Curmudgeon Girl says: happiness is no late grading

What is making me happy right now is that for next semester, I'm gonna put a drop-dead deadline in my syllabi that 1-2 weeks after the assignment is due, I won't accept late assignments anymore. Period.

There is a little wave right now of LATE LATE work propelled by whiney, pleading students who feel that their life stories are so very exceptional that they should be exempt from the rule that EVERYTHING (no exceptions) was due last Friday. Oh, my car. Oh, my disk (back) problem. Oh, oh, oh.

And I would bend, in the holiday spirit - but how fair is that to students who actually took the deadline seriously and are adult enough to conclude that they fucked up, move on?

You can just imagine the QUALITY of this late work, right? Yeah, overall, it sucks bigtime. Take the 50% reduction for late work that thankfully my syllabi already incorporate, and you wonder why these students even bothered. But then again, math is seriously not their strong point, so it's no surprise that they are overoptimistic about what this work will do for their final grade. Why let algebra intrude on their "feeling" about what grade they've earned?

Bottom line: classes ended yesterday. If they haven't talked to me about their "issues" by now, they are out of luck.