"Well I did not mean to imply anything specific about the way you run your class."

Except for when you said I "approach school like prison." :)

"On the other hand, I am not sure how you can defend the idea that a student who fails to complete a time-wasting assignment should be punished, which is what you seem to be saying."

In my opinion, a student who doesn't complete a time-wasting assignment ought to expect to receive a grade of zero on that assignment. I think either fewer or more consequences would miss the mark. I'm not sure if you would consider this "punishment"; I would not.

I think we're missing each other because we're using the same words but with different definitions.

I don't consider failing to complete a worksheet (time-wasting or otherwise) to be a matter of compliance. Notice that in my original comment I used the word "insubordination", which is important.

(I do think that there's a place for requiring a specific method. When I give my kids programming assignments, I sometimes restrict how they're allowed to complete the program. If I say "You must use a while loop", and the kids uses a for loop, there's no credit, even if a for loop would be better. I gave you this assignment because I want to MAKE SURE you can solve it using a while loop. Sometimes my curriculum requires me to make sure you can solve the equation using "completing the square" even when other techniques might work just as well. I think I'm justified in not giving points if you don't complete the square.)

I'll use a different example: in my school, hats are prohibited by dress code. (This is a dumb rule.) If I am walking through the halls and see a student wearing a hat, I ask him to remove it. If he removes it, we are good. He has "complied" with my perfectly legitimate request. If he refuses to remove it, we have a problem. He is insubordinate, aka "non-compliant".

I maintain that this sort of compliance is ABSOLUTELY necessary. I don't make very many outright demands of my students ("Johnny, I need you to sit down.") but when I do they damn well better comply.

Now, as I've said, I much prefer to let natural consequences rule the day. But some students want to break rules and then ALSO avoid the consequences of those rules, and that's what I object to. It's like, you understand that Rosa Parks was arrested, right? She didn't just refuse to move to the back of the bus; she also gracefully accepted that she was going to get arrested for it, too. And that's why civil disobedience works.

In the case of a "completing the square" worksheet, I think it's justified to not award points for getting the correct answer if the method wasn't what was specified. If my curriculum prescribes that "students must demonstrate mastery of solving equations using completing the square" (which would be a bad curriculum, agreed) and you refuse to demonstrate that you can do that, then I can't in good conscience award you points. And if you're a dick about it, then we may have an insubordination issue on top of it.

So it's not as simple as just ensuring students are learning. Sometimes we're required to make sure they can get their answers in a specific way.

To give a real example from my classes: I think object-oriented programming is WAY overrated. But I have to teach it. When I do so, I apologize to the kids for making them do it, because OOP doesn't make sense for the small programs they're using it on. Using OOP for a 50-line program is almost always BAD design.

But when I ask kids to write Tic-Tac-Toe in an object-oriented way, and they turn in a perfect but non-OO solution, they get zero points. And if they try to argue with me about it, then we're getting into disrespect territory.

I suspect that this is what happened to you. You got into a lot of power struggles with teachers. (Those teachers were probably also bad teachers, which is only partly related.) Then you got tired of fighting about it and just started skipping class. But you didn't hate the curriculum, just the methodology.

So, to deconstruct: "Thus a student who does not bother with pointless exercises that have no educational value is just as wrong as the teacher who gave those exercises, regardless of whether or not the student is learning in lieu of doing their official assignments."

A teacher who gives exercises with no educational value is the most wrong.

(Important caveat: you probably are not a perfect judge of which exercises have educational value, because 1) you had a bad experience, 2) some of your teachers were bad and treated you badly, so even if the assignments were okay in and of themselves, they were received badly, and 3) you didn't do some of them anyway. Like, who knew that eating kale could improve your eyesight? You'll never know if you don't eat it.)

A student who cares about learning is better than one who doesn't, even if one does assignments and the other doesn't.

A student who doesn't care about learning but completes assignments anyway is probably slightly more likely to succeed than a student who DOES care about learning but refuses to do classwork. This is a shame, but statistically true.

Always remember that Rosa Parks would never have accomplished anything if she had run from the cops.

And finally, for what it's worth, I have the following sign posted in my classroom:

The Best Students in my Class

* Ask questions until they understand deeply
* Want knowledge more than grades
* Accept consequences gracefully for their choices
* Don't quit (They have grit.)