Verified answer

WARNING: This is a long rant and I hope that some of my assumptions are incorrect.

The short answer to your question is YES; she was being unfair, and things like this piss me off to no end.

There is absolutely NO reason (let alone a cornball reason like this) for a teacher to lower a student's academic grade on the basis of an assignment being late.

Last I checked, the course title was ENGLISH...not "Punctuality," "Diligence," or "Responsibility."

She could justify lowering your conduct grade for this, but c'mon...

You should be graded SOLELY on your ability to read and write---not on the basis of "class participation," turning in work on time, artsy poster projects, or any number of nonsensical things that go into most English grades.

There's gonna be an inferior writer who gets a higher grade than you on an important WRITING assignment. Ask her how THAT reflects the reality of college.

Furthermore, if she wants to "prepare you for college," tell her that you're gonna start monitoring with a stopwatch the minutes in terms of what is actually being taught to you. Tell her you're gonna be counting how many minutes she spends playing on the internet while you guys "work in groups" or "read" silently. Tell her you'll be keeping track how how much student work she grades on YOUR time. Ask her how many movies they showed in HER college composition classes. Ask her where she goes during her prep hour or on "faculty workdays."

College professors keep office hours during which students are free to seek help. Does she arrive an hour before school and leave an hour after, or does she arrive ten minutes before the bell and leave ten minutes after?

Also, when these essays are returned, if they aren't FULL of helpful comments and criticism, then that teacher is NOT doing her job.

Tell her your "other English teacher" said this. Show her these comments.

Hell I'd love to talk to this teacher myself.

Feel free to contact me if you want me to. I'd relish the chance to defend you here.

Also, I'd be delighted to see your essay if you are so inclined.

The easiest way to fail is to not follow directions, and you didn't follow directions.

You left turning it in to the last possible moment, and when something went wrong -- which happens, which is why you don't want to turn things in at the last possible moment -- you emailed it. But according to the rules, that's not a form of turning it in. So "technically," you didn't turn it in on time. "Common sense" doesn't say "everybody gets to turn in work in whatever way they feel like" because (a) that's not going to work in the real world, and (b) while it's manageable if a teacher has only a small number of students (total, not just in your class) and only one or two turn things in the wrong way, it's a pretty much guaranteed way for people's papers to get lost if a teacher is teaching multiple classes and several people decide the rules don't apply to them, and (c) this is one method cheaters use to try to get away with something dishonest, so it's better to just not permit it from the outset.

Common sense is that when you are given instructions by someone who has authority over you, like a teacher, you comply with them. If you don't understand why the instructions are what they are, which apparently you don't, you follow them anyway. Even if they actually are pointless (which they certainly are not in this case), you follow them because you don't get to unilaterally decide that the rules don't apply to you.

I'm not sure what "Keep in mind that she extended the time we had to turnit in" is supposed to have to do with anything, but if I'm understanding you right, what you are saying is that you *really* should have been penalized *more* than 20 points, but you got off easy.

The students who didn't turn in hard copies were able to submit their work later because once the work is submitted the first time, they're not going to change it. It's not a double standard. You still hadn't turned in the paper the first time.

That's why you are being penalized 20 points -- because there are rules about how to turn things in (and the teacher has a specific and valid pedagogical reason for those rules), and you didn't follow them.

Yes, you should try to do something about it. You should submit future work *at least* several hours before the deadline so that if something goes wrong, like forgetting your user name, you can fix the problem and not be penalized 20 points. And if your "raging" was even the tiniest bit visible to your teacher, you owe her an apology.

I'm going to respond to Academic Supporter first. There are very good reasons for having deadlines in high school and college. On any job, if the boss says, I need a memo on that on my desk Monday, you'd better not try to hand it in on Tuesday or Wednesday! If a client has flown in from California, and you don't have the report ready, you're going to be fired. So meeting deadlines is an important part of preparing you for the "real world".

The other reason is that no teacher can reasonably compare one paper that a student wrote in a week to another that a student took 3 weeks to write. That's unfair to everyone.

Now- your teacher is being a little harsh. However, one of the requirements of the class is to turn you papers in to turnitin. Forgetting your password is another example of the skills you need to learn. You can't tell a boss that you forgot the password to the company website, so you couldn't get your work done.

On the other hand, I think turnitin is a bad, bad excuse for monitoring a student's work. If the right assignments are given, and the students work on it with the teacher's help, plagiarism is impossible. There are better strategies. But that has nothing to do with you being responsible for fulfilling the class requirements.