The Importance of Deadlines?

The examples given for adults meeting deadlines such as working 12 or more hours in a day to meet a contract deadline, etc., are possible because these workers are adults. They have control over their lives, they know their bodies, they can re-arrange other things in their lives, and they can set aside some recovery time after the task is completed.

Our students have none of these options. They really can't re-arrange everything else in their lives, they can't stay until 10:00 at night at their school to work on things, skip out on taking care of their younger siblings if the parents are working evenings, or argue with the football coach to skip the state championship because they need to finish their essay on how cuneiform writing dramatically impacted the Fertile Crescent.

Students' physiology is changing which makes it hard for students to "read" their bodies. They can't go without sleep, and take time afterwards to recover from the long days. They are so egocentric in the now of the moment that they can rarely task analyze so well as to plan appropriately for how long something will take to complete, especially if there are many somethings.

Also, when we are late with things in the real world, there usually isn't a dire penalty. We're allowed to be late with taxes, appointments, and even proposals from time to time. Sure, it's a competitive world and in many situations if we are late we lose business...but again, that's an adult-level competency and situation. We're talking about students just learning how to organize their lives and complete tasks.

When students are late with something and we extend the deadline for them, we're not making things any easier -- we're making sure they learn the material. They have to handle the new, daily work while shouldering the burden of the late work. This isn't something they consider easy or good, and it's not going soft on the students. It's really holding them accountable: "You now have to do this week's tasks AND last week's tasks all within the same week."

The concern that other students who do their work on time will find this extended deadline unfair isn't really justified. They do not see doing double (and sometimes triple) the work as preferable. It's something to avoid. They're glad they don't have to make such sacrifices in their own lives, relieved at getting the work done on time. These students also appreciate that teachers are looking out for them, not just trying to catch them making mistakes, as some may view teachers doing.

Our students are imperfect beings, constantly mixing priorities, dealing with temptations, and often making the wrong decisions. If we arbitrarily declared that everything not completed by the identified date is an automatic F a lot of learning would go undone. Our commission is to teach so that students learn, not just present curriculum and blindly hold students accountable for it.

We teach in whatever way students best learn the material. The idea that each of our students learns at the same pace as everyone else goes against all we know about human psychology and the way the mind learns. We learn at different rates, and we become proficient at different rates. A lock-step factory model in which all students are timely with their tasks and learning is pretty close to malpractice, and it does not prepare students for the world beyond school.