Today, as I read through final writing assignments, I am faced with a familiar dilemma: what to do with students who haven’t turned assignments in “on time.” How can I be fair but also accommodate students’ struggles?
I realize that the heart of my dilemma lies in the conflict between my desire to help students learn, with my need to follow the rules of the cultural institution we call “education.”
I need to assign specific grades by a specified date, to specific amount of work, that needs to completed by another specified date. I know learning doesn’t really work this way. Complex tasks that require critical and/or creative thinking – the kind of learning we want students to engage in these days – does not happen on command, or within a particular timeline. But institutional rules force us into a very specific window. No wonder so many educators say that “assessment” is their least favorite task in teaching.
Socially-Embedded learning 
Isn’t it educational institution’s responsibility to prepare the students for their careers?
I agree that learning can happen at any pace and it absolutely doesn’t matter one is able to learn in one time frame and another in some other. However, when it comes to the real world, things should happen in certain time frame and if one doesn’t do it, the employer would find someone else who would in that time frame. My point is that if institutional system prepare the students by imposing rules on students to finish and train their brains to do critical thinking in certain timeframe.
Venkatesh – I absolutely agree. One of the things our culture wants to teach – through the institution of education – is to be timely. But “timeliness” is not always aligned with the learning goals I have in mind for the student. And that causes a conflict for me.
Ruth and Venkatesh. This is a great discussion. I have the same struggle, particularly when I try to think of what the final grade represents. To me, the final grade represents a score for mastery of the learning objectives as a whole at a moment in time. Because of this, I struggle with whether implicit norms of the discipline (timeliness without regard for context, western academic grammar, etc) should be a learning objective of my courses. To me this is important, because if they are learning objectives, then I need to have an explicit plan for teaching these objectives and not simply assessing whether they were taught previously for students. I also need a method for students to make and correct mistakes while learning these objectives.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately too! My view on the institution is pretty negative, and I don’t believe graduates’ income is a useful metric for our success. Discussions about “job readiness” often seem to have a dense core of unquestioned a priori assumptions about our students and the world, such that helping students get jobs quickly turns into helping corporations make more money. My Dean seems to see the purpose of our programs as producing as many wealthy alumni as possible, with the hopes that one of them will buy us a new building. There seems to be a huge gap in our system where the trust in students should be – why don’t we trust them as collaborators? And/or as experts in their own experiences and a contemporary world that is frankly confusing to us 20th centurions. For today, learning and education are like a banana, where learning is the part you eat and education is smelly wrapper you throw away.
Devlin, I love the banana analogy!