About 6 or 7 years ago, I would say that my policies were somewhere in between the two extremes I’ve written about. When I first started teaching about 15 years ago, I was already beginning to move away from the “3 big exams is 90% of the grade” model. I was introducing more quizzes and shorter exams, and making homework count for more. But I don’t think I was very flexible in my policies. And I have my fair share of final grades that I regret handing out; D’s that may have unnecessarily held a student back and B+’s for a student who really should have had that moral accomplishment of an A-. Around 2018, as I shifted out of my first long-ish term teaching post of 8 years, and moved into a variety of different teaching settings, I began to relax a little bit. I definitely tried to “control” things more in my early years; maybe it was a sign of feeling young, of trying to earn respect from my elders, and making sure that the students knew I was serious business despite my fun-loving nature in class. I think that years of “rigidity” started to feel … pointless. What was it all about? Why did I do that? I’d been interested in education research for many years, but it was all centered on “students learning physics better.” At some point, I kinda stopped caring that they learned it “better.” I want, instead, for students to care about learning at all. How could I make it relevant to them. As I started to make that shift towards “teaching for my students,” course policies and grading schemes began to shift. I was less interested in physics education research and more interested in learning what makes a better classroom. The pandemic, of course, accelerated the learning curve. My course policies, now, aren’t too far from the rewritten version, here. I sometimes wonder: “Am I too loosey goosey, fluffy wuffy?” And then I hear from my students about the class they go off to next. I hear about the rigid policies, the firm expectations, the “mean” overtones carried in the messages (and I’ve talked to this faculty member myself and heard it firsthand). And when I hear that — I realize that it’s just fine to blaze my trail on the other end of the spectrum now. That old approach didn’t make the world a better place — it had it’s chance. Time for something new.