Compliance culture in the classroom has always, always been a problem.
This is the teacher who demands compliance, in fact, grades on compliance. Most folks have a story about That Teacher--the one who wouldn't accept a paper because it was ten minutes late, or who took off a letter grade because the paper had the "wrong" heading on it.
For some people, compliance is practically the whole point. No Excuses charter schools are founded on the principle that students need to learn to comply with every action in every moment of the school day. Just this weekend, a USA Today op-ed suggested that if students aren't given zeros for late work, that's a failure to hold those students to standards of excellence.
Students have to learn compliance, the argument goes (though it rarely uses the term "compliance"), because out in the Real World, students will have to learn to meet deadlines and expectations and basically do as they're told promptly and "correctly," and the longer the argument goes, the more you can see that compliance culture is often meant for Those Peoples' children. But it is also true that life involves deadlines and expectations and most of us don't grow up to live in the world of do-as-you-please. Compliance has its place (like on your face, over your mouth and nose, too, please).
The problem with compliance culture in the classroom is that it loses the plot, falls off the track of CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Distance Learning and Compliance Culture