Tag rebellion

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.

The Right Idea

Dusty 2 Comments

I had an idea.

I received an essay from a student arguing that the drinking age should be lowered to 18. I have seen this argument before, and believe me, this was not the cleverest attempt; this student failed to offer even the traditional outrage over the idea that one could join the military and fight and die for one’s country, but not even buy a beer! I mean, come on!

I’ve been looking for the just-right response to that particular “argument” for years. I’m trying to choose between, “If you cut off your left hand, you can’t cut off your right. Is that fair?” or “You’re right. And you know what else? Boko Haram lets their soldiers drink.” or “I heard you can make a lovely Cosmopolitan out of the blood of a slain enemy and just a little wasabi. I bet the Army lets them drink THAT.”

Although I did not have the opportunity to appreciate, again, the absurdity of being allowed to shoot people and not be drunk while doing it, I did get to enjoy my very favorite class of argument: the “Everyone on Earth thinks like a perverse, obnoxious adolescent” argument. In this instance, it goes something like this: People think drinking is cool because it is against the law, and teenagers want to be rebellious. Teenagers do things for no other reason than because people tell them not to do those things. Therefore, if the drinking age were lowered and kids had access to alcohol, it wouldn’t seem so tempting and dangerous, and therefore fun and cool and stick-it-to-the-man-y, and so they wouldn’t do it as much.

Ah, yes. Many times I have thought, “You know what would be cool? Building an addition without a permit. That would really impress my biker buddies.” Whenever I need street cred — and I can’t count the times I have needed to cash in on my street cred — I just fail to report an accident, or I make a fake 911 call. Because I’m a thug, and thug life means jaywalking, yo. I’ve always been a rebel: I remember back in high school, one morning I told my bathroom mirror, “I’m going to falsify legal documents. Yeah: then the head cheerleader will notice me!”

It worked, too.

But while I was reading this particular essay, and trying to think of the best way to point out how absurd is the argument that laws against certain behaviors actually make those behaviors more attractive and therefore more common (I usually ask if the student thinks that murder would become less common if the laws against it were eliminated. Just picture all those murderers thinking, “Yeah, sure, I could go out and kill someone tonight. But where’s the spice, without running from the cops? Unless I’m risking jail time, there just doesn’t seem any reason to kill people. Sigh. I miss the good ol’ days.”), I got to the conclusion, which argued that things would be a whole lot better for everyone if drinking were considered an individual right, not a fascinating vice.

That’s when it hit me.

That student was absolutely right.

The key is not making things legal: the key is making something a right. That’s how you get people to walk away from it.

Just think: our forefathers fought for the right to build a government based on the rule of law and the basic principle of democracy, a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. And they won that right, too. Then it only took us 200 years or so to tear the whole thing down and replace it with Citizens United, and the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, and the Wall Street bailout, and the Keystone Pipeline: a government that represents money and power, and nothing else. A government of the rich (or at least only interested in the rich), by their puppets, for the profit margin.

Know why they do that? Because we’ve been told for years that greed and corruption are wrong. That makes them cool. (I can’t tell you how tempted I am right now to turn this whole thing against God and the Ten Commandments. But the problem with that is the Bible actually supports the claim that I’m currently mocking: after all, God told Adam and Eve not to eat the apple, and they did exactly that, and lost Paradise for us all.

Come to think of it, this bullshit really is the Bible’s fault.)

Then for decades, people fought against slavery, fought for the freedom not to be treated as a commodity. They won that, too, after struggle and war and destruction. And now we happily enslave ourselves: we work harder and for less reward than any other people of any other civilized nation. We do whatever the boss says, whenever the boss says it — you’ll never see a better example of this than teachers. “Why are we giving up the things we know are right for our students, like actual literature and field trips and creative endeavors? Because the boss says we have to raise test scores. Well, then, I guess we have to do it. Somebody pass me that stack of Scantrons.” We all happily give up our free will, duck our heads, bow and scrape, and do what we are told. Some of us even become Ditto-heads, and Moonies, and Beliebers; we “Let go, and let God.”

We have the right to vote: we don’t do it. We have the right to speak freely: we are silent. We have the right to a free press: we stopped reading the ones that spoke the truth, and now we have Fox News and CNN. We have the right to peaceably assemble, and we stay at home and tag each other on Facebook. We have the right to petition the government for redress of grievances, and instead we simply grieve.

It’s true: make something a right, and we can’t run away from it fast enough.

Therefore, I am advocating for the right to murder, the right to hate, and the right to celebrate and enforce ignorance. I believe all Americans should have the right to exploit each other, the right to feel no compassion for any other living thing, and the right to pervert and corrupt every goodness on Earth for the sake of instant gratification and petty, spiteful vengeance. Screw that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness stuff; we need to have those rights taken away. Life and liberty — and happiness — should be outlawed. Then they’ll be cool.

Then we’ll want them. Like everything else we can’t have.

So I hereby stand corrected in my basic intent as a blogger: we do not need to fight for the natural rights of man, we do not need to fight for justice, nor peace, nor love.

We need to fight for the right to treat each other, and ourselves, like dirt. The right to drink beer. And bacon: definitely the right to bacon.