On Deadlines
Which may or may not make lovely whooshing sounds.
When I was writing my first book, back in 2008, I was given a deadline by the publisher that fell right around the predicted date of SteelyKid’s birth (which, as it happens, was almost two full weeks sooner than SteelyKid’s actual birth date). I had sent in a first draft months earlier, and my editor had asked for some absolutely massive changes (in the end including adding the interjections by the dog to the text of the chapters, which turned out to be one of the strongest points of the talking-dog books), so I had a ton of re-writing to do. And then about a month before the deadline, I dislocated my left thumb playing pick-up basketball on my lunch break. I’m a two-finger typist (still), so this wasn’t completely paralyzing, but it hurt, a lot, and that slowed me down.
At some point in there, I sent a slightly panicked email to my agent and editor saying that I was worried about the deadline. I was pretty sure I could still get a completed manuscript in on time, but it was going to be a near thing— one of those 11:59:59 on the due date kind of deals— so I wanted them to be aware.
Their reaction was best summarized as “bemused and sympathetic.” And when I actually did hit the deadline, they were just plain surprised. They were much more used to dealing with writers coming out of more traditionally writer-ly professions, who enjoy the lovely whooshing sound as deadlines go past, where I was coming from the hard sciences. My most recent high-stakes submission, before the book, was an NSF grant, where the practical deadline is a day before the published one, because you’ll have a hard time getting through to the server on the actual day of, and will get no sympathy if your proposal misses out because you didn’t allow time for that.
I was thinking about this because of an essay in the Chronicle by Michael Bérubé about moving to more flexible deadline policies in his class, which I discovered via this reflection on it from Timothy Burke. I come at both of these from a bit of a weird place. As a matter of temperament, I’ve always been in the “soft deadline” camp for my own classes— I have a lot of sympathy for students who have other interests, and personally find it tedious to track and calculate and adjudicate late penalties and the like. At the same time, though, I’m someone who takes pride in actually meeting stated deadlines.
This is not to say, though, that I’m not prone to procrastination. In fact, I would put myself solidly in the camp of people who need deadlines to get anything done. I was once invited to write an article for a particular journal, and agreed to do so, but then spent literally two years faffing about on other things until the editor said “You know, I’m leaving this job at the end of the summer,” at which point I buckled down and wrote the whole thing in about a month. I’m currently in the midst of an extreme faffing-about phase, because my most recent projects with hard external deadlines have all been completed, and I haven’t yet embarked on new ones. I’m shortly going to have to do the thing where I completely invent a couple of deadlines for myself, just to get myself to do actual work rather than aimlessly doomscrolling the days away.
(I try to make myself feel better about this by thinking of it as Jordan-esque— in the same way that Michael Jordan would invent slights by opposing teams or players to motivate himself for otherwise mundane games, I’m inventing due dates. It’s still kind of messed up, though….)
As I said, this puts me in kind of a weird mental space. On the one hand, unlike Burke and to some extent Bérubé I am absolutely 100% convinced that people who need deadlines really do exist, and that those people are ill-served by a “turn it in whenever you can” policy. At the same time, I’m not necessarily serving those people perfectly with my own classes, because I’m pretty laid-back about accomodating student requests for another day or two. I can sort of justify this, though, by analogy to my trade publishing experiences. Five books in, I know perfectly well that all the deadlines in publishing are a bit soft, but they still give me the target I need to motivate myself to do the actual work. For the students who are the same kind of crazy as me, my nominal due dates will get the job done, and those who need more flexibility can be accomodated.
(The cost to turning in late work in my classes tends to come via point #3 in Burke’s enumeration of the arguments for strict deadlines. I absolutely hate grading, so do it as little as possible, and as a result an assignment that comes in after I’ve graded that assignment for the rest of the class will tend to languish in limbo for weeks. If you’re a student in my class, and want feedback on your work, you need to turn it in on time, otherwise you’ll get it back at the end of the term, when I have to clean up my final grades for the Registrar.)
As a result of this weird stance, though, I find myself not entirely on board with Bérubé and Burke in calling for a universal faculty embrace of flexibility in deadlines. That is, while I am not a professor with a hardline stance toward due dates, and have no interest in ever becoming one, I am very much of the opinion that other faculty who want to do that kind of thing should feel free to do so.
I say this both because of my own deadline-motivated psychology, but also in line with something Burke mentions when describing his own approach: he describes himself as “a professor teaching adults whom I want to be responsible for their own learning.” Which I think is an admirable view, but also points toward a weakness in that view, namely that (at least in the “traditional age” cohort), our students are not necessarily fully formed adults. They’re largely still in the “figuring things out” stage, finding what works best for them, and part of that figuring-out process is experiencing a bunch of different modes of operation in a context where the consequences are pretty limited.
A student who needs soft deadlines won’t enjoy a semester taught by a professor who says homework is due at the start of class and thus refuses to accept papers from students who arrive late (yes, people do this), but that’s a learning experience. Similarly, a student who needs hard deadlines will not enjoy the process of doing a semester’s worth of work that they let slip under a professor with a “turn it in when you get to it” approach (been there, done that), but that’s also a learning experience. And in both cases, the actual damage potential is relatively minor— a lower-than-expected grade, and a professor added to the “don’t take classes from this person” list that every student carries around in their head.
To some extent, this amounts to having a bit more belief in reason #1 on Burke’s list than he does— there really are work contexts in which deadlines are absolute and inflexible, and I do see some value in having students experience that. Also, as I’ve written here in the past, I think that there’s a balancing act inherent in supporting student learning and growth, and that will necessarily mean sometimes putting students in situations that they find unpleasant. You could, I suppose, attempt to get around this with direct instruction about time management, etc., but to again call back to my own comments, my gut reaction to this is that the students who might benefit most are the ones most likely to approach it cynically.
So, anyway, like most honest writing about academia, this ends up in a sort of squishy “It’s complicated…” place. I’m not really invested in this enough to mount an impassioned defense of the inflexible-deadline model, but I am somewhat sympathetic to those who do care enough to enact such policies. Enough that I think they ought to be free to do that thing they do, anyway.
I initially intended to wrap in another conversation about time management as faculty here, but this is running kind of long as it is, so I’ll push that off. Which I may or may not get to, as there are no hard deadlines on Substack… Here’s a button if you want to find out:
And if you have thoughts about deadlines, here’s the comment link:
Nothing to do with deadlines but I really like these little paragraphs/wrap up before the "subscribe" button... Keep 'em coming!
Where I worked, missing a deadline meant our customer wouldn't hire us for their next project. Which meant we had to lay off some of our guys. Did that always happen? No. But sometimes. No fun for anyone.
That aside, if the assignment is to turn in the problem set or paper on a given date, I think it's just disrespectful to the teacher/professor to turn it in late.