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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I was teaching at colleges a long time ago, and made my share of mistakes. One mistake was being too strict and gave too difficult homework. Now I realized the strictness is not necessary at all.

But I know many professors love being strict and give hard exam that the average score is barely passing, so that they can bump the scores up using a hypothetical normal curve. To me it is very manipulating. [/quote]

I was an adjunct briefly, and I was too strict at first. I learned later to let things go and focus on teaching and trying to excite the kids about what they were learning.

I took a class recently at our local CC. The professor had very strict deadlines, and he took 10% off the grade if the assignment was late. But he was very lenient if you talked with him. I had to ask for extra time, and he always gave it to me, no matter how flimsy my excuse. At one point, he said, "I'm on your side," to whole the class, which I thought was great. I wish I said that to every class I'd ever taught. Because it's true. Teaching is so much more fun when the kids are engaged, and intimidating them doesn't engage them.

To answer OP, my HS kid is miserable with all the busy work and constant deadlines, so I'm hoping that when my kid gets to college, there will be more flexibility and more emphasis on learning and communication with the professor, instead of meeting deadlines.

When I went to college, I'd be assigned a paper on the first day of class, and there'd be no further mention of it until the day it was due. It seemed crazy and pointless. All my professors were busy doing research and fighting for tenure, so I guess they didn't want to bother teaching us sad little undergraduates. It made for a miserable time for me in college (and this was at an Ivy).

I suppose there's some judgement involved here, and that requires getting to know your students. Some kids will do really well if they have a strict deadline, and others will fall apart. If you have 100 kids in the class, that's tough to do, but with 15, you can get to know them a little and try to figure out how best to deal with them. Some get very anxious over deadlines, others not so much. My DD writes papers and turns them in ahead of time. She's super organized and has no anxiety whatsoever about writing a paper. One of her siblings has huge anxiety about writing papers, and puts everything off until the very last minute, then writes it all in a rush. They both get good grades, but they're different kids. I suggest flexibility, OP, as much as possible. I don't think super strict deadlines are helpful, but everyone needs to learn how to meet deadlines, so they are useful too. 
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