Student Spectrums

                                                                                               

Life events come in various ways and times, but can sometimes alter the way life looks or feels, both in a positive and negative way. Some of these events occur by pure coincidence while others occur with hard work. The point here is that a lot of events can be life changing and can determine who and what a person will become in his/her future life.

Throughout my life in high school, work piled up pretty fast, especially when I procrastinated all the time. Although I didn’t think much of it at the time, it slowly started to get piled up to a point where I was really going to struggle on how to get these assignments done. These assignments were composed of many, mostly boring essays I didn’t want to write, which really annoyed me. I kept doing this “last minute” work method for quite a while, thinking it was the best way since I didn’t want to do these assignments at all. 

I would stay up all night before the day the assignment/assignments were due and work till late night, my eyelids sinking into my eye sockets as I reevaluated every decision I made up till now. This would impact me quite a bit as the next morning. Part of my mind was still in bed while the other half was slowly tracking the movement of the teacher’s pen. This affected my perception of class greatly. It also made me less responsive, attentive, and comprehensive.

One thing was clear here, even though I somehow managed to get good grades from these last minute submissions, I needed to change the way I completed my assignments as it was incredibly inefficient and was costing me greatly in sleep and class. 

 Then came the turning point in ELA class. My teacher assigned an essay with a twist. Progress was due and checked, partly during class and partly at home. Here I would just pretend to think and work and just procrastinate all the way till the last day, but the teacher graded the essay on the spot for completeness every day, ensuring something has been completed. This may have just looked like another weird tactic teachers use, but for me this changed a lot. I slowly started to write in class, rather than at home and although it was just as simple as that I realized it was way more than that. 

Suddenly assignments were completed way faster. I would get done with 2 paragraphs in class and complete the 2 others at home. By then I would have already brainstormed, gathered my thoughts, and written a good introduction and body to my essay, which saved me a bunch of time.

This “weird method” surprisingly worked better than I expected to and was helping me greatly in my assignments in class. This way I had more time to sleep, work on some other assignments, or even have some fun. Not only that but I was also getting significantly better grades, going from a measly B- to an A and even an A+ sometimes. It was pretty clear at this point that my procrastination tactic was not good for me and was barely keeping me afloat in school.

Slowly I started to get better at this, I was often avoiding procrastination as a method and always trying to complete my assignments at the time they were assigned or at least start them and get the important stuff accomplished. This slowly got my grades up and gradually improved surrounding grades. In the end, this “weird method” this teacher enforced on me ended up changing the way I worked on my assignments and also changed the way I approached my assignments. Instead of viewing it as a chore I saw it as a direct challenge to my “procrastinating” mindset.

This helped and hopefully will help me in the future as college is up ahead and the last thing I would wish is to fail while procrastinating on college assignments. In all, this simple daily requirement did more than improve my grades; it rearranged my ways of working on assignments and redefined my work principles completely.

The shift from avoiding anything to do with my assignments until the very last day they were due to engaging in these assignments as soon as I can transformed the way I tackled my assignments and challenges greatly, keeping me on a mindset that I need to carry forward into college level assignments and curriculum.