Why We Can’t Require Students the Same Way We Require Teachers: A Classroom Teacher’s Perspective
Last month, I was covering a 5th grade class for a colleague who took a personal day when a district instructional observer dropped in for a scheduled walkthrough. I’d planned a fractions lesson that went pretty well, and left 10 minutes at the end for an exit ticket: three problems to check who got the concept and who needed a re-teach the next day. When the observer pulled me aside after class, he tapped his clipboard and said, “Only 12 out of 22 kids turned this in. District expects 100% completion from teachers on all required tasks, why aren’t you holding students to that same standard?”
I nodded and didn’t argue at the time, but I knew every single one of the 10 missing exit tickets by name. Javi, who sat by the window, had texted his mom from his pocket halfway through class that morning to ask if his dog, who’d been hit by a car the night before, was out of surgery yet. He didn’t write a single problem, just drew a messy golden retriever on the back of his math notebook. Lila stopped to walk a lost kindergartener back to class right when the exit ticket started, and never got the five minutes she needed to finish. Noah missed two days of class the week before with strep, and told me before the lesson started he still didn’t get how to multiply mixed numbers. He didn’t want to turn in a half-done paper that would get marked wrong, so he tucked it in his folder instead. Mia’s little brother had a seizure at breakfast that day, and she spent the whole period checking her phone under the desk waiting for updates from her mom. None of these kids were being defiant. None of them refused to do the work because they didn’t care.
That night, I was driving home and thought about my own requirements as a staff member. Two weeks before, I was supposed to turn in a mandatory professional development module by 3 pm. I woke up with a migraine that lasted through my morning classes, then had to leave school early to pick up my own 13 year old who’d spiked a fever at middle school. I turned the module in at 8 pm that night, five hours late. No one yelled at me. No one marked me down or put a black mark on my record. They sent a gentle reminder and accepted it. If I’d been a student in my own class, held to the same “100% on time” standard that the observer wanted, I’d have gotten a zero and a detention.
That’s the core of this: requirements aren’t one-size-fits-all, because they depend on what the person you’re asking is developmentally capable of. We expect teachers to meet consistent deadlines because we’re adults. The part of our brain that manages planning, impulse control, and prioritizing competing demands is fully developed. We’re paid to do this job. We’ve had years of practice adjusting plans when something goes wrong, communicating when we need an extension, and bouncing back from unexpected disruptions. Kids are still building that part of their brain, well into their 20s. They’re still learning how to prioritize, how to ask for help, how to handle when life gets messy. Expecting them to meet the same non-negotiable, no-exceptions requirements we hold for adults doesn’t teach them responsibility. It just teaches them to avoid trying when they think they’ll fail.
I’ve adjusted my own classroom rules around this over the past three years, after that same conversation came up at a parent-teacher conference for my own son. I keep a no-questions-asked late basket by my classroom door, and I don’t take any points off for work turned in up to three days after the deadline. If more than three kids don’t turn in an assignment, I don’t mark them down, I re-teach the lesson in a different way the next day. If a kid goes a whole week without turning anything in, I pull them aside for 30 seconds at recess and say, “I’ve noticed you haven’t turned in your work this week. Do you need extra time, or is something hard right now?” instead of sending a referral to the office. As a parent, I’ve stopped demanding that my 13 year old meet my standard of remembering every single commitment he has. I help him put a sticky note on the fridge for big things like project deadlines or game days, and if he forgets his soccer cleats or his homework, I bring it to him once a semester instead of forcing him to sit with the consequence (and I don’t yell at him for being “irresponsible” when it happens).
Last week, Javi turned in his exit ticket, three days late, with a little scribbled note at the bottom that said “My dog is okay, he just has a limp now. I got all three problems right, right?” I graded it and wrote back yes. I still get pushback at data meetings for my lower on-time completion rates. I still have to explain why I don’t give zeros for late work to admin who haven’t stood in front of a classroom full of 10 year olds dealing with things most adults I know would struggle to push through. Some weeks, I end up grading twice as much work on the weekend because so many kids turned it in late. It’s not a perfect system. But I’d rather grade 10 late assignments that kids actually tried on than 20 rushed ones that they copied from their neighbor just to avoid a consequence. We don’t have to lower expectations for kids to meet them where they are. We just have to stop requiring the same level of consistency from developing brains that we demand from trained, paid adults.
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