To Procrastinate or Not to Procrastinate...

So I have procrastinated a few times during this summer course. I have also been involved in procrastination during my undergrad degree, and high school. I guess you could say I am a procrastinator but it depends on the topic being discussed or the assignment needing to be completed. Recently I listened to Anita Woolfolk's podcast on procrastination and was surprised that many individuals identify as procrastinators when asked: to be specific 75% of Americans identified as such (Woolfolk, 2007). The reason procrastination is of importance in schools is because of the completion of the assignment when an individual procrastinates. For example, some of my blogs were procrastinated and I feel you can tell when I was engaged in the writing and when I was putting the information together to just "get it done". Teachers need to be aware of procrastination especially in the middle and high school grades where essays are assigned more often than not. If an assignment is due in two weeks give a one week warning to your students and then a two day warning. I know some of you may be thinking "Why do I need to give warning my students should be responsible" but the fact of the matter is that some students will wait to the last minute and the quality of their work is poor so to make sure they do the best they can the warnings may help.

An interesting point Anita made was that procrastination can be environmental, such as the assignment is not of intrinsic interest to the individual or procrastination can be individually developed, such as being a perfectionist (Woolfolk, 2007). I never thought that perfection could be related to procrastination. If the individual wants the project or assignment to be complete perfect with no errors they may take even longer to edit or revise due to the perfection aspect. This comment made me think of a friend I have who always wanted everything perfect. If she received a 98% on a test she would be very unhappy and ask the teacher why. To most of us 98% is great and it is still an A but to a perfectionist it is not good enough. She also procrastinated her undergrad thesis because she felt she needed to add more and more to make it the best. Ultimately she was docked a whole letter grade because it was not received on time. I felt this portion of the podcast was important because it showed the opposite side of procrastination.

This is a short musical video on procrastination. It made me laugh and instantly gave me the jump start I needed this morning to accomplish all the tasks for the end of this summer course. Hope you enjoy!

References 

Woolfolk, A. (2007, May 31). Podcast #10-Procrastination. Anita Talks about Teaching. Retrieved 

       

              from https://anitatalks.wordpress.com/