LIVE LAUGH LOVE

“But that’s unfair to the people who submitted on time!”

I didn’t say you had to give everybody full credit. Drop the grade for each individual assignment by 5% for every day late until it gets down to 20%. Never, ever take it below 20%.

Here’s my rationale:

1. If you are a good educator, then you created that assignment in the first place because YOU WANTED YOUR STUDENTS TO LEARN SOMETHING. You still want them to have an incentive to complete that learning experience even if it’s not “on time.”

2. You want to prepare your students for the the real world, right? Well, if you missed a deadline (for example, submitting report cards), would your boss throw away everything you’d worked on, dock your paycheck, and tell you to try again next time? No. They would be upset with you, but they would ask you to take time out of your schedule to finish the project as quickly as possible. It wouldn’t cease to exist.

3. Based on point #2, if you are teaching high school or below, not accepting late work is holding children (who by the way, generally do not have full control over their schedules or what materials they have access to) to a higher standard than adults. 

4. If you are teaching college or graduate school, you are working with adults who are taking years out of their lives and paying thousands of dollars to learn from you. Why make it harder for them than it already is?

5. You have or will teach students with extenuating life circumstances that they don’t tell you about (e.g. chronic illness, caring for children or sick relatives, abusive relationships) because they are embarrassed to share this information or have already been taught to shut up and stop making excuses.

6. You have or will teach students with learning disabilities that they don’t even know about. I was diagnosed with ADHD in high school after years of being treated like I was just a bad kid. I suffered from depression and anxiety for over ten years before I went on medication. I did not even learn the words “executive dysfunction” until I was in grad school.

My dog is told “Would you like to wear your jewelry?” And becomes excited. He then chooses which necklace he’d like. He has a few and they all have to have tags on them. I discovered this because I bought him a second collar and he refused it with a sneeze that usually is his equivalent of “fuck you”. I asked him why he didn’t like it. He did a dance. I don’t know how I figured it out, but I remember putting the new collar on him and seeing him still beg for the older one and thinking “there’s got to be a reason”. It occurred to be that he might want a little jingle. So I took an old keychain bauble and put it on his collar and he was so happy I thought he’d leap outside. The whole walk, he pranced around like a prize pig. So I realized that the collar couldn’t be a collar. It had to be a necklace. And now he has a large selection for every season, each with a set of tags that have his name and some sort of jingle decoration.