I give extensions rather freely. My students know that they need to ask at least two days in advance (longer for major assignments), and they need to have an acceptable reason, and provide supporting documentation (which I follow up on).
In my experience, colleagues who have at least 5-10 years of “real world” experience have tended to be more flexible with deadlines and re-test opportunities than teachers without.
In fact, one of my major frustrations with my experience in education (as compared with industry) is that there is no provision for negotiating requirements that cannot be met. In industry, if a manager told me to do something that I knew to be impossible with the resources I had to work with, I had to negotiate with that manager on the spot, and we needed to both come away from the negotiation understanding and agreeing on:
- the requirements
- the feasibility of the task, given the resources
- the timeline, given the availability of resources (taking shared or multiply allocated resources into account)
In public high schools, these negotiations are not permitted to take place. Everything must be done according to the prescribed timeline, regardless of the feasibility or availability of resources. It is unacceptable to negotiate, even though everyone in the conversation understands and even agrees upon the impossibility of the task. In the education world, tasks fall on the floor all the time , and we’re not allowed to talk about them. It took me two gut-wrenching years before I understood that everyone else dropped just as many tasks on the floor as I did, and that this was not only understood, but expected.
Given our working environment, it’s little wonder that so many of us create a similarly inflexible world for our students.
Originally posted to the ChemEd-L discussion list.
