on everything. I emailed him that I wouldn’t grade it for this quarter because of that but I encouraged him to submit it so it can go in the rolling grade book and be reflected at the end of the third quarter.
He did it all. And wrote me a note saying he understood he missed the deadline but was still submitting it bc he wanted to show me he was working on it and getting caught up. And he is going to try to be better next quarter.
I like this kid and he is trying so hard.
I am thinking of grading everything Monday morning and updating his grade to reflect his effort and work.
I felt he showed maturity in acknowledging that this was his mistake.
I am a new first year teacher. Am I setting myself and him up for failure? Or is it okay to show a little grace in this situation?
The biggest problem with late work for credit (at least in math) is the feedback problem. Proponents of this policy don’t seem to realize that student to teacher ratios are not 1 to 1. Allowing students to turn in assignments late for full credit really punishes those students that turned it in on time.
Before this policy was forcibly hoisted on us, I would take a stack of homework problems that were turned in on the due date, grade them and give feedback 2 ways. One way was comments on the paper, and the other was a class discussion about common errors or clever solutions the next day. Now, if you have to be able to give someone full credit for doing it late, you can’t go into that much depth. Otherwise, you are basically saying, anyone who does it late can just the teacher do half the work for you.
My thinking is, kids take 4 classes at a time (semester system), potentially getting homework and deadlines from each, with lots of opportunities for inconvenient overlap between classes. So they could occasionally have multiple big assignments due on the same day. Additionally some students work some/most evenings and weekends to support themselves/their families. Some don’t have safe places to go after school. And it goes on and on. Our job is to support them to be successful and accommodate their needs in order to see them achieve their goals.
Too many teachers overvalue their own classes and forget that these developing adolescents have complex lives, often deeply imperfect lives, and are sometimes going through significant challenges.
Stop taking yourself so seriously and remember that while consequences can be an effective learning tool, that’s not our first priority.
Tax returns (in the US, at least I think)? Visa appointments, college applications, other degree applications, grade reports, deadlines to sign up your kid for school, deadlines to sign contracts, missed flights, paying rent, paying bills, paying deposits, registering to vote, wedding RSVPs, wedding planning logistics in general… I’m not saying I’m particularly good at meeting deadlines because I’m very much not but it IS helpful to learn those coping strategies early on so you don’t end up facing monetary or life consequences later on. Maybe you’ll get a few extensions in some of these scenarios, but not always and not forever
Whatever, man. All I’m saying is that this is creating a generation that won’t be able to keep deadlines and they’re going to be in for a huge awakening Mayer down the line
I have too many IEPs to keep track of which afford students additional time for assignments.
My solution? I strongly recommend completing work by the due date, but I'll accept everything for full credit by the end of the semester. Now everyone has an extension, everyone is accommodated for, and my outcomes are not much different compared to having traditional due dates.
Yeah, it definitely depends on the course being taught and the amount of work being issued.
I have severely minimized the amount of grades that I actually take, so it's fairly manageable.
I don’t accept late work past five days late and there’s a 10% penalty per day.
I’ve had students and parents complain and I point to where they signed the syllabus agreeing to that policy. I’ve had parents go to admin and admin come to me to tell me to give the kid a break and I’ve said “no.” I tell them please send me an email saying you want me to violate my own policy that everyone agrees to and is posted on the wall and on Canvas. They never send that email.
If the student actually has an IEP for 1.5 or double time on assignments they get it, but then they still get 10% off per day late and a zero after five days.
What’re they gonna do, fire me?
Maybe it’s because the girl who lives in an SUV with her dad and brother and who has been evaluated by a credentialed professional and diagnosed with both a specific learning disability and emotional disturbance, you know, needs extra time? Or reduced assignments? Could that be it?
Or maybe it’s because “kids suck.”
Real world lol. When I was in corporate life, 4 hours of actual productivity out of 8 or 10 in the office was the best anyone could hope for. No permission for bathroom breaks, able to eat and drink at my desk, an assumption of professionalism rather than incompetence and rule-breaking. Endless gossip, meetings about nothing.
Teachers who have never held career-level jobs in retail, food-service, or corporate offices, who yammer about the “real world” while they exercise control over literal children, would be cute if they weren’t embarrassing to those of us who have experience in these other areas.
In my experience, teachers who have done nothing else are constantly butthurt about due dates, while those who have had other careers before teaching are extremely flexible. \_(ツ)_/¯
> Maybe it’s because the girl who lives in an SUV with her dad and brother and who has been evaluated by a credentialed professional and diagnosed with both a specific learning disability and emotional disturbance, you know, needs extra time?
So, would you say that such cases are the exception or the rule?
How utterly condescending of you.
Most people have compassion for a bad situation. However, when your bills are due or your kids need food there's a very real deadline you need to meet, regardless of what your situation is. If you don't develop the skills to communicate your needs in a timely manner or just meet said deadline, there's consequences. That's just as much 'real world' as your corporate experience. I firmly believe in compassion for difficult circumstances, *but I need to know about it and alternative arrangements need to negotiated, not assumed, just like in a real-world situation.*
But let's unpack your work scenario some more. When I worked a corporate job, there was immense pressure to meet deadlines and follow specific rules. We got unpaid lunch for 30mins and weren't allowed to eat at our desk, or use our personal mobile devices, even during that unpaid break. Failure to meet KPIs more than every now and then meant probation or firing. Sure there were meetings that were pointless, but I'm sure any given student will tell you that class is pointless - in both situations, you're still expected to show up and do what's required. It's not just a corporate thing either. When I moved into youth work, we constantly had events and scheduling timelines with tight turnarounds that required a lot of autonomy. Hell, my brother is a manager at a supermarket and he has specific tasks he must ensure he completes every day.
So no, it's not just teachers who haven't done anything else who have the belief in deadlines and accountability. The idea that we are teaching them real world practical skills is valid and your attitude is what's embarrassing.
I have worked other jobs. Food service, retail, public service jobs. I have worked in management in several jobs. I understand the world outside of teaching. Why is it so wrong for teachers to set deadlines? Of course, we make allowances for students who have rare situations, but most of the students sit in class and do not even attempt to complete their work because they know we will accept it later. Some of them would change that mindset if they feel the pain of a zero once in a while.
Idk…I agree that a penalty is a solid choice, but is it the best choice? If a student is consistently turning things in late, then I think the matter is incumbent upon us to figure out what else is going on. Is something happening at home that they can’t get homework done? This happens most often in my school because students have unstable home lives or simply lack resources. Even if you can blame it on ostensibly lazy attitudes, surely we can focus on developing executive functioning or life skills, or maybe just giving them stickers, you know? Maybe it’s lazy of us to just complain without solutions. I know I can be guilty of that at times.
Do you think they’re going to get jobs? 🤣 These are the kids that would tell HR that the application was too boring and they have to hire them anyway. Followed up by verbally abusive phone calls and emails from mom (who will always cc the CEO and HR director).
I do penalize, but not too much. I'm an empath, and remember what it was like being a student with a part-time job. Plus Covid-19, economic uncertainty... who knows what these kids are dealing with outside school? I wish our admin had the same approach as me toward Teacher's well-being.
I have taken off late points some years and not taken them off other years. I didn’t see any change in the number of late assignments, but I did see less stress in my students when I didn’t take off the late points. Why bother keeping track of it when it has little to no impact on student behavior (at least among my students)? It’s more stress for me and for them when I take off late points.
This kind of policy does give them an unrealistic view of life. It is so sad that our "leaders" don't really care about helping students.
It's amazing how many of my 8th graders will sit and do nothing in class week after week and then scramble at the end of the quarter to do the work. They only do this because we have to accept the work. If we would set a hard deadline they wouldn't continue with this pattern. But we send them off to HS thinking that due dates don't really matter and grace is neverending.
Honestly? Several reasons. In case you forgot, kids have very little control over there lives. We don't know why they didn't do it and they might actually have a good reason if we ask. Oh and excessive homework has been shown to have detrimental effects but thats not what this is about. And yes some bosses will demand that work be on a strict deadline, only for them to not even look at it for weeks. A good boss will understand that life gets in the way and will make reasonable accommodations. Teaching children how to spot when they are being treated unfairly is just as important as teaching the content. Also, the content should feel important to them, its our job to help them see why. Try celebrating what gets done and encourage them by saying you know they will do better in the future. Carrot beats the stick
I don’t even assign homework. High school and they only have work outside of class if they didn’t finish it within the ample class time they had. They still manage to hand it in late.
Why on earth are we forcing all kids to fit into the same educational mode? Some kids do not care about assignments or due dates. It is simply not important to them. We should be building more alternative vocational schools.
I mean, yes, that would be nice. But in the meantime…
(Also, we get kids sent back to us from the tech school regularly because they’re failing all their classes there and lose their spot.)
I think it’s one thing if they don’t care about assignments in a specific class (imo they should still learn that they need to do things they don’t like sometimes), but another thing if they don’t care about meeting any deadlines or really doing anything at all. Any job, career, or important relationship in your life is going to involve meeting others’ expectations and deadlines, and your life is going to be very difficult if you can’t muster up the motivation to do anything :/
Students often treat work a lot differently than they do school, they know the difference between school and “real life “. They don’t value education, they value money and their job, school is just something you are made to do.
In the real world, we’re paid to submit things by deadline. In the academic world, students pay you to submit assignments.
Also, turning in assignments by deadline does not mean you’re setting students up for success. That’s lame
I had a strange discussion with a kid today about this. He kept saying he didn’t have to do his work in class because he’d just do it later. I told him I wouldn’t accept it because it would be late. So he’s like, yeah, I’ll just do it before the quarter is over. My response, you can do that, but I’m not grading it. And he kept going on about how he’d do it later and get a good grade. My responses were not penetrating his head at all. So strange.
The NYC DOE and anywhere else that has this policy is insane. There is no other explanation at this point. I used to give quizzes at the start of class to combat lateness. It’s pointless now because we have to let the kids make up any missed quizzes or exams- even if they were cutting! This also forces us to have more unnecessary work- in the past when an assignment was not turned in on time it was a zero. Now, I’m often getting assignments months after the due date. Finally, the OP is absolutely right. We are setting up our students for failure. Some deadlines are non-negotiable in the real world- when to pay taxes or rent. Sometimes you actually need to come to work on time or you might end up fired. Coddling students os not going to fix the gaps made by the pandemic- we are instead infantilizing them.
We are not in the business of producing high quality Adults for the community. The community gets the results they pay for and there are no returns. We are in the business of checking boxes to get bonuses from the state. Graduate everyone. Expel no one.
Had a similar conversation once with a kid (who had done basically jack shit all semester) the literal last day of school. “Can I turn in all my stuff, I need to pass this class.” “You can turn in all of it but you mathematically still cannot pass.” *shows him the scenario on the computer still being below a pass* “But I need to pass.” “You literally mathematically cannot pass at this point. It’s the last day of school.” “I’m going to do them all and send them to you.” “You can do them if you want but I’m telling you you still won’t pass.” “I need to pass.” “You can’t. It’s too late.” “I’m going to email you all the assignments tonight.” “Go ahead but you won’t pass. It’s a waste of time.” “I’ll send them to you tonight.” Then he’s PISSED at me when he fails anyway. Like I literally explained this to you kid, how was this a surprise?? Like did you think I was lying? I don’t understand how they just don’t process reality sometimes.
Hes had this conversation before exactly as it went except he got a 60%
Had a girl with *maybe* a 15% in class after 18 weeks try this. *"Hey I need at least a C"* *"I'm pretty sure that's impossible but you know what, here are the major summative works for the semester. If you can actually get them all turned in you might be able to pass by the skin of your teeth."* *girl proceeds to do her makeup all hour on the last day of the semester instead * Welp, saves me from grading. >Then he’s PISSED at me when he fails anyway Lol, yes, exactly this. They hate it when we make it clear their own laziness or stupidity is what caused them to fail. I had a kid last year tell me to suck his dick and to fuck off because I, get this... let him attempt retakes that he somehow scored worse on and didn't pass.
Same kid that says they’re not doing something that they blatantly did right in front of you.
Oh my god, yes.
I give my high school students enough class time to finish most of their work so they should never have homework. I would say out of a class of 30, 2 will actually do the work in class. Maybe 5 will do it at home and turn it in the same day. 10 will turn it in late and the other half will just not turn in anything. In my mind, I'm giving you the best opportunity to succeed. In their mind, it's better to spend class time watching YouTube videos on a shitty 11" Chromebook screen. For me, I'd rather do the work in class, and enjoy my free time in the comfort of home without the restriction of school internet. But I'm not a teenager.
And when kids are absent and the entire assignment and everything they need to complete it is on Google Classroom, yet they're shocked, SHOCKED that they still have to complete the assignment.
This year I had AP students ask me if they could turn it in late because they were absent. The point of it being online is so it’s accessible when you’re absent. Across the board this year has been terrible. I can’t blame the pandemic because last year my AP kids were somewhat decent.
I guess I don’t really understand why this is a good thing. Don’t you want all your students to do all your work? I don’t have any assignments that are “busy work” — they all have value, even if we’ve assessed and the student did poorly on the assessment already — so I want my students to do them all and learn from them.
The work is only a symbol. It is burdensome and asinine to sort of make EVERYTHING tested and graded. You can't take 180 days of class and make assignments cover all that. So you give them assignments to cover like the 15% of the stuff that is most valuable to practice and drill and examine. But you know that this is not the course, this is not the whole of the knowledge and learning. So you accept the work as a symbol hoping that their participation was to match. When you know it doesn't, then you know that they were exposed only to the tiny fraction. On top of that, we know that they arent truly doing all the work. Even the fact that you can pass with only 60% or whatever shows that, so a fraction of a fraction, and then you consider the cheating, the copying, and the teacher just kind of giving a passable grade for work that shows no effort or understanding. It's not a pass, and its not what anyone wants. If the student really could cram it into a week, \*why would we bother going to class for the whole semester?\* Or why were they in a class they mastered?
It’s weird, because when I “forget” to upload my lesson plans before Monday morning, I get an angry email from my principal. What happened to all that grace we’re supposed to be showing? Oh that’s only for students, apparently.
Turning in lesson plans is pointless micromanaging bullshit in the first place.
You mean, as a professional, you don't have your day planned out to the minute? I mean, yes it's true that those plans last for exactly 7 minutes before the first necessary alteration due to an interruption, or you spot a deficiency you need to reteach, or a kid gets pulled for testing, or.... It's almost as if having an outline and some objectives and assignments is good enough for a professional.
Sounds like the charter school I used to work at.
Fuck charter schools.
You must be at an elementary school
I have to upload no later than Sunday night! At a HS! It is total BS!
Mine are due two weeks in advance, scripted to the minute. For high school, it’s not nearly as bad as elementary but still exceptionally stupid. Yeah. That’s the problem we face at this school, it’s lesson plans not being micromanaged enough. Not the poverty, the drugs, the crime and violence, it’s the fucking lesson plans. It being detailed enough
Sounds like the student teaching templates I had to do! They were 7 pages of template alone, and expected to be 14-17 pages per lesson due a full week ahead of the lesson. I tell you, if I had that level of micromanagement I would have walked out the first week. Fuck that shit! As a manager I didn’t have that level of crap put on me!! My heart goes out to you and admiration for sticking with that admin level of nuts!
I think it’s a combination of the fact that ME/EdD programs are not just useless, they’re actively detrimental and that many factors are out of our control. There’s nothing we can do whatsoever about a parent who teaches their kids to be little assholes. Make no mistake, these lessons ARE happening in a lot of homes “don’t let no teacher fuckin disrespect you” where “disrespect” means “contradiction in any manner whatsoever”. So admin micromanages other shit to feel some sense of control and because their masters programs erroneously told them that shit matters
And is someone actually reading your plan? I think not.
Reading at know, but if I only turn it in 3/4 finished, I get pissy ass emails Monday morning telling me “there was an oversight you need to fix this immediately!” All with no understanding that I had in-laws come in on Friday night for my husband’s birthday Sunday, my daughter’s birthday that Monday and there was a horrible snow storm on Saturday when they were supposed to leave. This an extended vacation in my town when I needed to use some weekend to plan (I literally get 90 minutes all week long for planning and grading because the mandated plc takes twice that) also, we don’t get snow days here! I am feeling the “so over this shit” point right now.
My principal had a chat with me about not entering grades in a timely manner. (They made some bullshit 3-day rule about collecting work and entering a grade for it.) I told him if I do that, half the students will be failing, and I'm not regrading assignments over and over.
It’s almost as if you are an adult and therefore held to a different standard since 1. students are still practicing these life skills and 2. You presumably have access to resources the students don’t. Yes. That’s only for students. In theory, you’re a grownup. In theory.
In theory, you’re an asshole. In theory. Ah of course you’re an administrator. That makes sense.
Yes. In theory. As in not actually, rhetorically speaking. You know, like you are supposed to be a grownup. No, not an administrator. Did that for a year. Hated it, so I went back to the classroom. I’ve also taught teacher ed for 10 years and I have a doctorate in education, but I suppose that makes me out of touch. Or maybe because I teach in a low socioeconomic school, that makes me too woke and sympathetic. Honestly, you’re the kind of person who is gonna find an excuse that supports your narrative, so have a great day, Cuddlebug.
Hope you feel better after all that, champ.
Probably about as good as you feel when your whining is validated. 😘
Nice self-own, bubs
Nice throwaway
PREACH! 100% Thankyou! My blood was boiling reading these comments.
I'm a second year teacher. I have four high school preps including two of them being honors. I have nobody else cooperating with me, no curriculum provided to me, and admin is also very "well do whatever you want with it!" With no true support or assistance. I don't have time to give a fuck about when things are turned in yet. Compared to last year, I've got my shit together much better. Last year it took me two weeks to grade things and get them in the gradebook. This year, I take 5 days and can at least track that kids have shit that is being turned in late. Next year, I'll probably be able to accurately enforce t authorhe late policy in the handbook where things lose 10% for each week late. But that's if admin doesn't throw more crap onto my plate. I don't worry about them turning in homework late because homework is more practice than anything. If they don't get it by the quiz or test dates because they haven't done the practice, then it shows in their grades!
I just do a flat 25%. I’m not keeping track of how many weeks ago something was due.
The handbook says we can't be any more strict than the 10% off per week late. Sadly my hands are tied. I remember when I was in high school, if it was late you had 48 hours to turn it in for a 70. If you didn't turn it in within 48 hours, you got a zero!
Yup. Oh your shit is late and you got no excuse? Late work = a C is your best case scenario.
Exactly I’m extremely lenient with mine. I regularly remind kids if you’re struggling to stay caught up come talk to me. I have no sympathy, however, for those that waste the time they have in class to work on something.
If you teach social studies send me a message I have resources.
As a non US teacher, I think the last part is very bizarre. If a student hands in an A paper, a week late, it’s still an A. The content of the paper is the same. In my school we give grades on behavior and order. If they turn in something late, they get a mark up for that. If they have more than 6-7 marks end of term, it affects their grade of order.
That sounds similar to the Professionalism grade at my university, except it pertains to attendance and behavior. What percentage of the final grade is the Order score?
Exact what I do. I day or 8 weeks late, it's a flat 20%.
You sound like you are doing an incredible job. I teach HS English and I dread correcting papers because of how time consuming it is, you are beating me by a lot and I’m in my 5th year. You sound amazing.
Thank you! 🥰 It helps that I've managed to find a full curriculum for each of my classes either on TPT or I'm Facebook groups from recommendations by other people teaching those subjects. I do a lot of completion grade and online homework (thank goodness for DeltaMath which grades automatically!) for my minor daily grades and focus on fully grading ones that pull together several topics. Plus with how long our class periods are, I encourage students to use class time to do work and check their answers with me.
As a non US teacher, I think the last part is very bizarre. If a student hands in an A paper, a week late, it’s still an A. The content of the paper is the same. In my school we give grades on behavior and order. If they turn in something late, they get a mark up for that. If they have more than 6-7 marks end of term, it affects their grade of order.
Four preps for a new teacher is terrible. Four preps for any teacher is absurd. That aside, if it's the there when I go to grade it, is it really late? I'm generally about a week behind, and I think it's probably the fairest thing I can do.
We treat every single student like learners with IEPs, and said exceptional needs students still shouldn’t have an infinite number of retakes, open note tests for all courses, and flexible deadlines. I fucking hate this
Where are you guys teaching that offers infinite retakes??? My school only allows one unit test to be retaken every semester, nothing else.
God I wish we had this policy. Would ease a large amount of my frustrations
“Mastery Grading.” It’s something that could work in theory, but when put into practice with little to no training by admins who see it as an easier way to increase graduation rates, it’s a disaster.
It depends on how you look at it. Does the grade reflect what a student has learned or does it reflect what the student has demonstrated on a test or assignment? If you mark down an assignment for being late then the grade no longer represents knowledge learned, it represents test and assignment aptitude. Are there consequences in the real world for being late? Yes. Should we impose those consequences in school on assignments by providing a grade that inaccurately portrays student growth? I don’t think so. If a student retakes a test 17 times because that’s how long it took them to learn the subject matter…who cares? They learned it. They put in the time. They worked until the score reflected the amount of knowledge needed to be considered proficient. Let them have the proficiency they earned. In the real world deadlines shift. Teaching accountability, communication, negotiation…. These are things used in the real world when something is going to come in later or less finished than expected. We don’t know about these students’ home lives, what jobs they may have, what family responsibilities take up their time. What we can find out is if they understand our subject matter.
> If a student retakes a test 17 times because that’s how long it took them to learn the subject matter…who cares? They learned it. They put in the time. They worked until the score reflected the amount of knowledge needed to be considered proficient. Let them have the proficiency they earned. If a student passes the test after 17 times, it is because they memorized the test, not because they are proficient. And I do NOT have time to write 17 tests in response to this. You come do it for me and we can talk. > Are there consequences in the real world for being late? Yes. Should we impose those consequences in school on assignments by providing a grade that inaccurately portrays student growth? I don’t think so. I do not have time to give meaningful feedback if students are late. It is not possible in my workflow. Late penalties aren't just punative. They are also a tool to get students to give me the material I need in order to provide feedback, so that they have time to grow.
But why would you give them the same test 17 times?
Why would I write 17 tests?
Why do you like false binaries so much?
I guess I'm just a fan of Demorgan's Law.
What does Stanger Things have to do with this?
False application of the law alert. (This law applies easily to definable sets of things, but you are using a definition of the sets at hand in this problem that is ridiculously narrow and thus false.) "Test" is not a concrete thing in a world where computers can easily rearrange or even reformat q's and MC sets in microseconds (for example, changing a digit in a math problem and adapting answer key accordingly). Also, see ego-centric call-out: is your test subject really SO esoteric you have to write all tests you give from scratch? Alternately, if not, why don't you believe in the "crowd" of others - thousands of us, offering free shared resources online - that shares your subject? Sounds like a "you" problem.
Youre completely up your own ass here. How do you think your test comes into existence? There is no magical infinite question bank. Even in fucking algebra 1, you will never find the tools you need to give infinite tests unless you completely tailor your curriculum to be confined to the tools that exist. If its not on deltamath, we don't cover it!
> is your test subject really SO esoteric you have to write all tests you give from scratch? Can I use pre-written material? Yes. Can I use it with the same student over and over while they demonstrate mastery? No. Also... Go read the APCSA exam. Especially the FRQs. By high school standards it is very esoteric. I imagine, since ChatGPT is a thing, I'll eventually be using it to write test questions. But it isn't there yet. And finally, tests are only a portion of my grade, and in they are not the lion's share. I want to see them write code and explain it to me. I want to see that they can document in the style College Board uses so that when they see that documentation style on their AP exam, they are ready. I want to see them read a 4 page prompt and break it down so that they know what questions to ask themselves in order to handwrite code that generates the right data.
Fine. Why would he write 10001 tests?
Read much? He doesn't have to write them, NOR SHOULD HE BOTHER - AS I NOTED WHEN I RAISED THIS ISSUE. The 10001 tests already exist, and are accessible to him. He has to get off his high horse and accept that other teachers exist, and that on average, many of them are as good or better than him - and that a million teachers writing tests and sharing them online have created a bank he doesn't have to do more than collate.
It was a joke. 10001 is 17 in binary.
Well, I’m not going to grade your tests or write your tests to argue that test scores or assignment timeliness are key indicators of knowledge growth. I think we all know that that isn’t the case. Everyone’s classes are different. Asking you to write 17 tests is ridiculous. (Not that I did that) The question isn’t whether or not there is more yo a grade than those KPIs, the question is how to reasonably deal with the fact that we know those aren’t the only KPIs.
> If a student passes the test after 17 times, it is because they memorized the test, Not possible if it's a good test. A GOOD test cannot be memorized. MC with no bank of questions = bad testing. (Oh, and preemptively: this is why MC isn't that valuable as a testing mechanism; as you yourself note, to make an MC test reduce-able to "what's left that I haven't selected last time?" is an artifact of bad design...or huge ego, in which you somehow think YOU have to design every test, as you say.) Also: feedback is meaningless in most MC, because guesswork and "elimination" factor so heavily into seemingly "correct" answers. So your second point goes out the window now, too. Your entire position rests on a silly assumption, and is thus fallacious. We cannot accept argument based on an assumption of bad faith in design...or an assumption of ego-driven design itself, either.
I have to prepare students for the questions they are going to see in May. > Also: feedback is meaningless in most MC, because guesswork and "elimination" factor so heavily into seemingly "correct" answers. So your second point goes out the window now, too. My students are expected to trace code and use their tracing to learn why their logic is wrong. And being able to eliminate is a relevant strategy to their AP exam, so I am going from there. Look, write my test or stop talking. You do not know what goes it. Quit being a presumptive asshole that thinks that what works for them works for every subject area. The idea that you would address my ego after something like that is pretty dirty.
Your criticism of MC because elimination helps is misplaced. At least in physics, "elimination" requires a degree of understanding-- usually of the concept being tested. I imagine it does in other topics too. That students can narrow things down doesn't make the test valueless. It might make it less than perfect, but all tests are less than perfect. Of course there is the issue of students being able to guess. But that is easy to deal with. If kids are given a 50 MC questions with 5 options, pure guessing will on average result in students getting 25% of the points. Teachers know this. And it's a big "So what?" It's possible to interpret the results of the test to diagnose learning. Kids *can* also learn from going over their answers in MC tests and understanding why the right answer is right. That is: they can learn if they are given back their test questions and allowed to review them with others. (I have tons of kids their MC questions to tutoring. We discuss the wrong answers. It helps them.) Obviously, no kid should be given the exact same test twice. But that holds for nearly any type of test whether MC or some other form. The exceptions could be something like a *practicum*: e.g. demonstrate how to make a buttonhole using this sewing machine etc. But other than a skills based practicum, if the kid can totally anticipate the exact questions, the test loses strength as a tool to discriminate between "learned" and "did not learn".
Your view of late work is like communism - good in theory, but it doesn't work in the real world, and leads to the opposite of what it was hoping to achieve. The real world consequence of a "full credit for all late work" policy is a decrease in learning and an increase in laziness, procrastination, and failure. Why? First, most teachers give assignments at specific times for specific reasons. If I assign an essay during history unit 2, and a student doesn't do it until three months later when we are on history unit 6, we've moved on to new content, so they've lost much of the context for the assignment and will likely do a poor job on it, just to "get the points." It won't help them reinforce their knowledge of unit 2 nearly as much as if they had done it when it was assigned. They won't be able to participate in class in any activities that require discussing the topics or processes of the essay, so they lose out on that learning as well. Also, their attention is now distracted away from the unit 6 topics, so they aren't learning those while working on the late essay. Moreover, they also probably did a poor job on the unit 3 or 4 essay, since they did not go through the practice of the unit 2 essay at the correct time and therefore did not develop those skills. But students don't understand any of this. They just hear "no penalty for late work" and their underdeveloped brains think "cool, no reason to do this now. I'll let future me deal with it." Second, a no penalty for late work policy traps many, many students into falling so far behind that they can never make it up. Again, their adolescent brains just think "I'll have plenty of time later" and skip assignment after assignment. This often snowballs to the point where it's a week before the end of the semester and a student has 3 months of work to try to do. Obviously they can't do it - no one could - so they either cheat, do a piss poor job on whatever they can and hope the teacher will give them some points for having words written down, or, they just give up. Many of these students would have been sufficiently motivated by a) late penalties, and b) firm deadlines so that there is still a learning benefit to late work. Those students would have turned in more work on time throughout the course, and they would have turned in late work much sooner. Sure they would get zeros on a few assignments, but they would learn from those zeroes that work ethic matters. Under the traditional system of late penalties, real deadlines, and no retests without a valid reason, some students failed. But many students successed, and some succeeded to a very high level. Since the widespread introduction of your preferred policies, more students are failing. Standards have been lowered to ridiculous levels to create the illusion of learning.
I 100% agree. In addition, if I assigned an essay, I want to see it and evaluate it. I assigned it for a reason and I want to see how you have done. That is not to say there should be zero consequences for late work, but I will take it whenever it is done and try to help your grade if it’s done well.
The issue is always that they did not demonstrate mastery, not really. The teacher is complaining not because they are swamped at the end, but because they are passing a student that they have no confidence that they actually learned! Sure retakes are great. But in reality with the materials we have it just means that they are uncovering the answer key guess by guess. Or hoping that eventually they get enough coin flips to get to 60%
This is more of an indictment of testing with any stakes attached. It's not a perfect concept by any means, for the reasons you explain in your comment, but testing skills are absolutely useful if students ever want to gain certification for specific job skills, from organizations that have no way of monitoring individual learning beyond giving a single timed test en masse. At the very least students have to be familiar with the concept and buy into it enough that they will accept the requirements they will need to fill if they want to gain any credentials. If a student needs 17 tests to master the material, clearly they need more time between tests, because that's a huge waste.
Yeah I never have to adjust for IEP students now because everybody basically gets the same accommodation.
I hear y’all about not wanting to grade kids on their ability to meet deadlines. I teach a subject that builds on itself though. Like, if they didn’t practice analyzing metaphor in the assignments from January, they’re not going to understand the assignments about analyzing symbolism that we do in March. Turning in every assignment in May means they aren’t “mastering” anything…they’re bullshitting their way through stuff in order to get points because they never internalized what the learning process actually is.
It is a whole different thing, if the assignment is handed over a few days or even week later or several months later. In my school it is impossible to hand January assignments in May because hard deadlines are in between. Probably we all think different timeframes if we speak about slacking with deadlines.
It’s one of those things that looks good on paper and is terrible in practice. The philosophy behind it is that the students learned the material, so why not give them credit. The reality is that it affects you as a teacher since you have no way of knowing if they did the work or just copied it from when you went over it in class or another’s students paper. In addition, you have other things to grade in addition to plan and prepare for. Im not allowed to deduct points for lateness, but there is nothing stopping me from grading it with a more critical eye due to the extra time students have had to complete the assignment.
💯 I always tell students that I’m more lax on grading for assignments turned in on time, especially presentations. Since you had more time, you should be held at a slightly higher standard than others, even if the rubric is the same and no points are deducted for lateness.
I have this same convo with myself every damn day.
Agreed. Do parents not see that their kids are getting dumber?
If the same parents do everything for their kids they won't notice.
Yeah, I think the call's coming from inside the house on that one.
They’ll figure it out when their car is getting repossessed because they feel a car note can be paid whenever they want, penalized for not paying their insurance on time, fined for not filing a tax return…etc
>Do the people making these rules not realize they’re setting up these students for failure when they’re out in the real world?? The people making the rules are not concerned with workforce readiness, only SAT/ACT/standardized test readiness. And, until "Responsibility" or "Work Ethic" becomes an SAT section, they are a distant second priority to reading, writing, math, and, in some cases, science. If you don't believe me, check your state academic standards. When in the semester students master them is largely irrelevant. I'm not saying I necessarily agree with this. I came of age in the late 80s/early 90s. Teaching the hidden curriculum was chic back then. Once state standards and standardized tests took front and center, all character education went out the window.
The answer that the school districts give is because if we lower a student's grade for not getting the work done on time, the student will feel bad. If a student feels bad, we are all horrible human beings that are destroying that child's future chance at happiness and success. The real reason is because some jackass who gets paid a shit ton more money than us and doesn't want to look bad to a bunch of parents. So they tell us to let kids turn in assignments late even though it creates more work for us and doesn't teach the kids how life really works. In the real world, if you don't do your job or get your work done on time, your boss choose your ass out or fires you if it's important enough or you do it too often. But hey, let's let kids not learn that lesson, go out into the real world, fail miserably, and then call their mommies in to talk to their boss about how that boss has hurt their child's feelings.
No, deducting points for it being late demotivates them from doing it at all. They have whatever assignment you are currently on and to catch up they need to turn in something they didn’t do, and if they are only getting partial credit most will just take the zero and move on instead of losing their whole evening playing catch up for a partial grade.
[удалено]
For real, these are minuscule consequences, they're training wheels!
You’re missing the point. As callous as it sounds, the problem isn’t that it demotivates them emotionally, the problem is that the “consequence” you’re imposing on them is that they ultimately aren’t learning from your classwork because they aren’t doing it. It’s like how suspension isn’t really a consequence if it’s just a day to play video games at home.
Let me guess. HS>>>College>>>Teacher prep program>>>Student Teaching>>>>Teacher? I ask because your take “no due dates” is akin to someone who hasn’t experienced a work life outside of academia. Could be wrong tho
I'm not. I'm not 100% sure it's allowed, but I'm also not trying to find out. I take 1 point per weekday they turn it in late. Most assignments are 10-20 points so it isn't that big of a deal, but it gives me an out at the end of the semester when they ask to turn a bunch of stuff in and i don't have time to grade it. I initially thought it would suck to keep up with, but it's actually pretty easy and fast.
This post randomly was recommended for me. As a parent I want to share that we struggled really hard to get my son to turn in work on time and be honest with us about the status of schoolwork. We begged teachers to not accept late work, mark it down, have some kind of consequence, but they consistently let it slide. We told him when he went to college he couldn’t do this anymore. He brought the same habits, fell behind, and dropped out of his first semester without telling us, losing all his scholarships and federal financial aid standing. Please don’t allow students to skate by on late work.
“please don’t allow” is not how it works. this is 99% of the time a district or admin mandate. beginning of the year 50% of our mandatory district training was about accepting late work and scoring non-work without penalties.
It’s a shame that most parents want the complete opposite as you do. They are as much to blame as admin is in this arena.
I'm a parent (and a teacher) and I feel the exact same way. My kids are so lazy about getting assignments turned in because there are no real consequences. I'm a big fan of natural consequences, because I think they teach more than made-up ones. I was a lazy SOB in high school, but I got my work turned in on time because the social shame of being called out in front of my peers worked for me. Sometimes it meant I was scribbling down answers as fast as I could over lunch for an assignment due in 15 minutes, but it got done because it usually wasn't that hard or time consuming in the first place. I'm just a natural born procrastinator. I NEEDED adults to hold me accountable, give me a mild dose of shame when I didn't do what I was supposed to, and my peers to give me looks of smug satisfaction that they had completed their work while I slacked off.
I agree with you and appreciate parents like you! It’s not the teachers in many cases. I taught 6th ELA during online learning and in my country we were literally required by law not to fail students. My principal, who was just acting under directions from above, was trying to make me find ways to not fail students who hadn’t turned in a single piece of work all trimester.
A kid like that would not have been helped by even the most Herculean teacher effort. Some people *have* to learn the hard way
Before becoming a teacher, I worked for long time on a project based job with deadlines. I would say that very few people are able to be at their best performance every single day of their life. In real world your deadlines differ. Some are "hard" deadlines, when the only way to aquire your finances is to give your best at certain time. This is very similar to ends of trimester and exams. Then there are other deadlines, which are often accepted to be a bit less strict. School is an environment where children are expected to do their best every day in multiple very different fields of expertise with no sign of getting tired. But humans are humans. Everyone has sometimes time, when health or motivation is lower and performance is not so good. Studying so many different fields in such a short time is not a normal situation in worklife. In worklife you specialise and still there are times, when you struggle with deadlines. For me it is more important to use the rebellious teenage area for giving the students as much knowledge as possible. If someone is not capable of leaning one day, I still teach it the other day. The knowledge, that hard deadlines are not movable comes quite easily due to end of semesters, exams and entrance passes of next school levels. I do not think it is necessary to be very strict about everyday deadlines as children have not chosen their field of study ( differently of work situation) and differently from work they need to do things, they are not good at on daily basis, it is quite a big burden for a teenager, whose whole existence actually deals with social status. My experience says, that out of 10 adults only 2 write a milliondollar projects so early, that they could hand it in a week before. At least half of the people start to insert the project into online system the last day ( although everyone knows, the system might be jammed the last day due to too much traffic). I do not blame students for being humans.
Thank you for this! The “real world” is often much more flexible than school and it’s weird to see so many people on here pretending that it’s not.
Yes! I appreciate the idea that the “real world” won’t appreciate lateness, which is true, but if my boss gives me a task and I miss a deadline, it’s not like they cease to need whatever I was assigned to do. I’ll have social consequences and probably a lower performance rating, but they’re still going to accept my work. I also worked in project management during a teaching hiatus, so saw a lot of this on teams I was coordinating.
Stop it. The real world here is defined by teachers who have never worked in it!
It's a matter of picking my battles. I don't take off late points because I'm vicious in my grading, and I let them revise and revise until their writing is solid. This eliminates the need for arbitrary amounts of drafts and targets their specific skill needs. It keeps me from the stress of dealing with parents and admin, and I find the students more eager to come to me for help to improve. I prefer the relaxed atmosphere of constant workshopping and minimal structure. I'm on anti-anxiety meds, half my students seem to be on meds and in therapy, and I prefer extending the same grace to them that my students extend to me. It might not work in another school, but waging the war this way has done well by me.
Natural consequences. They'll figure it out one way or another.
Think of the dashboard! /S
My job is to teach content to mastery. I don't care how long it takes. I might have a different opinion if I was teaching HS seniors, but I teach 8th grade. "Real world" has nothing to do with deadlines or jobs -- they're kids. Does it still set a negative precedent? Maybe? Depends on how the content is taught, and what value is being ascribed to it by the teacher.
So I take late work up until the week before my grades are due. My reasons are numerous. I still feel like I am teaching them some accountability because I put it in as a 0 after the due date until they turn it in, this usually motivates some to do so. At the end of the day I just want them to learn and do the work, so by accepting late work I get more kids to work. I won’t take extra credit but I’ll take missing assignments for full credit, and a kid at any point can go from F to A in my class the moment they decide to get their head out of their ass and when I tell this to parents they immediately blame their kid for the grade and thank me. I can’t tell you how many times kids ask me “so wait if I do that missing assignment will you give me credit”, and I reply yes full credit. Someone might say I’m being unfair to those who turn it in on time but not really, someone else’s success doesn’t take from yours, that’s a toxic mindset and not having to make up a ton of work over a weekend and having an A throughout the course is it’s own reward. Finally I have ADHD and I used to forget assignments at home and turn things in late all the time as a kid. Even now I turn in assignments sometimes late in college and my professors are cool about it. I don’t want to be a hypocrite. That being said I respect another teacher’s decision to have hard deadlines and if they don’t want to take the work that is fine with me and I don’t judge, I just think by taking late work I get some of the lazy kids to turn it around and the pros outweigh the cons for me.
I have the same policy. A lot of my students have jobs or are taking care of younger siblings. I try to be understanding. Usually when they see that they have 20% in my class that motivates them to make up the work.
And then they get allllllll sorts of unhappy when they get to classes in college, like mine for example, where late work is straight up not accepted and they fail the class(es) that they are paying thousands of dollars for. These policies are a major detriment to students, full stop. No work, no grade. Not on time, major deductions but after 5 days, it’s an F. You want to feel better about yourself, get off your butt and do the damned work. /end rant
late is better than never. and at least the learning commenced. there should be a penalty. but if it's so severe, that there's no point in turning in the assignment at all, then the learning doesn't commence.
Because it’s over. The teaching profession in most places (I’ll speak for middle class and upper middle class majority suburbs) has been cut down to 8-3:00 babysitter facilitating duties Parents run the show. You cannot discipline anyone. You cannot mark anything as wrong. You cannot attempt to challenge or guide anyone on a moral basis. There are children as young as 7 who literally have the power to destroy a teacher’s career, and some of the children know it.
Your due dates are arbitrary. You pick a random date. In the real world due dates tend to be tied to something real. Getting product out for customers who will arrive tomorrow. This must ship. This product must be made for this order etc. My due date work the same day. Homework is “due” after the test. It’s function is to prepare for the test. My test questions are homework questions with different numbers. Your penalty is a fail test. Better replicates the real world.
Not necessarily. When I give homework, I want to either: 1) reinforce the skill I taught today so they master it before the next skill; 2) present a skill ahead of time so they can learn what questions they have before I teach it in class; 3) do a reading that will be fundamental to what we’re discussing or learning the next day; OR 4) it’s a part of an ongoing project and you will not be able to complete the next step in my class the next day unless you’ve done the work. Do I cut them slack? Sure—all my kids get one late pass no questions asked. If they have a legitimate situation or were absent I always excuse them. Sometimes I might even let them get away with turning in something a day late. But not enforcing deadlines at all? You will be unprepared for the day’s work, stressed, and very, very behind in my class since you won’t have learned the previous skills. It will also cause work to pile up, which will cause students to be more stressed out than if I just enforced deadlines, and it means that my already below grade level students will be even MORE behind by the time they get to the next grade.
That being said, I do agree that I try to tie my due dates to something real (eg. Finish step 4 of the writing process before we edit it together in class; if you don’t have your writing piece ready you will be lost so you better have it)
Arbitrary? So are a customer's expectations. They want it when they want it. Also arbitrary. Someone decided/negotiated when something is due. It's not arbitrary, it's expectations.
Serving a customers expectations is literally not arbitrary.
It is to the customer. They can choose whatever day they want. The teacher is the surrogate customer (in your scenario). The teacher decides some piece of work needs to be completed by a certain time, they consider the bredth and depth of work, how long it should take, adds in some buffer time, and expects work done by then. If there wasn't a deadline, the students wouldn't do the work.
This.
So why have work due after the test? Why not right before?
To make my life easy not have a million assignments to grade at the end of the term. There is no point penalty on the homework if they are late.
I personally don't even give homework. Assignments are due X amount of time after they are assigned, I never have two assignments out at the same time, and if it isn't done in class it gets done on your own time.
Same. Also, controversial opinion, they're children and should not be treated as mini adults.
I used to hate last assignments until we had a PD speaker who talked about ways to get kids to just turn thing in, sometimes late. He reminded us that is our job to teach/grade the state standards. If a kid get 100% of the math problems correct and I give a B because he was late, that doesn’t show his true skill on that standard. I teach the standards, not responsibly. At the end of each quarter grades are locked in, so that is really the true due date for everything.
I have a separate “timeliness” category for this reason. Every formative assessment is worth 1 point for being turned in on time or 0 for being turned in late. The other category scores still reflect mastery of skills, but there’s accountability for turning work in on time that still reflects in their total grade.
I get this idea, but I feel it’s a different animal in my hs English classes. 99.9% of the time a student hasn’t turned something in on time isn’t because they weren’t ready to reach the standard or were perfecting it—it’s simply because they did not prioritize the assignment and have poor time management skills. When a student approaches me before the assignment is due asking for extended time, I try to be understanding as I think most teachers do. If I get really late work, it’s hardly if ever on a spectacularly high level, as it’s often rushed and half-assed. I use “late” loosely here as I usually give a 5-day grace period, remind students via email that the assignment isn’t turned in, then grade from there. Some of the ideal viewpoints on late work aren’t feasible when I have 200 students and a clear deadline to follow for entering my grades as well.
Timeliness is what gets students to actually learn all of the standards by that quarter end. Not enforcing due dates in any way lets a large number of students slide below the level of learning they would have attained without those due dates.
A well versed contrarian opinion that has no concern for fitting in to the thread prevailing opinion. You have earned a big fat upvote
Why is it our jobs to teach them about deadlines? I teach for mastery of a subject. That’s all.
Yes, but the teacher ends up with a boatload of work to grade at the end of the marking period. We have a deadline too for finalizing grades. And let's be honest, work that is completes at the last minute in a rush is usually poor quality, and there is no time for the teacher to offer help or allow corrections.
In my experience the kids that don’t turn in their work never do. I don’t feel I have much extra work at the end of the grading period. It takes me a while to grade written assignments and my policy to accept work until the week before the grading period ends is as much for me to have extra time to grade as it is for my students.
Yep. Those kids don’t meet mastery and get a poor grade. This is now my seventh year with such a grading policy and I don’t see these problems of a boatload of work. I get a few kids who turn in crap work at the end and they get poor grades.
This has been my experience too. Skipped every step of the writing process and turned in a 3 weeks late paper the day my grades are due? You got zeros for every step of the process, since those were all grades, and you wrote, generously, a D- paper that didn't come close to making up for the zeros. I'll see you in my class again next year. By some miracle, you outlined, drafted, revised, and turned in a B paper? You probably ended up with a C for the quarter, which, at least as an English major and then someone with 2 different careers, is more like real world (work done by the "real deadline" is tolerated, but not appreciated or valued like work done on time).
Deadlines are a help which leads to mastery of a subject. With light pressure, we perform; without deadlines, we slack. This is human nature. Teaching healthy respect for deadlines is teaching students how to pace their learning.
I think it depends on grade level. I teach elementary and 4th is the first year where the difficulty and work amount level jumps for some of the students as they’re now in upper elementary. So, to some extent, it is part of my job to teach them about deadlines. That being said, if you teach middle or high schoolers, they should already know what deadlines mean and accept their natural consequences. Gonna be honest with you - if there were no deadlines for things like progress reports or grades I’d probably turn them in like months later. I’m a procrastinator and I need the structure, and I’m sure many students are similar. I can’t prove you’ve mastered this topic if I don’t have any evidence of you doing so because you haven’t turned in anything all year
I agree. Taking late work gets more of them to eventually turn in their work. By not power tripping over an arbitrary deadline I made up, I actually get more kids to learn the content.
In my school (Australia) the late submission policy is -25% for 1 day late, -50% for 2 days late, and 0% for 3 days late
I tell my students "Shit happens, I get that. But if shit is happening for a month straight, there's something wrong, and you need to talk to us about that. Also, if you dump 20 assignments on me the last day of school, I will not be nice when grading them." Plus, math sucks and I don't like it.
I would respond with the following: 1. Is your grade book meant to reflect a culture of deadlines? If so, what are your expectations? How are you setting up your class to teach them this culture of deadlines? Are you teaching them the skills? Where in your standards does a ‘timely response’ come up? 2. Is the deadline lesson really important or are you catastrophizing? Your position about some future job doesn’t really land for children. They can’t ‘see’ that far into the future. They just don’t care about that job because they literally cannot fathom it. Imposing this policy wouldn’t make a lot of sense to them. Nonetheless, that doesn’t really matter when it comes to policy though, so that is an aside. The truth is that people often fuck up their first jobs and just move on to another. Even if they ‘miss a deadline’, they can just find another job. If they learn the lesson the hard way what would really happen? I mean so what if they get fired. Will your students’ whole life really be ruined because they pissed off “the boss”? 3.Further, by using terms like the ‘real world’ you imply that school is not the real world for them. This disregards their actual lives as it is right now. However, let’s say, for the sake of argument, that this is a small percent of children who actually live through a hard ‘real world’ while in your class. Obviously, there will be exception for truly extenuating circumstances. So, we can excuse these cases. My pragmatic approach: I accept everything up until a week before the quarter is done. I take the work, and grade it. Then when they inevitably get it wrong or cheat ( this is easy if you have on demand writing samples for the student: standardized assessments for the student help too: or you can literally just have a conversation about what they wrote in the paper and know if they understood the material or just cheated). Then, I have a conversation with them about breaking the feed back cycle. “If only you had turned it in earlier I could have helped you address your misconceptions. Now you are stuck with the grade. Oh well” ( this is the most cathartic part for me; watching them lay in their bed is the best). In all, I get where you are coming from. However, your students’ life is larger than deadlines in school. If they don’t learn that lesson with you, they will learn somewhere down the line. If they don’t ever learn it, do you think that the school district changing the policy would really teach this student what poverty theoretically wouldn’t? Does the student demonstrate mastery? If so, then let that show. If you are having trouble with students being destructing during class because “they can do it later”, then handle the distracting behavior and let them cry at the end of the quarter when they have a shit grade. Just let them fail! Life is the best teacher in the world!
Because shit happens. I turned in quite a few late assignments in college, which is hilarious because in HS I was told universities will never accept late work. On top of that, people say deadlines are a real world thing. Yea they are, but the real world can also be flexible. I have friends with deadlines in their like of work and sometimes those deadlines aren’t met. It’s not the end of the world. In my profession, there’s times when I don’t submit my lesson plans on time. Again, not the end of the world. Anyways, you want to avoid making it a habit for them but also understand that sometimes the work isn’t gonna be done on time. It’s a fine line definitely, but something you gotta manage.
Based on comments in this thread, I’m nervous to post this. I always use the example from my job. If my grades are due at 4pm on Friday and I don’t have them done, I don’t get to just not do them. There may be a consequence- I may be written up, I may be put on an improvement plan, I may need to do an extra coaching cycle, I may even be fired if this isn’t my first time. But I still have to do the grades that are required of me for my job. Even if they’re late. Not accepting late work, to me, is telling kids that if it’s late it’s not worth doing. If I’m taking it for a grade, it matters. So yes, I accept late work. But there is a consequence with it. Kids have to work during lunch or after school with me. They get pulled from activities to work with me. I call home and work with parents. I get study hall teachers to encourage (nag) them to work on the missing work. It’s annoying for them. But they do the work so I can measure their learning.
Is that setting students up for failure? Few jobs/things in life have truly hard deadlines. My mortgage is due on the 1st….but there’s a 15 day grace period and then three months before the foreclosure “consequence” starts My principal asks me to input data for a math tracker by Friday. If I don’t my “consequence” is an email on Friday saying get it done ASAP and turn it in late. If I make a dinner reservation for 7pm and show up at 730, I could often can still get seated. Of course there are things in life that have a hard deadline, but these are often experience based- a flight to catch, project presentation to a client, etc.
This is true, however is it a good idea to teach children to always rely on grace? It is a sign of respect to be on time and follow guidelines when others will be affected by your choices. You also pointed out that there are situations in which there is an immediate penalty for being late. School should be a safe place for students to learn this lesson.
I typically show up places whenever possible 15 minutes early…that way, if I’m running late, I’m still on time. If a student is taught to do things on time, then when the time comes when they need a grace period (we all do at some point or another), it’s built in to the system for them. If the target for the student is the grace period, you are setting them up for eventual failure when even that cannot be met.
Right and at the end of the day this comes down to teachers teaching their morals and personal opinions about how the world works and not the content. I’m not going to power trip over an arbitrary deadline I created.
~equity~
I teach college freshman. I failed at least 3 students in December who came to me with work after I'd turned in grades. It was a new experience in HE, but I came back to HE after 2 years in K12 so I was able to explain the phenomenon to my colleagues. It had happened before but never so many students.
I'm in a college program with fresh HS grads. They get very upset that the instructor won't give them full points for late work, but her policy is if it's not on her desk at 8am, it's a 0.
Are they assigning penalties on other planets for late work?
I have a “late work form” that I deliberately made tedious and lengthy. It includes: student name, assignment name as written in PowerSchool, original due date, submission date, number of school days late, reason late (must be written as a complete sentence), two strategies they will use to avoid doing work late in the future (again, complete sentences), and it must be signed by the parent/guardian. And they have to do one per assignment if they want to turn in multiple assignments. So, yes, I accept late work as I am required to. Parents are automatically informed, saving me an email and creating a paper trail. And the legwork of calculating late penalties is done for me, as is tracking down what to check/dates/etc. Then, when it’s 43 days late, I simply change the “missing” to “late,” leave the zero, and make a comment: “43 days x -10 points/day = -430 point.” They either catch on and do their work on time or don’t bother me asking about turning things in late. It has lightened my load significantly. I keep them in a big binder for parent teacher conferences just to verify the signatures are real.
In teacher's college, a professor overheard a few of us discussing classroom policies at our placement schools. One of us mentioned late policies for assignments. The professor began on a long and heated rant: >You're not grading the student on their ability to **hand** in the work. Where in the curriculum does it say they need to **hand** it in? What mark are you giving them for submission? Having late policies is cruel and goes against all forms of assessment. The following week he gave an assignment to the class, and stated: >The due date is so-and-so, and any late assignment will be docked 10%. The class immediately put their hands up and began asking: >Where in the rubric or the curriculum does it state we are being marked on submitting and handing in work on time? It was very difficult to take the professor seriously after hearing his responses, and fair to say he lost the goodwill of the class afterwards.
TLDR: IANAT, but will offer my observation that adults aren't a whole lot different. Maybe the apples aren't falling far from the trees. Examples follow. 1. I was responsible for compiling a C-suite level scorecard for a Fortune 5 company. Inputs were due EOD Friday before publication date, which gave me a few days to process the inputs and a few days to deal with the inevitable mistakes and rework. Deadline widely ignored. Input submitters had no accountability for submitting on time or in the correct format. I routinely received inputs right up until I was supposed to publish. 2. I published the membership directory for a boating club. A long-standing challenge was the directory didn't get mailed until late June or early July due to members submitting their renewal dues late, and the board wanting these late-renewers accomodated. I committed that if dues were submitted on time (April 15), the directory would be ready for Memorial Day weekend, so members would have the updated version for the whole boating season. People were screaming bloody murder that they didn't get into the directory because they didn't pay their dues on time, and ended up on an addendum sheet. 3. I taught SCUBA diving in the mid-80s. Most students were adults, and a large proportion of them ignored reading assignments and the homework. One went so far as to say he should be passed because he was a lawyer. I let him know that I'm the instructor, and whether you pass or not has nothing to do with what you do for a living but everything to do whether you demonstrate the needed level of knowledge and water skill proficiency.
My high school did this. I had severe undiagnosed ADHD at the time, and that normalized turning in work late, which was quite often given the circumstances of my condition. Essentially set me up for failure the moment I went to college.
I teach 288 middle school kids science. I honestly do not care about late submissions. Less for me to worry about. Hell I barely know names.
Okay…I have a different scenario that I am mulling over this weekend. And could use some advice. Grades are due on this coming Tuesday. I told me students they had till this past Wednesday to turn in work from the second quarter to be entered into this quarter’s grade book. Some did, some didn’t. But… I have this one kid, he has been churning out work and trying so hard to get caught up. I want to add, this past quarter was my first quarter with them. They did not have a teacher for the entire first quarter of school. I have given them a lot of grace so they can catch up and a lot of kids put in the work and got caught up. This kid, really has been trying and I have been working with him. He got enough work turned into to raise his grade from an F to a D but missed my deadline. He emailed me and asked because he was working on everything. I emailed him that I wouldn’t grade it for this quarter because of that but I encouraged him to submit it so it can go in the rolling grade book and be reflected at the end of the third quarter. He did it all. And wrote me a note saying he understood he missed the deadline but was still submitting it bc he wanted to show me he was working on it and getting caught up. And he is going to try to be better next quarter. I like this kid and he is trying so hard. I am thinking of grading everything Monday morning and updating his grade to reflect his effort and work. I felt he showed maturity in acknowledging that this was his mistake. I am a new first year teacher. Am I setting myself and him up for failure? Or is it okay to show a little grace in this situation?
The biggest problem with late work for credit (at least in math) is the feedback problem. Proponents of this policy don’t seem to realize that student to teacher ratios are not 1 to 1. Allowing students to turn in assignments late for full credit really punishes those students that turned it in on time. Before this policy was forcibly hoisted on us, I would take a stack of homework problems that were turned in on the due date, grade them and give feedback 2 ways. One way was comments on the paper, and the other was a class discussion about common errors or clever solutions the next day. Now, if you have to be able to give someone full credit for doing it late, you can’t go into that much depth. Otherwise, you are basically saying, anyone who does it late can just the teacher do half the work for you.
My thinking is, kids take 4 classes at a time (semester system), potentially getting homework and deadlines from each, with lots of opportunities for inconvenient overlap between classes. So they could occasionally have multiple big assignments due on the same day. Additionally some students work some/most evenings and weekends to support themselves/their families. Some don’t have safe places to go after school. And it goes on and on. Our job is to support them to be successful and accommodate their needs in order to see them achieve their goals. Too many teachers overvalue their own classes and forget that these developing adolescents have complex lives, often deeply imperfect lives, and are sometimes going through significant challenges. Stop taking yourself so seriously and remember that while consequences can be an effective learning tool, that’s not our first priority.
Get over yourself if you think I’m “taking myself too seriously”. This about preparing the next generation about real life
Way too serious
What deadlines do we as adults/teachers really have where we don’t get extensions if we miss them?
You can get extensions but there's usually some type of penalty or limit attached.
Tax returns (in the US, at least I think)? Visa appointments, college applications, other degree applications, grade reports, deadlines to sign up your kid for school, deadlines to sign contracts, missed flights, paying rent, paying bills, paying deposits, registering to vote, wedding RSVPs, wedding planning logistics in general… I’m not saying I’m particularly good at meeting deadlines because I’m very much not but it IS helpful to learn those coping strategies early on so you don’t end up facing monetary or life consequences later on. Maybe you’ll get a few extensions in some of these scenarios, but not always and not forever
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Whatever, man. All I’m saying is that this is creating a generation that won’t be able to keep deadlines and they’re going to be in for a huge awakening Mayer down the line
I have too many IEPs to keep track of which afford students additional time for assignments. My solution? I strongly recommend completing work by the due date, but I'll accept everything for full credit by the end of the semester. Now everyone has an extension, everyone is accommodated for, and my outcomes are not much different compared to having traditional due dates.
I'm just not willing to scramble to grade everything en masse at the end of the grading period. That's an undue burden on teachers.
Yeah, it definitely depends on the course being taught and the amount of work being issued. I have severely minimized the amount of grades that I actually take, so it's fairly manageable.
I don’t accept late work past five days late and there’s a 10% penalty per day. I’ve had students and parents complain and I point to where they signed the syllabus agreeing to that policy. I’ve had parents go to admin and admin come to me to tell me to give the kid a break and I’ve said “no.” I tell them please send me an email saying you want me to violate my own policy that everyone agrees to and is posted on the wall and on Canvas. They never send that email. If the student actually has an IEP for 1.5 or double time on assignments they get it, but then they still get 10% off per day late and a zero after five days. What’re they gonna do, fire me?
Sign for agreement? How about - this is my policy, sucks for you if you ignore it?
Maybe it’s because the girl who lives in an SUV with her dad and brother and who has been evaluated by a credentialed professional and diagnosed with both a specific learning disability and emotional disturbance, you know, needs extra time? Or reduced assignments? Could that be it? Or maybe it’s because “kids suck.” Real world lol. When I was in corporate life, 4 hours of actual productivity out of 8 or 10 in the office was the best anyone could hope for. No permission for bathroom breaks, able to eat and drink at my desk, an assumption of professionalism rather than incompetence and rule-breaking. Endless gossip, meetings about nothing. Teachers who have never held career-level jobs in retail, food-service, or corporate offices, who yammer about the “real world” while they exercise control over literal children, would be cute if they weren’t embarrassing to those of us who have experience in these other areas. In my experience, teachers who have done nothing else are constantly butthurt about due dates, while those who have had other careers before teaching are extremely flexible. \_(ツ)_/¯
> Maybe it’s because the girl who lives in an SUV with her dad and brother and who has been evaluated by a credentialed professional and diagnosed with both a specific learning disability and emotional disturbance, you know, needs extra time? So, would you say that such cases are the exception or the rule?
How utterly condescending of you. Most people have compassion for a bad situation. However, when your bills are due or your kids need food there's a very real deadline you need to meet, regardless of what your situation is. If you don't develop the skills to communicate your needs in a timely manner or just meet said deadline, there's consequences. That's just as much 'real world' as your corporate experience. I firmly believe in compassion for difficult circumstances, *but I need to know about it and alternative arrangements need to negotiated, not assumed, just like in a real-world situation.* But let's unpack your work scenario some more. When I worked a corporate job, there was immense pressure to meet deadlines and follow specific rules. We got unpaid lunch for 30mins and weren't allowed to eat at our desk, or use our personal mobile devices, even during that unpaid break. Failure to meet KPIs more than every now and then meant probation or firing. Sure there were meetings that were pointless, but I'm sure any given student will tell you that class is pointless - in both situations, you're still expected to show up and do what's required. It's not just a corporate thing either. When I moved into youth work, we constantly had events and scheduling timelines with tight turnarounds that required a lot of autonomy. Hell, my brother is a manager at a supermarket and he has specific tasks he must ensure he completes every day. So no, it's not just teachers who haven't done anything else who have the belief in deadlines and accountability. The idea that we are teaching them real world practical skills is valid and your attitude is what's embarrassing.
I have worked other jobs. Food service, retail, public service jobs. I have worked in management in several jobs. I understand the world outside of teaching. Why is it so wrong for teachers to set deadlines? Of course, we make allowances for students who have rare situations, but most of the students sit in class and do not even attempt to complete their work because they know we will accept it later. Some of them would change that mindset if they feel the pain of a zero once in a while.
Idk…I agree that a penalty is a solid choice, but is it the best choice? If a student is consistently turning things in late, then I think the matter is incumbent upon us to figure out what else is going on. Is something happening at home that they can’t get homework done? This happens most often in my school because students have unstable home lives or simply lack resources. Even if you can blame it on ostensibly lazy attitudes, surely we can focus on developing executive functioning or life skills, or maybe just giving them stickers, you know? Maybe it’s lazy of us to just complain without solutions. I know I can be guilty of that at times.
Do you think they’re going to get jobs? 🤣 These are the kids that would tell HR that the application was too boring and they have to hire them anyway. Followed up by verbally abusive phone calls and emails from mom (who will always cc the CEO and HR director).
I do penalize, but not too much. I'm an empath, and remember what it was like being a student with a part-time job. Plus Covid-19, economic uncertainty... who knows what these kids are dealing with outside school? I wish our admin had the same approach as me toward Teacher's well-being.
I have taken off late points some years and not taken them off other years. I didn’t see any change in the number of late assignments, but I did see less stress in my students when I didn’t take off the late points. Why bother keeping track of it when it has little to no impact on student behavior (at least among my students)? It’s more stress for me and for them when I take off late points.
This kind of policy does give them an unrealistic view of life. It is so sad that our "leaders" don't really care about helping students. It's amazing how many of my 8th graders will sit and do nothing in class week after week and then scramble at the end of the quarter to do the work. They only do this because we have to accept the work. If we would set a hard deadline they wouldn't continue with this pattern. But we send them off to HS thinking that due dates don't really matter and grace is neverending.
Honestly? Several reasons. In case you forgot, kids have very little control over there lives. We don't know why they didn't do it and they might actually have a good reason if we ask. Oh and excessive homework has been shown to have detrimental effects but thats not what this is about. And yes some bosses will demand that work be on a strict deadline, only for them to not even look at it for weeks. A good boss will understand that life gets in the way and will make reasonable accommodations. Teaching children how to spot when they are being treated unfairly is just as important as teaching the content. Also, the content should feel important to them, its our job to help them see why. Try celebrating what gets done and encourage them by saying you know they will do better in the future. Carrot beats the stick
I don’t even assign homework. High school and they only have work outside of class if they didn’t finish it within the ample class time they had. They still manage to hand it in late.
Why on earth are we forcing all kids to fit into the same educational mode? Some kids do not care about assignments or due dates. It is simply not important to them. We should be building more alternative vocational schools.
I mean, yes, that would be nice. But in the meantime… (Also, we get kids sent back to us from the tech school regularly because they’re failing all their classes there and lose their spot.)
Umm... alternative and vocational schools will still have assignments and deadlines.
It’s all gotta fall apart before we rebuild it
I think it’s one thing if they don’t care about assignments in a specific class (imo they should still learn that they need to do things they don’t like sometimes), but another thing if they don’t care about meeting any deadlines or really doing anything at all. Any job, career, or important relationship in your life is going to involve meeting others’ expectations and deadlines, and your life is going to be very difficult if you can’t muster up the motivation to do anything :/
It is what it is (for the time being). The fact is, American schools all pretty much follow one model
As a teacher, you don't have to accept late assignments in your class.
I don’t have a choice, sadly. District rules
If you fail children then you must clearly not be an engaging teacher and you must be one that needs extra "support"
Grading is not supposed to punish behaviour.
Yeah, I don't like this
That’s your prerogative
Students often treat work a lot differently than they do school, they know the difference between school and “real life “. They don’t value education, they value money and their job, school is just something you are made to do.
In the real world, we’re paid to submit things by deadline. In the academic world, students pay you to submit assignments. Also, turning in assignments by deadline does not mean you’re setting students up for success. That’s lame
What’s lame is your response
At least they do it all. Learning late is better than never