Earlier this month I sent an email with both an egregious spelling error and a punctuation error in the subject line.  I noticed the error about one minute after sending, but still too late to retrieve.  Here it is. 
So I had to decide what to do.  Should I resend and correct my spelling error, or let it go and hear my own bells of shame? 

I
choose to let that spelling/typo error just go without a re-do.  I felt like I would be clogging your email, and that you probably figured out sesmster meant semester.  I really wanted to resend, but it didn’t feel right. I hoped my reputation wouldn’t suffer that much.

Earlier that week I
also sent out an email with the wrong attachment, and because of a special schedule, the wrong times.  Again the decision- should I resend and correct times and attachment, or let it go and hear my own bells of shame?  I did re-do this one.  It was a MAP test email and had information
I did not want to be lost in the errors.  I couldn’t risk it. 
 

That same week, I was re-grading a bunch of student work done in a collaboration with Gaeby and Miranda on the Little Big History Project. I try my hardest to give students the opportunity to re-do without grade consequences, and I am always surprised more students don’t take me up on the re-do. Plenty do but by no means all.  This has puzzled me, because do you remember I said I really wanted to send a correction out right away.  All things being equal, I will re-do.  The juxtaposition of my experience with re-doing choices and students’ choices made me wonder if they do a cost/benefit analysis, too.  And what do they see as cost vs benefit?

The grade matters, even in a nontraditional graded course like TMS. If the grade will change, the benefit of the grade outweighs the costs in time and study for some students. I  wonder if one of the costs – facing the embarrassment of the error – is too great for some.  I really hope they don’t hear the bells of shame because I emphasize making mistakes as part of learning,  but I am afraid some do.   I wonder if some students just hope that their equivalent of my sesmster error will somehow suddenly make sense to me.  So are they hoping for a no-cost solution?  That hope is not very realistic,
because once I grade, I don’t look back without the redo.  It is a shame grades cant be conversations, but I guess conversations have a time cost, too. I can state a lot of reasons for my errors.  Multitasking, sugar overload, terrible typing skills, a get-‘er-done stance, over-reliance on spellcheck…
but I don’t claim carelessness.  I have felt some students are careless, but I also recognize everyone has limited time, and just have to put somethings on low priority.

Sometimes I feel they re-do because they know they can do better work. That is the cost/benefit analysis I want my redo offer to validate.  I feel so happy they are recognizing a chance to either learn or demonstrate learning. I
want students to be able to present their best work, but I also want them to have agency in their learning.  Teaching is complicated.