Deadlines First Hurt Then Help

By Amy Barr with The Lukeion Project, in charge of lots of things and especially Latin 1-7

The start of a new academic year at last! We enjoy having a fresh wave of new students who are (mostly) enthusiastic about their new topics and new challenges. Faculty work late nights even on weekends to coordinate a relatively easy glide into new routines for students who may be new to the world of online learning. On average, students in any entry level course will be reminded about what must be done for the first week of the semester between six to a dozen times counting class announcements given digitally, then verbally, then by email, and then--starting two weeks before the first class--the enduring syllabus which contains everything that must be done. More advanced classes get fewer reminders as expectations rise with maturity. Many classes offer a week 1 guide handout plus we always post the links to assignments in advance of semester start, sometimes with special colors, links, and notes. We want the students to succeed.  

Then faculty predictably get several emails: the student was confused! Surely nothing had been assigned this first week. Can’t there be second and third chances here?

Twenty+ years of teaching has taught us many lessons. Chief among them is the importance of a deadline, a creature so rare and endangered that ours may be the first ever seen by some. Why would a small educational company care so much about deadlines and why can’t we have more mercy on our new students who have yet to encounter a deadline out in the wild much less recognize one as their very own? Wouldn’t we have more students if we just let every deadline slip and slide?

Actually…no 

When our students first learn we hold firm deadlines, it hurts. This pain is shared (perhaps with a little hyperbole) with family and faculty as an affront! No real notifications about expectations and due dates were published! So young to earn so harsh a zero!

We get it. It is not our favorite chore to be the deadline enforcers, but if deadlines are negotiable this time, they will also be negotiable next time. The chain will be eternal. The first one that holds fast will elicit pain once more and the cycle renews indefinitely until a person who might have a brilliant academic record and great potential are held back by so humble a thing. Stuck. Instead of this simple (though relatively painful) lesson now, they will still be negotiating to avoid that hard line in the years to come while everyone else is moving forward.

Should we have a new tagline? Maybe “holding students to deadlines since 2005”?

The wonderful news about our apparent lack-of-empathy-towards-very-busy-students is that we have been doing this long enough that our first decade of students graduated college, graduate school or medical school, and are now enjoying the first decade of their chosen callings while juggling things like children and spouses and bills. 

We have never had any highly successful student email us to chide us for our ridiculous deadline policy nor given us grief about our callous high expectations. On the contrary, learning the pain of a zero in week 1 of Latin 1 meant that they took deadlines more seriously from that moment. They’d met a wall that didn’t move with a slight push. When success in a class, project, or exam was essential for their future plans, the pain of a firm deadline was a distant memory. They already knew how to tackle their own schedule and juggle multiple responsibilities. They didn’t go through this maturation in week 2 of college—when their academic scholarship was already imperiled by tardy marks in lab and missed submissions in required courses—but in week 2 of a class that they started in middle school or high school. They learned early that they alone are masters of their responses to stress and knew their way around a planner packed with challenges. That’s what made all the difference.