Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Survey Says

They break their pencils. I never knew that until today. I was chatting with my classes about the different ways that students procrastinate on a daily basis. You see, I'm an expert in the area of procrastination-I've been putting off until tomorrow for quite awhile now.

Our class discussion started off with my insights on student procrastination techniques. In the end we came up with a list of three top procrastination strategies. It was easy to see that students use bathroom/water breaks as their go to way to put off class work. It's a solid technique--one that I employed often during my two hour British Literature class in college. My students easily identified with this strategy, even smiling and nodding as we talked about it.

Then there was the general staring out into space. This is a tricky one for teachers, because when a student is asked if they're actually working they can quickly respond with a safe answer; "I'm thinking." Yeah, they smiled and nodded on that one as well.

And then I innocently surveyed the group. "What else do you do to procrastinate?" I asked.

A few hands shot up.

"We break our pencil points on purpose."

Wow, they say you learn something every day and boy did I.

1 comment:

  1. I'm definitely going to have to research this in my classroom. I'll bet this was a great discussion!!

    ReplyDelete