I long ago decided that penalizing late work was not helping the students achieve any of the learning goals for my course. I want them to learn how to read Latin or write a compelling essay. Generally speaking, if it takes a student an extra day or two to accomplish that, that's preferable to me giving them a zero and then them not doing it all.

Plenty of teachers do not see things the same way, and enforce strict penalties for assignments that are submitted even minutes late. Whenever I ask teachers about these policies, the response is usually some form of, "We need to teach them a lesson?"

At a teaching blog run by Instructure (full disclosure: my school uses the Canvas LMS owned by Instructure), Sean Morris asks many of the same questions that I do, and tries to follow them to their logical conclusion.

What is the classroom meant to be? Should it be a microcosm of an unforgiving world? Should it be a retreat from that world? Should it be some kind of safe synergy of novelty, rigor, and relevant experience? And if it is this last, what “rules” must we establish in the classroom to keep our pedagogy intact?