That is well and truly fucked up. For the reason you mention and several others.
But much of the time, late work doesn’t lead to acquiring knowledge–it just amounts to busywork. Reading a book in preparation for a class discussion adds to your knowledge. After you’ve say through the discussion and missed the opportunity to take part in it, going home and reading the book will do you much less good. The window of opportunity has passed. Your grade should be lower because you’ve learned less than the person who did do the reading and did participate in the discussion.
“After you’ve say through the discussion and missed the opportunity to take part in it, going home and reading the book will do you much less good.”
But presumably does more good than never reading the book at all because you missed the deadline.
Otara
Right, but a “no penalty for late work” means a kid can lie to himself Monday night (when it would do the most good) and promise himself he will make it up, and then ends up never doing it, because the Xbox or whatever will be just as tempting all those other nights–plus, he has new homework to keep him busy on those nights. So less reading in total gets done.
Furthermore, as was mentioned above, late work will often just be copied. It’s impossible to prevent without harming the education of everyone around them.
In that case, the grade will be less, assuming there is some kind of testing and the academic mark is not only based on homework. If the student has really learned less, then they’ll do poorly on tests and be graded accordingly.
I’m not saying lateness isn’t a problem. And the school isn’t saying that lateness is not a problem.
But there’s a real difference between a student who gets a fifty on his essay because he hasn’t learned the material and a student who gets a fifty because he has learned the material but he handed his essay in three days late. The second student has actually learned the subject - a year from now it won’t matter whether he learned it on a Monday or a Thursday.
I’m glad to see this school has been able to avoid the bureaucratic mindset that thinks the important thing is making sure the rules are followed. Rules are important - but they’re important because they serve to achieve some purpose. So you need to keep your focus on whether your purpose is being achieved not whether your rules are being followed. You should never be enforcing rules just for the sake of enforcing the rules.
Except that kids are, by and large, stupid. They don’t get the connection between “If I do my homework on time, I get more out of the lesson and do better on the test”. Hell, they don’t even understand that if they sleep in class they learn less than if they stay awake. Furthermore, until they are 15 or so, the vast majority are incapable of learning this: it doesn’t matter how many times it happens, they won’t generalize the lesson. Even at 18, many of them don’t really get it. They may think they get it–they may be able to parrot back the idea that they’d have done better if they’d done more–but they are just telling you what you want to hear. In their hearts, they don’t see it.
Kids are not adults. They don’t reason like adults. At times, they need artificial consequences to make the best choices. There are exceptions to this, but very few, and an education system can’t be set up to only effectively teach those few.
Taking late work results in a smaller amount of work being done, the work that is done is of uniformly lower quality, and because the context is disturbed it tends to benefit children less. Furthermore, it allows students to build up a mental “debt” of work they intend to do, which, like spiraling credit card debt, ends up making them feel depressed and hopeless and less likely to do even current assignments. After a decade in the classroom, I am absolutely convinced that taking late work is detrimental to student learning.
Now, this doesn’t mean that student who misses a homework assignment should be run out of town on a rail. I carefully construct my course so that there are two sure-fire ways to pass it–you can turn in every homework assignment/get max credit on everything “effort based” and do a poor-to-middling job on every essay and quiz, or you can do no homework and do a good-to-great job on every essay and quiz. Most kids fall between those two extremes, and most manage to pass. I take enough grades that no one minor assignment can shift your grade by more than half a point, and so when a kid misses an assignment, I can tell them “It’s fine, it’s not the end of the world, I want you to move forward and do a good job on the next one. You may want to come in for tutoring to make sure you understand what that assignment was about”. That tends to produce more and better learning.
My daughter’s school policy was you handed in your homework at the start of class. If you were late to class, for any reason, your homework was not accepted and you got a zero. The kids coming from the far end of the building were kinda screwed.
Ok, so why not spin it around and have a small bonus for handing an assignment in on time. That way the student who is generating less than stellar but always on time work, gets token extra credit for it. Even if it is only a 2%-5% margin, it can make a big difference to that not quite A student who always does the work, and always makes the effort. Or perhaps have extra credit portions of an assignment that only apply if turned in on time.
Also this way, if life happens, the student has a little cushion built in that will save thier grade.
The student does have a little cushion–all the other assignments. Extra credit for turning work in on time would imply that it’s an extraordinary accomplishment. Furthermore, that doesn’t get rid of the problem of students acquiring tremendous work “debts” that they mean to go back and do, and which serve to dishearten them, nor the the fact that late work is stripped of its context and is often of much lower quality–if you can’t get max credit, why do max effort?
I agree that a student who has learned the material shouldn’t be doomed if they fail to do or forget their homework on a handful of occasions. But I don’t think that taking late work is the best way to insure that this is the case.