It is the thing that all students do, no matter how smart they may be, how logical a mind they might have...
Almost every month, once, we get instructed on time management and "how to use our time efficiently". They hand out nice little sheets of paper with neat tables printed on them. They ask us to "plan our week". We do. And then we throw those sheets of paper away in the first recycle bin that comes in our way. We sometimes even delay throwing the paper away.
To be honest, the time management things and the schedules saying :
17:30 - 17:45: Snack
17:45-19:00: Study math
19:00-20:00: Dinner
20:00-20.30: Practice the piano, memorize 3 of the scales.
20:30-21:30: Do econ homework
21:45-22:00: Break
22:00-23:00: Solve tests
23:00-23:15: Get ready for bed
23:15-23:45: Read two chapters of your bedside book,
NEVER WORK.
Instead, it metamorphoses into this:
17:30-17:45: Snack
17:45-18:00: Study some math and get bored
18:00-until your mother calls you to dinner: Break Time! Let's see what's going on in the social media...
After Dinner: I'll just play these pieces on the piano one time through...
A little while later, starting to get sleepy: I better start the econ homework and those tests...What's that? A new episode of Grey's Anatomy?
45 minutes later, feeling guilty about the episode you just watched, clock closing around on 23:00: Gee, it's almost bed time-cram in the math, hurry through the econ homework, get to the Turkish project assigned two weeks ago, decide to take the tests with you to school next day to solve them during your "free time".
Sometime later that night, or maybe even the next day: I better go to bed, but I should read a few chapt--zzzz.
This is why those schedules never work.
The student lives on procrastination, it is in its blood.
I even procrastinated on writing this blog post about procrastination, as I've had the idea for a couple of months now.
I am procrastinating doing the hard part of my math project even further (since it was assigned a week ago and I only got to it now) by writing this blog post.
What can I say? Just like you cannot take out religion completely, just like you cannot achieve world piece, you cannot possibly take out procrastination from a student's life. You just cannot.
The second law of thermodynamics states that a system is much more likely to be in random order than in any kind of specific order, because there are more ways of being disordered than there are ways of being ordered. For example, if I toss a pile of sand on the ground, there is only one way in which this pile can form a sandcastle, but an almost endless amount of ways in which it can form a random pile. Perhaps students procrastinate because there are more ways to not do work than there are ways to do work?
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