Sunday, April 1, 2012

Procrastination:Early Intervention

Procrastination. Most of us do it at some point in our lives. We can procrastinate going to an appointment, paying our bills or most importantly doing our work. We make up countless excuses of why we can't sit down and write a paper for class. I'll do it tomorrow before class, it won't take long, we tell ourselves. This paper is going to take forever, I'll work on it this weekend. In the time period it takes to reason with ourselves of why we should put off doing our work, the paper could have been researched, written and handed in. As a future educator and procrastinator myself, I think it's important that we intervene early when it comes to our students. I'm not saying we are going to stop our students from procrastinating. I'm just saying that we should teach students ways to avoid procrastination and reward and encourage that behavior. For example, when I'm having my English class write a paper I might give them time in class to work on it. I might also set deadlines for different parts of the paper. This gives them a head start and breaks the paper down into smaller chunks.  I might also try and use a reward system and motivate students to get things done. Maybe I'd give a couple extra  points to people who turned assignments in early. Another thing I might do is after a big project or paper was turned in, I might have a class where we just watched a movie and had a snack as a reward for getting things done and doing something fun and mentally relaxing. The point is that we should motivate and encourage our students to be and do better but also remember that we were in their shoes once.    

2 comments:

  1. I think you have a lot of great ideas. I think breaking up a paper into smaller assignments would work very well. I've had to do that in a few of my classes and it helped me stay motivated.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I, too, am way too good at procrastinating but I wish I weren't. I like what you said about rewarding them somehow after finishing a big project because I can completely understand what students go through. I often feel that my reward for finishing one paper is starting another. I'm not positive how to get students to stop procrastinating but I like your ideas!

    ReplyDelete