Deadlines Matter

The world doesn't care why it's late.

I passed out a page of sentences to be translated using the present tense today.

The vocabulary is simple. It’s what we’ve covered since last August. The verbs are not irregular. There is a giant chart on my wall with every ending they need. We have been conjugating verbs since October. I went over a couple of examples with them before I let them work, just to make sure nobody had a reason to say they didn’t understand.

Then I watched.

A few kids got to work. Some stared out the window. One found a ball. I took the ball. A girl picked up her phone. I asked her to put it away. Ten minutes later, she was back on it.

Bring me the phone.

It’s not mine, she said.

OK. Bring me the phone you were just on.

It’s his.

Bring me the phone.

But I wasn’t on it.

I wrote to both parents when I found out they had been playing Angry Birds. No response. Probably ever.

One boy wrote on my wall in Sharpie. I made him scrub it off, and then I wrote him up and sent an email home.

A girl looked out the window and spotted a boy leaving his class. She ran to my desk. Can I go to the bathroom? She was out the door before I finished the word yes.

The bell rang. A couple of kids were done. Most weren’t close.

I told them to bring it back tomorrow. We’ll go over it together. I’ll see where they made mistakes. We’ll fix it before the test. They’ll all get credit for trying.

They won’t do it.

I know this because I have been doing this for thirty years. By tomorrow, there will be ten thousand excuses, and I have heard every one of them. I had soccer practice. I had a baseball game. We went out and didn’t get home until late. We went to my grandma’s. I lost it. I left it at school.

Does the excuse even matter? The work isn’t done. That’s the only part that’s real.

I don’t give homework. I never do. The only time they have work to do at home is when they don’t do it in class. When they spend the period on a phone that isn’t theirs, or looking for a ball, or out the door before I answer. The assignment only follows them home because they chose, in the fifty minutes I gave them, to do something else.

And then they don’t do it at home either.

I am not the only teacher they have. I am not the only adult who is supposed to be holding a standard in this building. But I am, increasingly, one of the only ones who won’t accept work from January in May. One of the only ones who lets a deadline mean what a deadline is supposed to mean.

So I look like the bad guy.

Just turn it in before the end of the semester, and everything is fine. Everywhere else. Just not here.

I think about the girl with the phone. The boy who found the ball. The one who was out the door before I answered. I don’t know where they end up. But I know what the world charges for missed deadlines. Rent is due on the first. The filing deadline does not move because you had a baseball game. The client does not care that you didn’t get home until late.

Nobody in that world is going to let you turn it in before the end of the semester.

I’m the bad guy for saying so now, while it’s still just a grade in a Spanish class.

I’ll take it.

Until next time,

Jen