Why I Dumped the Due Date (part 2)

"I got my [assignment] done. Sorry about the delay, things are tough, I'm figuring it out. Part of life, right? Or all of life? I certainly appreciate your setup right now." 

I got that email from a student this week.  It really made me feel good.  My student completed the assignment of reading the week's materials, posting a question for exploration in the discussion forum and responding to other students' questions. Would it have been better if she'd done that work in week five, when the conversation was at its peak?  Well, sure, but better late than never!  If I'd enforced the due date, she wouldn't have done the work at all and would have missed that material entirely.

I don't know what is tough in her life, and that makes me feel good, too.  Not that she's having a hard time right now, of course, but that I don't have to evaluate whether the situation is tough enough.  And she didn't feel like she had to convince me. Who am I to judge?  Things were tough, she's working on it, and she got the work done when she could.  Good enough for me.

Or...maybe she's making it all up.  We've all had our share of dead grandmothers. But I don't think she is, because she doesn't have to.  Why do so many grandmothers die during midterms?  Because that's an excuse that just about everyone will accept. (Or used to, anyway, before the modern plague of dead grandmothers!)  But my students don't have to make sure their excuse meets my personal standard of "bad enough." I leave that to them.  Sure students will abuse the freedom to skip a due date (or two, or three, or....)  But they penalize themselves by doing so.  It's harder to catch up in a class than it is to keep up.  And my grading system STRONGLY encourages keeping up, without penalizing those who have one or two late assignments.  I don't feel the need to exact an additional penalty. 

 

Okay, I'm supposed to be writing about how I counter objections to my "no penalty for late work" policy, so here goes. 

It's impossible to keep up with 100+ students' work without due dates.

I have a lot of sympathy for this objection. It drove me crazy when a student would hand in a late paper when I wasn't prepared for it.  I'd usually stick into my bag  or tuck it into a book and hope would make its way to the stack on my desk that I'd collected last week.  I still remember the frustration of trying to keep track of the flood of papers coming and going between me and my students in the bad old days BC (before computers.)  Ah, but that was then and this is now, AD (after digital.)  And here I will shock everyone by saying something nice about Blackboard.  Students all submit their work via Blackboard and all I have to do is open the grade book and there it all is.  I grade each class once a week.  Anything submitted that week gets graded.  I don't have to remember if I gave someone an extra three days.  I don't have to remember if I gave that extension three days ago or four.  If the student does the work, I give them feedback on the work and the student learns something.  Students who don't do assignments don't learn from them.  (I also color code my gradebook to help me easily distinguish a pattern of late work indicating trouble ahead.  Maybe I'll write a blog post about that one of these weeks.)  So I keep up quite easily, far MORE easily than if I had to keep track of individual exceptions to a "no late work" rule.

I also discovered that I prefer the variety of not grading 25 or 50 or 100 of the same assignment, all at once!

Some students aren't mature enough to set their own pace in a class. 

True enough, but I prefer to treat them all as if they are rather than treating them all as if they are not. I do have some policies that I use to prod along the slowpokes and chronically disorganized, such as the grading policy mentioned above. I also grade each week and email those who are falling seriously behind.  And I withdraw any student who hasn't completed at least half the work required by the student withdrawal deadline.  If you are THAT far behind, no matter what the reason, you won't catch up and it's better to cut your losses now.

 

If you don't enforce deadlines, students won't work at the same pace and can't get the most out of group work or the classroom experience.

That is an excellent point, and I addressed this point to some extent above.  It's a trade-off.  If I enforced due dates, perhaps more students WOULD keep up and get more out of the class.  But those who miss the deadlines would get nothing out of the assignments they were unable to submit at all.  Is it worth cutting some students off from the work entirely to encourage others to keep up?  Which of those options you choose depends on the value you put on that immediacy of interaction.  But I do think there are coming changes in education that will tip the balance more and more toward giving students access to the class work at their own pace and in their own time.  Increasingly, educational technology is being designed to allow students to work at their own pace, to move ahead if they find the material easy or to slow down and concentrate on a topic that has stymied them.  Classes where everyone is required to move at the same pace, regardless of whether an individual student has mastered the material or not, are going to seem more and more anachronistic to students used to being in control of their own learning. 

 

We're training them for the real world, where late work has penalties.

Coincidentally, two days after I published my last post on Why I Dumped the Due Date, Anthony Aycock wrote an opinion piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education called "Don't Be Hard to Get Along With" in which he contrasts his experiences as an employee and most students' experiences in the classroom.  While I don't agree with everything he wrote, he makes a very good point.  Do we working professionals adhere to a "no late work" policy and expect tangible penalties if we don't meet them?  Should I ask the division Admin Assistants what they think about professors' abilities to meet deadlines?  Hmm?  Now, it is true that not all workplaces are as accommodating, and that's too bad.  Perhaps we aren't living in "the real world."  But it seems pretty real to me. I really value working at a place where, if I forget to fill out my textbook orders until Holly reminds me that I missed the deadline, I just get it done and the order goes in. (Sorry, Holly!)  And I choose to run my classes the same way.

 

There is one more objection that I didn't anticipate when I wrote last week's blog post.  I discovered it as I read the comments to Aycock's article and it isn't very pleasant to contemplate.  I was really shocked by the number of commentators who expressed undisguised anger and contempt about their students.  Lazy. Manipulative. Disrespectful. "Unique little snowflakes." Often these epithets are coupled with the assertion that it is our responsibility to teach these brats respect.  Especially respect for their professor and his or her rules.  But that just seems self-defeating to me, and I noted how often it was those who were most vigorously defending firm due dates who had stories of the most outrageous student misbehavior.  Treat students like they are incapable of conducting their own educational lives and I guess some will strive to live up to that assumption. 

 

I'm not fond of trendy slogans, but I do try to be the "guide on the side," and that include ceding as much responsibility as I can to the students themselves.  Some might (and do) argue that setting and enforcing due dates IS teaching responsibility.  But I'm after a more fundamental accountability.  As my student said, "things are tough, I'm figuring it out."  Nobody's setting any due dates on that.  It's all up to her, and I'm glad I could help. 

Why I Dumped the Due Date

I didn’t submit my assignment.  Can I still hand it in? 

My brother came into town unexpectedly this weekend, and I haven’t seen him in five years, so I didn’t get my paper done.

If I submit my work tonight, can I still get some points?

I’ve been really sick and haven’t been able to sit at the computer.  Do you want to see my doctor’s note?

I did the work but Blackboard wouldn’t let me upload it.

Need I go on?  We’ve all heard these excuses and many, many more.  And I didn’t even include any of the more outré ones: the alien abductions, the crises of the soul, one roommate murdered by another roommate. (I got that one once.)  There are as many reasons for not getting school work done as there are students enrolled at the college.  More, now that I think of it.  As I prepared to write this, I tried to think of an assignment where all my students met the deadline.  And I can’t think of one.  As Roseanne Roseannadanna would say, “It’s always something.”

So, how to cope?  The hard line, which a lot of instructors favor, is “No late work.”  So sorry that X happened, but the deadline is past and that’s the way it is.  But that’s not REALLY the way it is, in most cases, is it?  Maybe there is the rare teacher out there who won’t make accommodations for a student who has had to fly home expectedly for a funeral, or is dealing with an imminent medical crisis, or other such emergency.  Your class, your rules.  However, years ago I had a student who was being stalked by an ex and had been removed from her home by police one evening for her own safety. It happened to be the evening before a paper was due, and she didn’t get it done.  Am I not going to make an exception for that?  Of course I will.

So the next step back from that hard line is “No late work without a good excuse.”  Homicidal ex?  Good excuse.  Child diagnosed with leukemia?  You bet. Child in the emergency room with the flu.  Mmmm, maybe.  Oh, your first child died of pneumonia as an infant and you’re not coping well with the flu diagnosis?  Well then, fine.  Your family flew into town unexpectedly?  Sounds fun but you should have explained that you have to write that paper.  Your family flew in unexpectedly so you could spend one last weekend with your sister who will be deployed to Afghanistan next week.  In that case…

You see where I’m going with this.  The “No late work without a good excuse” rule means we put ourselves in the role of judging which excuses are good enough.  And I am VERY uncomfortable with that.  We deal with a large number of non-traditional students with families, jobs, health or socio-economic issues that affect their access to education.  Issues that I have been extremely lucky NOT to have to deal with.  I worked hard at school, of course, but compared to most of my students I had it ridiculously easy.  The point is, I’ve decided that I’m no longer putting myself in the position of judging a student’s priorities by my own standards.

And you can’t BELIEVE how much that has lessened my stress level.  This was a completely unexpected consequence of my shift in policy.  I figured, of course, that this would lightened the load for my students.  No more coming, hat in hand, to beg for an extension.  No more stressing over trying to get work done at the last minute.  Sure, great for them.  But for me?  Who know this was such a weight on my shoulders?  I love, love, LOVE telling someone, “Hey, no worries.  Just get it done,” instead of having to decide if it is fair to let student A have an extension and student B not.  Instead of having to keep track of who got that extension and who didn’t.  Instead of having to explain to student B (without violating privacy laws) why student A got that extension.  And best of all, I don’t have to hear the excuses at all. I don’t care to know about your bowel complaint and how it kept you in the bathroom all weekend.  Or the intricacies of your relationship with your boyfriend or whatever else it might be.  Just get the work done. 

I know, I know.  There are a LOT of objections raised whenever I explain this policy to other teachers.  It’s too hard to manage a class if students don’t all submit their work at the same time. Students aren’t mature enough to prioritize and will place playing video games or other frivolities over school work.  We’re training them for the real world where there are consequences for not meeting deadlines.  If you don’t enforce deadlines, students won’t work at the same pace and can’t get the most out of group work or the classroom experience.  All valid points that I’ll have to address in part two of this essay, since I’m way over my 25 sentence goal already.  But my core point is made.  Education belongs to the students. It is their own responsibility to decide how that education fits into their lives and what is most important to them at a particular moment.  Just get the work in when you can.

On the Other Side of the Screen: Confessions of an Online Student

For me, one of the greatest perks of teaching at a college is the opportunity to take classes for free.  I get to sample various topics I'm interested in, and I'm interested in a lot of things!  But, of course, I do have a full-time job and then some, so like a lot of our students I look to online classes to allow me to fit school into my schedule. I also teach online classes every semester and have for years, so I'm quite familiar with online education. However, being an online student has really given me insight on the challenges our students face. One of the biggest, I've found, is simply interacting with the course materials.

 I'm not an idiot. I thought I'd better clarify that right up front, because I've found myself making the same irritating mistakes that drive me up a wall when my students do them in my classes.  I've misread instructions and quiz questions. I've skimmed over text and jumped straight into watching embedded videos, missing important information.  I've clicked through folders and files, trying to remember where I saw the class due dates or the reading list. Remember, I'm a professional student, an honest-to-Betsy Ph.D. with (presumably) better-than-average study skills, taking introductory classes at a community college. And yet, it is SO easy in an online class to get lost, to misunderstand a direction or an assignment or to skim over online text. And that makes it so much harder to succeed.

A couple of years ago, I had a student who HATED my online class.  He couldn't find course materials.  He didn't understand the schedule of assignments. He'd email me repeatedly for clarification, and grew increasingly hostile when my explanations didn't make things any clearer for him.  In his eyes I was just a bad, bad teacher with a mess of a Blackboard shell. And I just couldn't figure out how to help him, as I'd made my class as simple and as straightforward as I could. How could he not understand what was so clear to me? I could find everything necessary for the class.  It was all there. Why couldn't he figure it out?

One thing I repeat again and again in my critical thinking class is that "different brains work differently."  This is usually in the context of discussing how people see the world from different angles depending on their background and experiences, but it is equally appropriate when discussing online education.  I try to make my classes as clear and organized as I can, and they make perfect sense to me. But then I take online classes from other teachers and I get frustrated and confused.  Objectively, I know that their classes are designed in a way that makes perfect sense to them and that they have taken as much care with the design as I do with mine.  But my brain works differently.  As did the brain of my frustrated student. As do the brains of all our students.

 Of course this can also be an issue in F2F classes, but for whatever reason, I find the problem magnified in the online setting. Perhaps it is the lack of metacommunication.  Or maybe the missing component is the opportunity to ask and answer questions on the fly. Certainly online classes can be isolating, leading to a sense that you are the only one struggling with the material, that you are on your own.  I don't have an answer.  But I am certainly now much more aware of the potential disconnect between what I upload and what students experience on the other side of the screen.