Vignette 6: Don't Borrow Trouble!

I think the most important, and hardest, thing that I will need to do in my classroom will be to give up rigid control when it comes to assignments.  I do believe that students want to learn, afterall, almost every child I know complains when they feel they aren't learning anything from one of their teachers, no matter how young.  Because students really do have this desire to learn, as a teacher I need to learn to trust that students want to do the work, and if they haven't completed an assignment that they will be motivated to do so.  I don't think I need to offer motivation to students, as long as they know that if they haven't handed the assignment in by the reporting period they will recieve a zero.  I considered for a long time using a system in which a student will be docked 10% if the assignment is late, then they will have until the reporting period to hand it in, but ultimately I have decided against this.  It is important that students are graded on the learning outcomes, and only the learning outcomes, so taking marks off because it's late does not represent fairly what the student has learned.  In my opinion, the best thing to do would be to give each student a completely separate grade for work habits, that includes docking marks due to lates, that all teachers the student has would compile together, and a completely separate section, apart from any subject, would be created to report work habits.  This way, the student would still be accurately graded on their learning of the POS, but would still be held accountable for things such as late assignments.