Academia: Due Dates

Thursday's Child Has Far to Go

I’ve been cutting students slack for my entire career, so I come to Michael Bérubé’s essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education already convinced.

There’s a lot of reasons why I’ve approached my deadlines and grading that way. Some of it is sympathy: I have trouble with deadlines too, on a deep cognitive level that at least touches on the space of what is and is not neurotypical. Some of it is that the kind of book-keeping that Bérubé describes as a part of his former no-slack-cut workflow has always seemed to me to be impossibly complex and annoying—tracking fractional credit, tracking hours or days that an assignment is late, and so on. It also feels like a bad caricature of white-collar supervisory behavior, like I’m asking about the cover sheet on the TPS report. Overall, it just feels like it’s getting in the way of what I see myself doing as a professor teaching adults whom I want to be responsible for their own learning: if I’m serious about that proposition, then I have to allow every learner to decide for themselves just how much they feel invested in what I have to teach in a given semester.

But I’ve also been struck very powerfully in the last few years at just how much both grading and what some think of as rigor or discipline matter to some faculty. There are professionals out there who advocate ungrading and slack and giving up some forms of classroom authority with intense fervor and as a result show unremitting hostility to faculty who refuse. I don’t see it that way. Teaching is an art as well as a technique: there are a lot of ways to do it right and only a few ways that are unquestionably wrong. My professional solidarity with fellow practitioners is as much of an ethical obligation as my work with my students, so when I become aware that a major subset of people in my profession think really differently than I do about a common aspect of our labor, I need to take that seriously and not just shout over them.

So when I listen, I hear a number of reasons for tight adherence to deadlines for all, for the maintenance of unyielding and universal regimens of penalization for late work and so on. Some I think are valid, some I question. I also think there are reasons that are rarely stated explicitly but perhaps even more important to consider.

1. That in the “real world”, students will face these kinds of deadline pressures and that this is a form of training for the professional lives that our students will live. This is the least convincing to me, because I think those who say it seriously have little empirical basis for saying it and that there is considerable reason to think that in fact it is not true in the working lives of many recent graduates. This feels to me like the classic secondary school threat by some teachers and administrators that misbehavior will go on your “permanent record”. It’s demonstrably not true in our own lives—while we face deadline pressures of many kinds, work that has to be done by a certain date, nevertheless faculty also frequently can change, renegotiate or just plain ignore deadlines without consequence. In a lot of workplaces that’s equally true. The film has to get delivered by a certain date, the software’s got to be in production on a certain date, the report for shareholders is due at a certain point, but also, a lot of the specifics turn out to be negotiable and mutable, especially when a person is particularly valued or important in producing that work. To some extent, the only person who can’t do any negotiating at all about deadlines or hours or schedules is the least valued and most replaceable person in a workplace or team. I don’t think that’s what I want to be seeing my students as or training them to be. So I ought to cut them the same slack that they will have as a valued professional.

2. That it is not fair if some people have to turn in work by the deadline and others don’t; equity requires consistency. It’s true that as soon as you say “Turn it in by Tuesday but if you need an extension, no problem” there are going to be a few students who take a cynical view of an offer that is meant to respond to varying circumstances. Ideally, when I’m saying “get it in when you can”, I am trying to appreciate students who have deep cognitive issues with deadlines but also students who happen to have a major exam due the same day or who are struggling with a recent event in their lives without any of them having to come up and specifically tell me the story of what’s going on, which really shouldn’t be something I ask of them. Am I imagining that this includes a student who just would rather go drinking with some buddies that night rather than finishing my writing assignment? Conventionally, a lot of faculty would like to bracket that person off and say “everybody else gets slack, but not you, not for that”. Me? I don’t care. There are plenty of reasons why that night might be a better thing, an important thing, for that student. The moment I start trying to separate legitimate reasons for missing the deadline from illegitimate ones, I’m involved in a never-ending morass of making unasked-for judgments about the lives of my students. It’s not a wholesome enterprise for me to be involved in. As Bérubé says, are there students “taking advantage”? Sure, and who cares if they are? I should believe that what I am teaching is important and valuable and useful, but I shouldn’t be insisting that requires me to force everyone to experience it with the same diligence and at the same pace in the name of fairness. If I really thought that, I’d also have to stomp on the student who is too invested in the material, doing too much work with too much diligence. I’ve had students who were diffident and drifting for much of a class discover later on that what they did pick up or remember turned into something powerful and useful years later—it’s just that they weren’t ready to be focused on it right there and then. That’s a win, and I’ll take the wins whenever and however they arrive.

3. I need work by the deadline so that I can assess, mark or evaluate them in a timely way for my own sake, but also because timeliness is important to learning. Ok, this is completely legitimate. It’s not just about managing our own workflow, either. Yes, even though I also have deadline issues, honestly, having papers or other assignments trickle in bit by bit over two weeks causes me enormous distress in terms of managing my attention to evaluation. But more importantly, one of the more robust things we know about the relationship between assessment and learning is that it is very, very tied to rapidity of feedback. If you get a grade or comments on something you worked on two months ago, the memory of the work itself has generally faded and you can only relate to what you’re seeing in terms of the finished product—you don’t know how to incorporate what you’re hearing into the process of making that product, thinking those thoughts, designing that experiment. If we could plausibly manage it (in most disciplines, we can’t), getting feedback or assessment within a few hours of doing the work would make a huge difference in learning outcomes. So when student work comes across a drifting time period and isn’t highly coordinated with the point in a syllabus that is linked to that work, our ability to give meaningful feedback is significantly affected (and our own experience of work suffers).

4. Because it’s the only way we can get everything done that needs doing. I’m one of those people who knocks the entire idea of “coverage” as a major imperative of course design, but I’ve developed a deeper understanding of what is going on underneath the concept of coverage, and I don’t think we consider that deeper problem enough. Essentially, university and college faculty are typically focused on getting students to the point of being able to do a particular discipline, which requires a combination of skills, specific knowledge, and a sort of motivating vision of that discipline’s perspective on its characteristic domain of interest. The problem that we all face is that over time, doing most disciplines requires the compression of more and more into those three areas (skills, knowledge, vision) as disciplines are built on longer and longer histories and on more and more output in the present across a wider range of institutions. We are trying to squeeze more and more into four years of learning, to use those four years to “catch up” our students to where we believe the next starting line of training in that discipline (or in professions that derive from it) is and will be. That makes abandoning ‘coverage’ feel painful, almost to the point of being malpractice—we feel that somehow we are excluding something that our students have to know or must be able to do, in an assemblage where the quantities of have to know and must be able to do seem to grow ever more numerous. Stepping away from this approach is not as easy as just abandoning “coverage”: it requires a rethink of the temporality of higher education as a whole, and a re-examination of what credentialization really is and ought to be. So I am sympathetic when a firm stance on deadlines is motivated by a desire to do as much as possible even when I think it’s something we have to step away from.

5. Because punitive approaches (or similarly, harsh or antagonistic evaluation) produce learning more effectively and evenly, especially for students who need to ‘catch up’. Obviously I have no sympathy for this point of view in a personal sense. It just is not how I think, and it is not how I believe I have learned any of the things I have learned. But that’s part of the problem here: for some people it is how they feel they have learned, that some kind of unyielding accountability tied to consequences has been important for their achievements, that it is an important driver of their ongoing productivity and more deeply for the maintenance of their dignity and autonomy as a person. I can’t in principle say that this is not true to a person who thinks it true of themselves, and therefore I cannot say that it might not be true for some of my students. So in effect, I have to concede that my approach to deadlines, grading and so on might be actually bad for some possible students. My uneasiness isn’t just that I’m not of this mind, though. It is also that I often get a sense that this is a belief not about some cognitive predispositions or personality types but a socioeconomic view: that some people from some backgrounds need discipline or constraint and other people from other backgrounds can be given latitude. That’s where this goes bad and lets a lot of other bad things into the space of teaching. This is in that sense the flipside of “fairness”: if you’re going to say that you think unyielding discipline produces good learning outcomes, you have to do it to everyone—but there’s plenty of reason to think that for some people this is the wrong approach. Bérubé says “some people need deadlines” and that’s true. I suppose what I’d like to do is have a practice that helps those people identify themselves and helps them impose that on themselves rather than a practice that does that to them indiscriminately. I get uncomfortable when deadlines and grades are seen as moral absolutes, which approaches at least some of what I read in forums where professional faculty are talking with one another. But I understand where that’s coming from for those people—it’s deep inside their own sense of self and their own vision of work. It’s not a surface-level doctrine.

6. Because I teach at a scale where making highly individual judgments about the circumstances, disposition and abilities of students is simply not possible and that this scale requires a single deadline, enforced rigorously. I can’t argue with that. It is true. I teach small classes in a small institution where one of the affordances of my work, secured through the wealth of my institution, is paying attention to individuals as individuals. If I were teaching a class of 500 people, I couldn’t do that no matter what I thought would be best otherwise.

Image credit: Photo by Tim Gouw on Unsplash