How School Teaches Students Not to Procrastinate
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses how the structure of school — deadlines, assignments, and accountability — teaches students the crucial life skill of overcoming procrastination.
Key Takeaways
- School structure fights procrastination - Deadlines, assignments, and accountability systems teach students to manage their time and resist delay
- Adolescent brains need structure - The developing brain is wired to procrastinate; school provides the external scaffolding to build better habits
- This is a life skill - Learning to complete work on time is one of the most valuable things school teaches, beyond any academic content
Transcript
Why are deadlines so important in school assignments?
And why is it an important tool for teachers to be allowed to take off points if an assignment is late?
I think there's a certain understandable compassion and empathy that we have for students, right?
We want to recognize the fact that often students' lives are difficult, they may have a lot going on, they may have a personal crisis they're dealing with, so it can feel kind to be flexible.
But I think when it comes to the adolescent brain flexibility we have to be careful and we have some responsibilities as adults to help students not fall into the trap of short-term thinking right kids would always pretty much put something off I think we would all rather put something off especially if it's hard work rather than do it now we have this kind of discounting that we do where like something that we do now seems hard something that we do later seems easy and there's always this temptation to procrastinate and one of the main functions of an education is to help kids internalize the value of doing stuff in a timely manner and not procrastinating and I think if we take away that tool of points off for late work we are essentially incentivizing kids to do what they want to do naturally which is procrastinate so deadlines do matter and getting the work done on time matters and students will learn the hard way but they won't necessarily benefit from that lesson if we allow them to put off their work and then of course there's more new work when the work is that they didn't do when they were supposed to still needs to be done and that new work has been assigned, eventually they'll get overwhelmed, right?
We don't want our students getting overwhelmed and having more to do than they can get done well in the available time.
So if we want to get the best possible education for our students, time matters.
Timeliness matters.
And taking off points for late work is a way of helping students realize that in a quantitative way, right?
Like intuitively, everybody would rather do something later.
But if I can look at the assignment and say, okay, this is gonna be late, I'm gonna get points off, I might as well get my act together and do it now.
That's a critical lesson that school teaches kids, and I think we should not take that option away from teachers.
Let me know what you think.