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This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning I am thinking about procrastinating.

Not for myself — though I’m not entirely against procrastinating — but because my students were assigned an essay about challenges they’ve faced, problems they’ve solved, and several of them wrote about their struggle with procrastination. My seniors are far worse about it: they take pride in their refusal to get anything done in any kind of timely manner. “Senioritis!” they cry.

Bullshit, I say.

Sure, seniors suddenly get several notches lazier in the second semester. They’ve gotten into college, they know they won’t fail their classes — they’re not that lazy — and so they will definitely graduate and go on to the next stage of their lives. That being the case, it’s hard to see the need to complete vocabulary assignments just like the ones they’ve been doing for years, now, and which, in a few months, they’ll never have to do again. (Not that they like thinking about graduating in a few months and being done with high school forever. It’s a tempting prospect, but also terrifying, because that, they know, is when they get sent out into the Real World, which they have been taught to fear throughout their time in high school.) And sure, I get that. But “senioritis” implies first that it is something out of their control, an inevitability, a condition that afflicts people in their situation; and second that they haven’t been pulling the same crap for years now.

There are exceptions, of course. A few students get all their work done on time regardless of the relative value of the work; in fact, they take pride in completing both the large difficult assignments and the measly, mindless ones, because that way they show that their work ethic knows no bounds, that no grade is too big, and no grade is too small. There are students who were slackers, but who pick it up in their senior year, though even they tend to fall back into old habits as graduation day approaches. There are, of course, seniors who really do get lazy only at this final stage of their high school career, who go from diligent to dilettante once February rolls around.

But for the most part, it’s not senioritis, it’s studentitis. And it’s not that: it’s just procrastination. But here’s the thing: procrastination doesn’t have to be bad. It usually isn’t. It can be, of course, but for the most part, it’s simply — prioritizing. A student has an assignment due on Friday, and that student knows they can get it done in two hours; there’s no particular reason to do it Wednesday night instead of Thursday night. They may get a surprise assignment on Thursday and have to do two things Thursday night, but usually not, and if they do, they simply give up some sleep, which they don’t mind at all. (Students are divided into two groups: those who do nothing but sleep — the sloths — and those who only sleep a few hours a night — the squirrels. Sloths mind giving up sleep, but they make up for it by sleeping 18 hours the next day; squirrels are already awake until two or three in the morning every night.) The assignment that isn’t due tomorrow is a low priority, so it doesn’t get done until it is a high priority; it’s not lazy, not irrational, it’s nothing more than what we all do all the time. This last Sunday I had time for one chore, and I had to pick between cleaning out the birdcage or vacuuming the floors; I cleaned the birdcage because the floors weren’t that dirty. Because unlike the bird, we don’t crap on the floor. Priorities.

It’s more troubling when the work is daunting, and they have time to do it, but they put it off anyway because they’d rather not do it. Not managing their time, perhaps short-sightedly but reasonably; this procrastination just keeps going, past when they have a reasonable chance of doing the work, sometimes past the due date entirely. This is the kind of procrastination my students wrote about in their essays, as a problem to be overcome, a challenge they have to face. Because now the procrastination causes stress, and makes them miss out on things they don’t want to miss out on, things they care about more than sleep. This procrastination is especially troubling because often, the activity they choose over completing their work is — nothing. Watching Netflix or YouTube. Laying on their bed and staring at the wall. Saying to themselves, “Wow, I really should do that thing I have to do.” And then not doing it. Over and over.

But even this, I would argue, is prioritizing: something in that lack of activity, that laying on the bed, that video watching, is more important than getting their work done at that moment when they make that choice. I think the two best possibilities for their reasons are, one, that they are so completely stressed and anxious that they are desperate for anything that can help them calm down — more common among today’s youth than you would like to think, but if you knew how many of my students are in therapy and on mood-altering drugs to handle their anxiety, you would know this is not an unlikely reason for procrastination — and two, the work is so unimportant that they refuse to do it, because doing it feels almost demeaning, almost insulting.

This is how I felt about high school when I was in it. It was beneath me. It was a waste of my time. I thought the teachers, who weren’t any smarter than me, were giving me homework just to push me around, and by God, I wasn’t going to let them get away with that. I would show them: I wouldn’t do the work! I’d take that F! That’s right, teacher, I’ve called your bluff: what are you going to do now? Huh?

Nothing. That’s what I thought.

Exactly what I do when my students don’t do the work. Because I don’t actually assign work to push my students around. And if they don’t want to do the work I assign, that’s their choice. Hell, if they don’t do it, that’s one less paper for me to grade. Win-win.

In either of those cases, crippling anxiety or petulant rebellion, procrastination is not laziness. It’s prioritizing. They may not be doing a good job of making those decisions, but they are making decisions, not just blowing things off for no reason. Because of that, I think that a student who procrastinates should be allowed to make that choice, and then face the consequences of that choice, of their own free will, which is why I don’t hound them, asking if they finished their work yet. They’ll finish it eventually, or they won’t; either way is their choice.

Just so long as they don’t call it senioritis.

This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning I am thinking about what makes me a good teacher. I think it is because I would be a terrible boss.

I’ve given an assignment to two of my classes. It’s an evil assignment, in my favorite tradition of assignments that make my students uncomfortable in what I think are productive ways; I like it because they whine and I don’t have to care about their suffering, because it is productive suffering. I just get to laugh at them. This assignment is a group project — that’s the evil part; group projects are the worst thing about school, in my opinion: and this time the group is the entire class. (They’ve handled it admirably, I have to say. They’ve divided the work in a rational way, and they have assigned themselves exactly the roles I would have assigned them: the best writers are writing, the most outgoing and entertaining students are presenting, and so on. My second class has had a rougher time, but largely because the strongest personalities have been out for sickness; they were all present yesterday, and — with a little prompting from me — they came to a good solution.)

I pitched the assignment like a work project. I said they were a department, and I was their boss, and I called them up and said, “I want background on this subject. Get it done.” Then I left everything else to them. But because I don’t want to make this harder on them than it has to be, I told them that I would let them pick the subject they researched — I suggested it relate to the literature in the class, but I didn’t insist; one class is doing the history of India because we’re reading The God of Small Things, and the other class is doing insane and dangerous monarchs throughout history because next month we’ll read Macbeth — and also the due date. I also told them that they could ask me for an extension if they couldn’t hit their due date, and I would give it to them, as sometimes bosses do that.

While we were discussing it Monday, one of my students said, “You’re being much nicer than most bosses.”

And she was right. Because I’d be a terrible boss.

I don’t like forcing my opinions and decisions onto other people. I am happy and flattered to be asked for and to offer my opinion, but I don’t see why mine has to be THE opinion. Especially not with decisions such as due dates. When I do pick them, they’re essentially arbitrary, and based solely on my schedule, my convenience; but since I’m not the one doing the work before the due date, shouldn’t the people who have to complete that work be the ones to decide on a good time frame? Since they know what else they have to accomplish in the same time frame? I do all the work after the due date, but that’s where I don’t let them estimate how long it should take me or when it will be finished: I take as long as I need to grade work, and they can wait until I’m done. Shouldn’t I offer them the same courtesy? I usually estimate how long it would take me to do something (and then I double or triple it, because I’m better at this stuff than my students are) when figuring how far out the deadline should be; but don’t they have a better idea of how long it will take them to do the task? The same for subject matter, or the form of the product; I pick some of that — I told them I wanted both a written product and a presentation — but why should I pick the actual thing that is being researched? Based on what I think they need to know? What I think is interesting?

Yes: that is precisely what bosses do, what people in charge do. We have a staff meeting today in which our bosses, who are not teachers, and 2/3s of whom have never been teachers, have decided what the teachers need to learn; they have picked the materials, and they will be presenting to us in the manner that they think is best. And every one of those decisions, historically, has been wrong. We don’t need to learn what they’re trying to teach us, and both the materials and the delivery are a textbook example of what NOT to do. This year our training sessions have been on pedagogy, and watching an administrator with no classroom experience do everything wrong — PowerPoint slides that are all text, which are then read to us directly; handouts that are the same as the slides; videos that are hard to see and hear, which often feature elementary school teachers (I teach at a 6-12 middle/high school), and which never give clear examples of the concepts being discussed, and by “discussed” I mean very much the opposite as none of the audience ever talk apart from offering short Yes/No type answers to their simple factual question — it’s pretty agonizing. It is wonderful irony, though. If only that were the lesson.

I couldn’t do that to my staff. I ask my students all the time for their input: what they want to work on, what they want to do next, if they have any alternate subjects or suggestions; I ask them how long they need to do work, when they want it due, when they want the test to be, and so on. I just don’t like demanding that people do what I think they should do. I think it is essentially immoral to impose my will on another human being; if I can convince them I am right, then they will agree to my proposal, and I think those outcomes are  always better. I also hate keeping secrets, which is important in many ways for those in charge of information, as information is power and also potentially harmful; and I cannot bear to inflict harm on those under my authority, which means I would be terrible at firing or disciplining employees, just as I am terrible at disciplining students.

I’m a very good facilitator. I am an awful authority. That’s why I’m a good teacher — and why I should never try to run a serious company, nor become a politician.

Or maybe I should be a politician, for exactly that reason?

Nah. I wouldn’t want the job.

 

 

(I should probably start numbering these.)

This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning, honestly, I’m thinking about how much I have to teach my students still, and how little time I have to do it. I’m thinking about whether or not literature can be parceled  into discrete packets called “reading assignments,” and whether there is any point to assigning reading homework to people who don’t read. I’m thinking about whether it’s better to comment extensively on essay drafts, or to hand them right back and just say, “Make it better.” Independence or guidance?

On the one hand I have the pedagogical establishment in this country, which wants me to differentiate and scaffold and make all learning student-centered, preferably student-generated project-based collaborative group multimedia discovery projects. I honestly have no idea how to do this, but I suspect it is both transient and unsustainable: that too much effort would go into planning and organizing the perfect project units, and in pre-teaching protocols for students to follow in generating their own discovery learning projects, and in trying to make the groups work fairly, particularly with low-interest students; and within five years, pedagogists will have discovered a new element that should be added — though nothing will ever be taken away. The new element will not make this more practical.

And on the other hand I have Eugen Herrigel’s Zen and the Art of Archery Herrigel was a German philosophy professor who studied traditional Japanese archery in Japan, and his book is credited with helping to popularize Zen in the west. His archery master has the perfect system: he shows the students how to do the thing — how to draw the bow, aim, and fire at a target (Also, most importantly, how to breathe) — and then he has the students do it, and he points  out their mistakes. Then he does it again. And again. That’s it: modeling and expert critique. There is no explicit  instruction at all.

There is precisely one reason why I have to rush, why I have to assign reading packets rather than whole novels, or better yet, just read whole novels with my students and discuss them as we go, and it is time. The determination that one class lasts for fifty minutes, that one week is five classes, that one semester is eighteen weeks, that one year is two semesters, that an education is thirteen years. We are in a hurry, all the time, forever, particularly with our children. That’s what ruins everything.

If I could teach anything, I would teach this world to take its time.