In what we sometimes call "the real world," explanations for why you were unable to do something often don't count for much. If you miss a plane, or a party, you miss it. It's gone. It may make people feel more sorry for you if it was because your mother was ill rather than because you were hung over or just forgot. One thing that "having a good excuse" might do is persuade people to help more enthusiastically in your attempt to deal with the consequences. I can't very well hold my party again -- but if I'm a ticket agent I might try to find a way to get you on a later flight if I feel sorry for you. But it won't make any difference to the plane or the party: the problem will still have to be dealt with, regardless of whether or not you had a good reason. The plane's gone. The party's over. It doesn't matter if you've got a letter from the doctor, or your mother, or even the Registrar.

As a teacher, I'm aware that school hasn't worked like this for most people. Most consequences in school aren't of that kind: they're not really consequences, but punishments. What's the difference? Well, if you ignore your mother's good advice and foolishly step off the curb without looking and get hit by a bus, that's a consequence. If you do that and your mother grabs you by the ear and drags you all the way home, or a cop issues a jaywalking ticket, that's a punishment. They call it a consequence, but someone has to decide to do it. The bus driver didn't decide to hit you (we hope).

In my courses, I try to get rid of the "school-based" model and substitute one that's more like how things actually work in the world outside school. I should admit that I do this partly because I absolutely hate being in the position of having to decide whether an excuse is a "good one," or (even worse) whether the prospective excusee is telling the truth.

But a more important reason is that I think this is how people learn best: by dealing with consequences rather than undergoing punishments. I'm trying to organize my classes so as to replicate, as thoroughly as I can, the way things might actually work in non-school learning environments, where deadlines have actual social consequences attached to them. If I'm late with an article revision, the journal can't publish my article (that's a consequence). If you don't get the information memo to the deputy minister in time for his press conference, there are awkward silences (that's a consequence), and the minister probably gets tacked off (that's a consequence too), and you might well get fired (that's a punishment).

There are a couple of ways this situation supports learning better than the punishment one. It takes the focus off the powerful person who decides whether or not to punish, and puts it back on the real situation -- so rather than trying to psych out the teacher you try to find a way to deal with the fact that you didn't get your part of the research assignment done. Another way to say this is that it gets around the well-documented psychological fact that the rewards directly related to getting something done (the "intrinsic" ones) are more effective than the external rewards which might be given by an authority (the "extrinsic" ones).

Another way to say this, maybe, is that I want to make it as clear as I can that you don't do things in this class for me; you do them because they're part of a process that you, and others, learn from.

So, in my classes I assume that when someone doesn't get something done, she has a good reason. I don't evaluate reasons. I don't cross-examine people to see if their reasons are real, or if they're good people. I avoid my tendency (one I share with everybody I know) to believe people I like, and be skeptical of those I don't.

I try to set things up so that if something can be compensated for, it's compensated for; if it makes sense for it to be done later, it can be done later. Often it can't be, though; the occasion for it no longer exists. If there's a conversation about something and you miss it, you miss it. On the other hand, if there's still reason for other people to want to hear what you would have had to say in that conversation, maybe we can get it to them.

As you might expect, this has consequences for the way evaluation happens, and marks are created, in my courses. There's more about this in the policy on evaluation.