Tell your students: when you’re pressed for time, you have to accept work that is good enough.
Busy working adults learn this, over time. We learn that when there are multiple projects with tight deadlines, we must relax our standards and deliver less than our best work if we want to remain safe, healthy, and with strong personal relationships.
We relax our standards to protect ourselves, and because a complete project at a lower standard is better than an incomplete project at the highest standard. When work slowed down, the standards can go back up to its normal level, and often we can retroactively fix anything we are no longer satisfied with.
We do not teach our students this.
The message most high school students get from five, six, or seven teachers a day is that the class they are in at that moment must be their highest priority, and they must keep their standards sky high for that class. This is untenable and it leads to students giving up, choosing to not do assignments at all or resorting to some kind of plagiarism or other immoral shortcut.
At the same time, hard deadlines make it difficult for students to triage busy moments and then revise assignments. If I have assignments due Thursday in English, Biology, US History, and French, I can’t possibly make them all my best work. (Most students have an incompletely myelinated prefrontal cortex and cannot plan far in advance.) A flexible deadline and penalty-free opportunities to revise are solutions that are rarely offered. In my experience, there is little attempt at coordination of due dates between departments to alleviate the kind of buildup I described above.
Again, the end result is that students give up and don’t do any work because they believe they must do their best work or nothing.
There must be a better solution – one that inspires good student work, engages students in learning, and doesn’t leave students demoralized, stressed, and anxious.