The rolling sands of time

Today a student pointed out no less than five broken links in a single area of my school.

I diligently investigated and determined that they worked for me, yes, BUT they were not working when I was logged in as her.  Confused, as this is a rolling enrollment course I reached out to a former student to ask if she had had any problems.  She had not.

I was baffled, having changed nothing.  What was different about this student?  why HER?

Then suddenly it hit me.  Her rolling enrollment is not set to start until July 1.  She was trapped in time between a time when her login works and a time where the course is operational, and I was so deep in the weeds with my current course load that I had failed to connect the name with a student who was not yet fully enrolled.

It felt like an episode of the Science Channel series "Through the Wormhole."  I am still waiting for a Morgan Freeman voice-over to tell me that what is really wrong is my perception of the student is not as the student actually is, and some physicist will explain that we are all just grains of sand existing in mutually co-existant multi-verses or something like that.

Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman

This rolling enrollment model might yet roll me into a fetal position from which I can never return.

The Existential Extension Policy

Due dates?

It would seem, dear readers that our lives have become lost and the meaning of due has been blurred to the extent that the concept of due may diminish and cease to exist.

It is an interesting pondering really given that due dates themselves only became established in the last half of the last century.  Historically dues dates were not only not necessarily dates, but they most certainly did not involve a time stamp.

Consider the conscripted soldier of the US civil war. In 1862 the President called for the raising of 300,000 more troops.  However a year later, in 1863, Wisconsin districts were given a number of men by the state and "urged to meet their quota."  So after a year, these men still had not reported.  But at the time to be fair, this was not an official draft, just a call to arms. Out of the 19 thousand some requested at the federal level from Wisconsin, only 4,537 men were actually further requested by the governor, of these 19 deserted and 1,622 just didn't come.  Many sited the statement about arrival time which read "as field and traveling conditions allow."  That was it for a timeline
[Source: THE CIVIL WAR DRAFT IN PLOVER AND STEVENS POINT: A STUDY IN EFFORTS, ATTITUDES, FRUSTRATIONS, AND RESULTS By David Ellison (UWSP)]  In other words, by gubernatorial order, you could show up when and if you could.


Now let us consider the baby due date, nominally considered until quite recently to be nine months after conception.  However, more recently stated as 40 weeks after conception, 280 days from the last menstrual period, and 266 days from conception. World health organizations made an attempt for a universal lunar months method to measure pregnancy length i.e. 28 days = 1 month x 10 = 10 months pregnant but this was not accepted world-wide. This has just made the confusion worse, with some health care providers using the 10 lunar months method now, while others do not. [Source: WHO]

Once timekeeping in the country was limited to dates punctuated by the common time frames of  dawn, noon and dusk but the advent of industrial transportation (train schedules), radio, and television systematically began to inform the public.  The final hurdle is often proclaimed to be the space race which demanded an ever more delineated time schedule for implementation.  Business is now timed to the minute and second.

But....BUT

have all of these deadlines really helped anything?

Enter the decline of the due.  In education the trend would seem to show that due dates are on the decline in favor of extension policies, IEP's, 504 and plain old good sense.

Is it important that a 4th grade know his times tables?  YES.  That is a fundamental skill which other ideas build upon.

Is it important that a 4th grade know his multiplication tables on Tuesday? 

or can he know them on Friday?  

Does it matter if the next skill is not yet being taught?

What lesson are we teaching? Multiplication tables or schedule tables?

To be fair, I understand the inconvenience factor for the face-to face teachers of the world.  But having taught now in online rolling enrollment, I have to say it is time to give it up.   Due dates are a thing of the past.  The ultimate deadlines that still exist are related to course end and beginning of teaching the next school alone.  So all of you lesson planners out there...sorry...but you need to relax.