Is late work a big deal?

"Mr. Mazenko, I wrote my paper, but ...."

😊

It is inevitable each year on one assignment or another that a student will not have the work present in class in hard copy at the moment that it is "due." And, thus teachers are forced into dealing with the issue of "late work." Do you accept late work? For full credit? Do you knock off points or a letter grade? Is the penalty based on minutes or hours or days? Do you give kids that disappointed look? Do you publicly shame the kids for forgetting (or neglecting) their school work? Do you believe you have to teach them a lesson? Do you tell yourself it's for their own good?

Do you have an inflated and unreasonable sense of self worth regarding your class and assignments?

Each year I share with my students a little bit of advice whenever the first assignment and issue of late work arises. Drawing from a "life strategy" in Jay McGraw's funny little self-help book Life Strategies for Teens, I remind students that "There is no reality - only perception of it." It doesn't matter if you did it; it only matters if you can prove it. And veteran teachers have heard so many endless variations on the missing homework story - "My printer ran out of ink. My hard drive crashed. I left my backpack in the trunk (it's always the trunk) of my friend's car, and I can't get it back because his sister took the car back to college in Nebraska this weekend, and she can't get the paper and send it to me because she parked illegally and the car was towed and the lot is only open from Wednesday to Friday ....." Thus, teachers are naturally inclined, when they hear the words, "I did it, but ..." to reserve some doubt, immediately thinking, "No, you didn't."  And, it really doesn't matter if you did. Because not doing it and not having it are the same thing.

That said, I am pretty flexible when it comes to turning work in late. For, let's be realistic; we all forget things from time to time. I've forgotten to bring copies or my book. I see teachers running back to the office all the time. I've forgotten to bring documents or information to meetings. It happens. And, we can all do ourselves a favor by getting past the inclination to stare disappointedly at kids and shame them for very human mistakes. And, we should stop telling ourselves that we are teaching them very important lessons about personal responsibility because someday their bosses won't put up with such carelessness. Oh, please. There was a time when I was a bit more rigid about these things. And I certainly am attuned to students taking advantage of situations and trying to get something for nothing. But only offering half-credit for completed work that is tardy in some ways - sometimes by only an hour or two - is nonsense. That's not what grades are meant to assess.

As I've matured in the field of education and parenting, and I've begun "Rethinking Homework," and as I've thought a lot about "The Case Against Zero," I have also begun to reconsider late work.

Give a kid a break sometime.

Is this my crowd? Identity politics and the new normal

In the past couple weeks, I've ventured into LoDo (lower downtown Denver) for a couple of cultural events: a beer/food pairing at Oscar Blues Brew Pub and the Crush Walls Art Festival in RiNo (River North neighborhood). Both were great fun and enriching experiences, though I recently noted to a colleague that I had a couple weird moments of self-awareness when I noticed the mixed crowd of twenty-something hipster Millennials alongside a fair number of forty-something Gen Xers. And, I thought, rather uncharacteristically, Is This My Crowd? We joked about how that might be the perfect title for my memoir.

Who am I? That's a never-ending question for the average American, and that quest for a sense of self is foundational to our national DNA.

However, that sense of identity, both personal and geographical, is at the heart of our troubling national divide. If there truly is a troubling national divide. And, that leads me to a nice bit of social commentary via a couple book reviews in the Weekend Wall Street Journal. Political writer and review Barton Swaim (whose Twitter feed has apparently deleted. Hmmmm) takes a look at the new work from Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity & the Politics of Resentment. Swaim & Fukuyama explain how "the modern quest for dignity may be traced back to Martin Luther, who first expressed 'the notion, central to questions of identity, that the inner self is deep and possesses many layers that can be exposed only through private introspection.'" I like that simple idea, as well as the extrapolation that it was Jean Jacques Rousseau who redefined the idea without the theological component and "elevated the individual to a status of all importance ..."

The complicated notion of the individual and the concepts of individual liberty are both the calling cards and Achilles' heels for progressive Democrats and pseudo-conservative Republicans. While it seems fairly straightforward and honest for Fukuyama to note "the desire for the state to recognize one's basic dignity has been at the core of democratic movements since the French Revolution," the emerging identity politics and selective applications of personal and individual liberty are the complicating factors in today's politics. Just how much do we really support the ideas of personal freedom and individual liberty? Well, we only do so on the readings of issues that resonate with us. Whose personal liberty is at risk and under attack in the case of the Christian baker and the gay customer?

Figure that out in a mutually beneficial and acceptable way, and you win.

Who are the primary & indispensable thinkers?

At the very beginning of my AP English Language & Composition class each year, I present the challenge for my students to become, in the words of Henry James, "people on whom nothing is lost." The challenge begins with my reading of "The Parlor Metaphor" from Kenneth Burke's description of the "Unending Conversation" in his Philosophy of the Literary Form. That situation of entering a conversation already underway is the task any time an AP Lang student sits for an essay - for, they never really know what the question or topic will be. Will they be asked to analyze the strategies Queen Elizabeth used to inspire the forces at Tilbury, or will they be tasked with breaking down the satire of Jennifer Price making sense of plastic pink flamingos?

Regardless of the topic, they must be able to play.

To this end, I seek to build a body of core knowledge for my students, and we do this together through the study of both fiction and non-fiction literature. They will come to understand bits of early Romanticism with the work of Jane Austen, and they will learn a bit about utilitarianism with Dickens' Hard Times. I touch on post-modernism with O'Brien's The Things They Carried, and we explore transcendentalism with Thoreau's work as well as Krakauer's Into the Wild. I've often included a unit on Enlightenment thinkers when I do a unit of political speeches and documents, mostly American, and we write on the strategies used by people such as Thomas Paine to influence his audience in The Crisis. 

Recently, I've kicked around an idea of creating specialists, or content experts, for the major philosophers they might encounter and want to incorporate in their analyses. For example, when we are reading a novel or story or speech or argumentative prompt, I think it might be cool to have one group who could pose thoughts on the Nietzschean or Freudian or Lockean or Thoreauvian view. And, now I'm trying to determine who would be the top 9 or 10 thinkers to assign. Here are my front runners:

• Plato
• Aristotle
• John Locke
• Jean Jacques Rousseau
• Friedrich Nietzsche 
• Immanuel Kant
• Adam Smith
• Karl Marx
• Sigmund Freud

• Rene Descartes
• Carl Jung
• Georg Hegel
• Arthur Schopenhaur
• Jeremy Benthem
• John Stewart Mill