Being Late Is a Great Lesson in Developing Responsibility
Most teachers we know complain that students are constantly late. One thing we’re finding is that teachers are inadvertently encouraging this behavior. When students are late, we typically see one of three responses:
Shame: “You're late. Take your seat, and we'll talk after class.”
Letting it slide: “Glad you could join us. Let’s get started.” (Or many simply don’t acknowledge it)
Preventing it: Calling everyone in from the hallway with one minute left.
All of these responses teach students not to be responsible for themselves: they all teach the student that authority figures will be responsible on their behalf.
Shaming students may temporarily force compliance, but it fails to instill the intrinsic value of punctuality. Instead, it creates a fear-based motivator, where students act to avoid embarrassment or punishment rather than take ownership of their actions. Their driving motivation is about the reaction of the authority figure, who is the responsible person.
When teachers let lateness slide, they unintentionally suggest that being on time isn’t important or that students are incapable of managing their schedules. This misplaced leniency can lead students to either “learn” that punctuality is unimportant, or believe they lack control over their arrival time. Similarly, when teachers take charge by rounding up students from the hallway, the message is clear: responsibility for being on time lies with the authority figure, not the student. “You don’t have to pay attention–authority figures will do that for you.”
Current approaches teach the student that adults and authority figures will continue to take care of everything for them. Either through sticks or gentle nudges, it’s someone else’s job to make sure you arrive on time… or worse, you’ve been taught that being on time is just not something that can be controlled. This coddling teaches students that they are not responsible for themselves; others are. It is psychologically debilitating to “learn” this “lesson.”
This becomes a bigger problem down the road. Students struggle to build critical habits like punctuality without learning to take responsibility early. This often shows up in the workplace as low conscientiousness–an essential trait for long-term success.
There is a third way that lateness can be solved that helps everyone show up on time and grow as people, and it’s the approach we take.
We allow students to be responsible for themselves–they’re at a dorm, and their parents won’t be able to push them out the door, and teachers won’t go looking for them. If they’re late, they’re late, and this might be the first time in their lives that no adult is trying to save them from this.
In this system, some students show up late. We don’t shame them: we let the natural consequences play out as if they were in the workplace. Perhaps their team started without them, or was forced to wait while other teams got a head start; afterward, our coaches help that team have a conversation about whether they appreciated their teammate being late. There is true accountability: they are responsible for the situation that arose and responsible for the impact it had on others. That impact is not brushed under the carpet for the sake of being polite or making people uncomfortable. The facilitator is not going to take that responsibility away. The facilitator is not going to become “the leviathan” that keeps everyone in line: if you’re late, you’ve hurt your team, and we’re going to talk about how everyone felt about that.
The cool part is: it worked! Students figured out how to show up on time! (It usually involved setting their alarm 5 minutes earlier). In their 3-minute final presentations, probably one-third of our students–aged 15-19–said learning that they were responsible for showing up on time was one of their major takeaways from the course. This was a bit of a surprise for us, but it shows us that even among highly motivated students, the “you’re not responsible for yourself” teaching has been quite pervasive. If you’re reading this, you’ve likely received a similar “education”.
If you’ve ever made excuses for being late, pause and reflect: are there other areas where you’re acting like your life isn’t in your control? Consider someone who is consistently punctual–maybe a classmate, a teacher, or our program facilitators. Is their life fundamentally different, or do they simply make deliberate choices, like leaving 5 minutes earlier? In most cases, the difference isn’t circumstance–it’s mindset. It’s a choice. You have the power to take control, even if you’ve convinced yourself otherwise. 99% of the time, whether you were on time or late came down to your choice about whether to prepare early enough, wake up early enough, or depart early enough.
Who do you think has greater success in life? The people who are good at finding reasons they can’t (can’t be on time, can’t accomplish something else), or the ones who figure out how to get it done? Which do you want to be?
Take time to decide for yourself what conscientious habits you want to adopt, despite the environments and culture around you often discouraging you from doing so. Developing this skill early will serve you well into the future.
