Late Work

Imagine you take your car in on Tuesday morning to have work done. The mechanic says great, I’ll have it done this by 5.  Around 4:30, you get the call. He is still working, but it won’t be done today. What do you do?

1. Ask him to rush through the work to finish on time.
2. Tell him he will lose 10% of the price if the work isn’t done on time.
3. Tell him it is unacceptable, demand your car back without paying anything.
4. Express disappointment and pick up your repaired car on Wednesday.

In case you missed it, the answers above are four common late work policies in US high schools, especially 2 & 3. (Option 1 is the result of teachers sticking with 2 & 3.) In the analogy above, however, you still need your car fixed. Which option will work the best?

Option 1: You might get your car on time, but the work could be sloppy or incomplete. This option makes it clear that timeliness is more important that quality.

Option 2: This option might work, but you could have a grumpy mechanic, or even a mechanic who refuses to work, which leads us to…   

Option 3: You car is not fixed, yet both of you have spent time and energy on it.

Option 4: This is the best option.  

Often teachers who accept late work are viewed by others as too permissive. They might think we are teaching students that deadlines do not matter. This is not the case at all. Instead, the message we are sending to students is that quality work matters more than meeting deadlines! It would be wonderful to expect both, but we are not always given that choice. When something is sufficiently important, like car repair or bridge construction, we will extend deadlines to ensure the task is done correctly.

The other benefit to accepting late work is that we are not letting students off the hook.  If we don’t accept late work or penalize it excessively, then it gives students an excuse not to do an assignment.  If we really cared more about learning than timeliness we would not penalize late work at all. We would expect students to keep working and learning, rather than giving up because it wasn’t done by Tuesday.