This past week I was really struggling with grading. It's like Cheyney said, if you give them an inch they will take it. For example, I had a student who came up to me the first Thursday of the semester. He said he had a reading response, but he needed to print it and he wanted to drop it off to me in my office during my office hours, which are directly after class. Unfortunately, I don't have an office and I didn't really want to stick around because I didn't really know where to stick around. I told him to give it to me on Tuesday and it would be okay. On Tuesday he shows up to class with a story about the printer breaking and he doesn't have an ID card to print on campus. Yada Yada. So I told him to email it to me right then. Go find a computer lab and send it to me. He said he had class until 2 but he would do it as soon as he got out of class. Guess what? I didn't get it until Thursday and then I got both reading responses and some story about a family emergency and that's why he wasn't in class. The email had some defensive language like, "I'm sorry if you can't accept this, but that's the choice I made." So then I had two reading responses and one was definitely late. What do I do? Part of its being late was my fault, the other part was the stories he kept feeding me. He's a good student in class, one of the only ones that reads, and I felt bad giving him a poor grade when some students haven't even turned in a single reading response. After much soul searching I decided to dock him points anyway. It's late and he has no excuse for not emailing it to me on Tuesday like I asked. I gave him credit, but not full credit. That was the best I could come up with.
That's a lecture I'm going to have this morning. I have students in my class who have not yet turned in one reading response, even after I gave them a week's grace period to do it. I have one girl who has consistently turned in two reading responses late. So today I'm going to march in there and explain that I will no longer accept late work. If they don't turn it in when I ask for it at the beginning of the class it won't count. I understand the flux of the first week. There are new students, and they forget things. They're not used to reading they syllabus, but late work is no longer acceptable. I don't want to be pushed over, and I want them to take responsibility for their work. If that means they get a bad grade, it's their responsibility.
It was hard for me to come to this conclusion though because I feel bad giving them fewer points, or no longer accepting papers. I want everyone to go home feeling happy and I don't want to be an ogre. But I also want the students to learn, and that's a fine line. I think I'll still be learning that line as the semester goes on, but I'm getting better at wanting to march in there and explain to them (again) that they need to turn in their responses or I will no longer accept them.
Who knew teachers had it so rough?
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