Deadlines and a Sense of Grace

 A student wrote to apologize for not getting her work done this week. She said she had been in the hospital after giving birth to a baby but that she would catch up on work this week.  I told her to take all the time she needed.

I know that some teachers would require documentation; I was once one of those teachers. But my experience during spring of 2020 has changed me a bit. In March of 2020, facing enormous disruptions, I wrote to my students and told them I had suspended all deadlines and that all they had to do was to do their best to get their work done by the end of the term. I would keep writing weekly emails as if the deadlines still applied, and in fact I encouraged them to try to meet the deadlines so that they wouldn't have impossible tasks at the end of the term. But I could tell early on that we were going to be facing a variety of challenges, and I didn't need to hear all the details to grant people grace. My goal was to get them to the end of the term as successfully as possible.

That's always my goal of course. I was surprised by how many people stayed on track even though I had given them blanket permission to turn in everything late. It made me wonder if the punitive approach to missing deadlines is the best. We talk about training people to be good workers later, good professionals, people who will get the work done on time. I'm not sure they really learn that by me taking 20 points off if they turn in a paper late.  Perhaps it's more accurate to say that the ones who learn the lesson that way have already learned it by the time they get to my college English classes.

I also thought about different approaches to grades with my own grades that I earned as a student this term in seminary. In one class, I earned an 89.7. On a 100 point scale, would you give me an A or a B for the class? As a teacher I would round up, but I know many teachers who don't.  I'm happy that my seminary professor did round  up, and I got an A minus for my term grade.

When I broke my wrist, I did write to all of my professors just to let them know, and they all wrote back to say that they were willing to do whatever I needed. I decided to push forward and finish my work before the surgery. This morning I looked at the calendar and thought that if it was a month ago, I would be deep in a variety of papers.  I thought that pushing ahead was easier than taking incompletes, and that turned out to be a good decision.

There's this strange emptiness in my days where seminary work once was and where it will be again. It makes sense to take this summer off for a variety of reasons:  wrist surgery recovery, moving across multiple states, and the fact that seminary scheduling didn't quite work for me for this summer. Today I will connect with old friends, one of the joys of having some extra time.