deadlines

This is my Week of Complaining, I think. I do so laughingly — laughing to keep from crying, to be sure, laughing bitterly, but hey, I’m laughing. All teachers, I think, are shaped by our experiences as students. We remember what we liked, what we hated, and what confused us, and we determine our policies and procedures accordingly. When I was a student, nothing frustrated me more than professors’ varying attitudes towards deadlines. Only a very few of those I knew were strict about deadlines; almost everyone gave some leeway — but it was often impossible to tell how much. Some would give a few extra hours; others a couple of days; and some clearly followed the get-it-to-me-when-you’re-done rule, though they never, as far as I could tell, openly admitted it. Similarly, there were widely differing attitudes towards formal extension of deadlines — you could never know in advance whether a request for extension would be granted, and in any case, the extension just created a new deadline…