Missing Deadlines or Making Choices?
We all make choices about what we do with our time. However, we tend to talk less about time and the choices we make and instead talk about wasting time, getting time back, saving time, or managing time.
To-do list grow. Calendars are filled with meetings and appointments, all in the guise of managing our time.
We’re doing it wrong.
I make a to-do list to help me remember the things that I want and “need” to do, and at the end of each week, as I reflect on what didn’t get crossed off, I wonder why I chose to skip the said item. Was it because it didn’t need to be done? Did I ignore it because I didn’t want to do it, didn’t know how to do it, and ran out of time? Should I cross it off and act like it’s finished, or move it to a new list to tackle tomorrow or next week?
What we do with our time shows what we value. Do you like what your calendar says you value?
We’re approaching the end of the semester for all of the students and educators reading this. This means that educators are frustrated because students still need to complete their work, and students are flabbergasted that the educators won’t extend the deadline one last time or offer them extra credit, even though they didn’t complete the actual credit.
Teachers will spend countless hours sending emails that will go unread or making announcements calling students to their rooms in one final attempt to get assignments submitted.
Students will ignore the assignments until they see the grade that’s about to be printed on their report card or transcript and will suddenly expect that there should be a way to complete a semester’s worth of work in one hour.
There isn’t.
I’ve worked in education for 15 years, and the story is always the same. It was the same for those before me. We can have the same frustrating experience over and over or make a change by having more honest conversations about choices, grades, and assessments.
Because I teach art, the most common phrase heard from students is:
I still need to finish my assignment for you because [ insert any other subject, SAT, or college applications] was more important.
For years the above statement would send me into a furry. That is until I decided to change the conversation to one about choices.
We can’t do ALL of the things. As adults, we make choices daily; hopefully, those choices reflect what is most important to us. Students do the same.
When students come to me and say, I didn’t finish my art assignment because I had to complete college applications, I say, it sounds like completing college applications was more important to you than receiving an A in this class. That’s a choice that you’re allowed to make. ( While this may seem like a snarky or unkind response, it’s not meant that way, it’s an honest response).
Framing the incomplete assignment as a choice made instead of an excuse leads to another conversation about what grades reflect. What do grades mean? What is the story behind them?
- Do they reflect choices?
- Do they reflect knowledge?
- Do they reflect the ability to follow the rules?
In the current system, they attempt to reflect all of the above; they shouldn’t. When a student receives a lower grade because they didn’t complete an assignment, it doesn’t reflect their knowledge of the content; it reflects a choice. It reflects that they may have poor time management skills, not value the subject, or many other things.
Before you lecture students about not completing a task, ask the student WHY they didn’t finish the assignment, and then talk through how that is a choice and what the results of that choice are.
As you complete your grades, reflect on what the one letter or one percentage number represents and ask how it tells an accurate story.
Assigning a student a failing grade because their work wasn’t submitted vs. failing because of the level of work indicates different things. Is that reflected in the grade assigned?
Too often, we talk about grades and assessments like they’re the same thing, and they’re not.
A zero grade demonstrates that no learning assessment was done because no work was completed. The grade “f” indicates a failure, but we need to be clear, was it a failure to understand the content, or was it a failure to complete the assessment; those are indicators of different things and need to be addressed in different ways.