Extensions as Honoring their Humanity

I needed an extension this week. That phrase that we’ve all heard and usually can’t stand– “Can I have an extension?”--literally befell from my lips, and I cringed at hearing it, even though I had every intention of uttering the word. And I needed it. Multiple components for the principal endorsement program I’m in were due, and I was nowhere near done. Why wasn’t I done? Legitimate reasons, most having to do with spending much of the week interviewing and dealing with the heightened emotions that come with that process. Why had it been left until the last minute? Also legitimate reasons: having needed a moment of pause after finishing my Harvard graduate program, wrapping up teaching for the school year, starting my summer teaching job, driving my own kids around to their myriad of summer activities, etc. The answer I received was no by the way, and rightfully so. I had known the deadline all along. I had made the choice–obviously a poor choice– to push it off. (I just wasn’t expecting to be interviewing for most of the week, and be in the throes of waiting to see if I got an offer during the same evening I needed to grade all the incoming papers I’m responsible for as a graduate Teaching Fellow.) It all got done. It always does. Did I practically pass out into nap-mode late on Friday? Absolutely! But it got me thinking about extensions and the impression that can be left on students based on how we go about dealing with them.

I’ve heard it said, “We should grade from abundance,” looking at anything our students present us with–assessments, behavior, mediocre holiday gifts in the form of Lindor chocolates in a mug–from a glass-half-full perspective. I’ve also heard (and felt myself) the grinding of teeth due to the frustration with forever open-deadlines, the kind that sometimes result from standards-based-grading or the extreme leniency that can permeate when expectations aren’t firmly set. Both views have merit. Yet something regarding extensions from my past stuck with me as one of my most foundational experiences in the formation of my adult self, not only as a teacher, but also as a human being.

I got e coli in college, and conveniently the week of the spring’s final exams. It was a terrifying experience, laid up for a week at a New York City hospital, for some reason having been put on the pain floor, surrounded by other patients crying and calling out in agony long into the night. I was told by my GI doctor at the time that it was one of the worst cases she’d ever seen, and I was lucky to be alive. So the fact that I’d missed my final exams and the logistics around making them up was not nor should not have been of any concern. 

NYU had a very reasonable exam make-up policy. I would have until the end of the following fall semester–December essentially–to make-up the exams that I’d just missed the first week in May. I, being what I thought was a very responsible student, reached out to my professors as soon as I was out of the hospital and had flown home. My professor for my biology class–a core requirement that was not my forte nor focus as an English student–gave me the greatest gift. “Forget it,” he said. He’d looked at my grades for a class that was based on three exams and a lab, and having received an “A” already on the first two exams and the lab, he felt that it wasn’t worth me needing to essentially relearn all the material in the fall when I’d finally have an opportunity to start making up the tests. In his view, I’d already proven myself and demonstrated command of the material. Now, did he need to do this? No, but he literally said, “You already got an A on the first three parts of the class. You’ll have enough to deal with when you get back. Let’s just call it a day.” In that moment, to him, I wasn’t just a student who needed to get assessed; I was a human being, dealing with all the mess that is implicitly part of our human experience. On the other hand, a professor in one of my English classes, someone from my own major’s department, who I’d have expected to be the most  understanding and flexible, gave the opposite response. She demanded that I make-up her exam on the first day of school in the fall. I wasn’t trying to avoid taking the test. That date was going to be the first day of my internship at TIME magazine–an internship I was even doing through that very English department for credit. But she said it didn’t matter. I had to take her test on Day One of the semester. Now, I got this solved. I did my research, found out that policy-wise, I had more than four months to complete the exam, went to the department, found the dean, got it taken care of. But I left that experience with two starkly different exemplars of what a teacher could be–of what any understanding and empathetic person could be…the science professor who let it go when he didn’t need to, or the English professor who took a stand for no reason, just to demonstrate that she could…which she actually couldn’t. Again, there was a policy.

Over the years of teaching, students always seem shocked when I’m flexible, when I’m receptive to hearing them out, to listening when they’re in a sticky situation. They always tell me things like, “That’s why we like you. You get it. You actually care.” I think deep down we all care, but remember that when you’re asked for that extension–and it’s warranted–how you respond may not just shape how your students think about teachers, or education for that matter, but it might even serve as a snapshot of what it means to be human, see humans, and if you air on the side of kindness, they’ll likely pay it forward someday.