Comment by htfu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by htfu | Hacker News Reader

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> To be clear, the specific policy I just mentioned really is part of the document - allowing students to always redo work for a better grade.

If you've learned the material and fulfill the requirements, and the course is still ongoing, why should it matter you were late? Are you teaching the subject, or is [literally every course all the time] really mostly a study in time management? (hint: it's not for the student's sake, it's about managing teacher time and resources. Which is obviously necessary, but not otherwise positive)

> That reinforces that idea that it's okay to do a half-ass job because you can always "fix it later".

I'd say it might equally mean not pointlessly throwing in the towel and phoning the rest in just because you performed poorly early on and (rightly) feel like it doesn't matter anymore.

> In the real world however, poor decisions can have devastating effects the very first time, and there might not be a chance for a "do-over".

Sure. Exceedingly rarely though, compared to school.

> Homework also normalizes the idea that things will be expected from you in this world if you are to be employed.

Most jobs don't involve additional work after you've finished work. Nor constant artificial deadlines that never let you truly relax. Constant stress is bad for humans, it's not something that hardens you, and pointlessly subjecting people to it "just because" is not just useless but counter productive, because you get blunted. It's important to have something extra to tap into when shit truly hits the fan and it's time to step up, but the contrast gets lost if it's a neverending blur.

> If you've learned the material and fulfill the requirements, and the course is still ongoing, why should it matter you were late?

The same reason it matters if you are late meeting deadlines for a customer or your job, because there are consequences. Turning in a paper late to school may not cause you to lose a client or get fired, but the fact remains that something was required of you and it was not delivered. Imo, students should be thankful to learn from their teachers that "yes, there really are consequences when you don't perform in your role as expected", as opposed to learning this from their (probably previous) employer.

> I'd say it might equally mean not pointlessly throwing in the towel and phoning the rest in just because you performed poorly early on and (rightly) feel like it doesn't matter anymore.

The fact that some people give up because they weren't able to meet the requirements of a class does not justify lowering the requirements of that class for everyone else. You're attending a class, the class isn't attending to you. If that's unacceptable then it sounds like you're probably in the wrong class.

> Sure. Exceedingly rarely though, compared to school.

Right. Which is why it is valuable to learn about consequences while you're still "practicing" in school.

> Most jobs don't involve additional work after you've finished work.

You don't have "most jobs", so that statement is not based on evidence. Moreover, I didn't suggest that jobs require taking home work, simply that homework for students reinforces the idea that work will be expected from them. You mention how stress negatively affect people... can you imagine how stressed out a person who has never done homework in their life would be if they were suddenly given a huge workload? Contrast this with someone who is used to spending hours on end studying, for whom the task would likely seem much more surmountable.

Work deadlines, at least where I've worked and with some exceptions for rare hard deadlines, are rather more fluid. In the sense that they might have to be pushed, or the work adjusted, because they were too optimistic or circumstances change. Because your boss knows you know what you're doing and aren't talking out of your ass when you give them a heads up things are not on track. More importantly they're there for some legit reason, not "so you'll learn the importance of hardship". Getting stuff done and having an impact is motivating enough, producing worthless schoolwork of no use to anyone is not.

> lowering the requirements

They're the same requirements, just with a different, looser, time constraint. You couldn't get a better grade without actually learning the material. Performing tasks on time, managing time, etc is incredibly important, obviously. But in an ideal world with more resources there'd be a time and a place for practicing it, reasoning about it, actually studying it, not this "absorbing it by osmosis from a constant grind" where it's all artificial. Work smart, not hard.

Consequences are still there, you still have to perform, it'd just be less time constrained.

Why would a person who has never done homework in their life be more stressed over a huge workload? They're used to working all day, _in school_. Just like how they'll be working all day, at work. Obviously I'm not talking about not having assignments/papers to write (preferably with at least some time allotted during school hours), but the kind of busywork that is the bulk of homework.

It's not fair to other students if there's a no-penalty late policy. If some students turn in their work on time, and others turn it in late, it's not fair to the former if the latter have zero penalty. The reason for this is that the students who turned in the homework on time had to make other sacrifices in order to do so. For example, they might have studied less for a test in another class in order to turn in their homework on time.

This unfairness exists unless all teachers allow for late submission for all assignments and re-taking of all tests. If this were allowed, then students would all take tests multiple times, so they could cram for the specific questions on the test (not the entirety of the course materials — the rest of the material could be forgotten/never learned).

Right but that'd actually be one of the benefits. Getting perfect grades in high school for me without spending all my time doing school stuff was a mad juggling of focusing/neglecting classes on rotation, always ensuring to get an A by the smallest possible margin, knowing how to properly front-load and have each teacher thinking of me as the kind of guy who gets an A, so I could get away with performing poorly at times before making a comeback.

A weird dance I happened to be good at, but not a skill to cherish or practice _because real work is rarely overloaded enough to make it necessary_

School should be about learning, not whatever meta bullshit the above was, at least for me.

Having more flexibility over pace would go a long way I think.

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