Curious what changes my teacher friends have made in the pandemic that they plan to keep.

Mine: I’ve changed on being tough on deadlines. I thought it was training them for professional journalism, but really it was causing rushed work with less value in feedback.

Another one I haven’t fully practiced but won’t ever do again is the zero for gross factual errors/misspellings. A residual of my own education, again I thought it reinforces accuracy. But if the goal is learning, they won’t read the other feedback on a zero, I’ve realized.

My old journalism profs are probably not going to be happy about the latter. At some point, I just realized this is education and asking them to be perfect by making penalties harsh is counterproductive to the overall goal of teaching.

For those who never did journalism classes, it was pretty standard for a long time (still might be) to get a zero on a story or paper that mispelled a name or have a gross factual error. Some let you revise up to a B. My classes did not. It was considered tough love.