650 Due Dates and Reasonable Time Frames

Message no. 650[Branch from no. 646] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Sunday, March 18, 2007 4:58pm Subject: Re: help!!!

Hi guys! I'm glad to see you have all been helping each other while I have been in the Sinai desert! Thanks! This is a good result, and probably more important than anything else we get out of this class, because as life gets tougher (what with urbanization, population growth, disrupted ecosystem services and the catastrophic effects of global warming) the most important response to environmental change on our psychology of behavior should be exactly what you are doing -- reassuring each other and helping each other cope with crises without panicking!

As for the due date: Somewhere in all these posts and emails I am pretty sure I did express that the way I reckoned things a midterm should come, well, you know, um, er... in the ... middle of the term. :) So I said in that post (wherever it is -- maybe it was in my email to Varshawn's specific question?) that in a course that is 15 or 16 weeks long I kind of expect the midterm to be "due" in the 7th or 8th week. I then said (and I will reiterate here) that I don't go for the "strict deadline" thing of "it must be in by 8:00 on the night of such and such a thursday" because we all know that the neocortex of the brain shuts down when stressed and the limbic system, with its "fight or flight response" takes over, and we become like lizards and we do our worst work, and nobody wants to read the literature of lizards. Are we not men and women?!(or are we Devo? D-E-V-O!) So phooey on strict deadlines.

But, as I mentioned, you have to get it done within a "reasonable time frame" around the middle of the course, or we will have collectively moved on and we won't have time to attend to stuff that comes in later. Also, if things get crammed into the last minute nobody (particularly me!) can handle the sudden traffic jam of stuff. So as for the deadline -- well, let's call it a LIFE-line (much more positive) and say that your life line is long (just look at your palm!) but our attention span isn't infinite, so get to work on it, and don't fall behind and if you can't get it done, go on to the other chapters (so you can keep up) and whittle away at it, and turn it in when you are good and ready, giving yourself ample time to do the final project so I can review everything in time to turn in grades (for which THEY give ME a deadline! ).

I hope that is clear as mollasses! :)

It is tough being sympathetic adults creating a new eutopian learning environment isn't it? Don't you long for the old days of mean draconian teachers who rap your knuckles with rulers?

Hmm... is anybody going to discuss learning environment design in their eutopias? This I would like to see!!!