Time Management

I was in my classroom at 7PM last night, the latest I've remained (save Parent Night) so far this year. My wife had a very long day at the office and as we carpool, it meant a long day for me, too. Needless to say, I got a great deal done - planning, papers graded, and so forth.

While I was grading papers, I noticed all of a sudden that I was reading the same thing over and over and over again. I went through nine student papers before the words started to change on me. And then it hit me: the previous nine had all copied from one another.

As unsettling as this sounds (or perhaps doesn't sound to experienced educators), consider that I have very strict consequences for cheaters and this class has seen me deal with cheaters before. Instead of a single grade (for instance, 75 or 90 or 0), I give cheaters two 0s for cheating (sort of as if they failed to turn in two assignments), detention, and I call their parents. And, of course, I have to deal with this tomorrow because the cheaters are all at work today. Fine.

I take a step back and ask myself, "Why would they do this?" Is my work too hard? I don't think it is, and the students do well enough in discussion... Certainly they could stand to spend more time on it - Hammurabi's Code is not the easiest thing in the world to understand. It isn't rocket science, certainly, but it isn't "Hop on Pop" or "Green Eggs & Ham," either.

I decided, for sake of argument, that the zeros I have in my gradebook and the homework that's getting done at school and the copying is all the result of poor time management. No one has ever taken it upon themselves to explain to these kids that their purpose is school. Period.

So I did that with all of the other classes today and I will do it with the Thursday work group tomorrow. It began like this:

"What time do you get up in the morning?" I received differing answers depending on distance from school, but the mode of answers was 6AM. So I told them, "subtract 8 hours from whatever time you get up and that is your new bedtime. You have to get 8 hours of sleep everynight." For some of my students, it was as if I had told them they had to go home tonight and drown some kittens. "Impossible!" They screamed. "But I go to bed at midnight!" yelled another.

"Not anymore you don't," was my reply. I told them I want them, for a grade, to write out their "from now on" afternoon schedules and have them go from 3PM to their "new" bedtime. And I told them that from now on, their names are now, "First Name Last Name, College Prep Student", not "FN LN, Basketball Player" or "... TV Watcher" or what have you. There was much disquiet in all of them, but one group had the nerve to insist they already know how to time manage. My response was simple: "Not one person in this room has an A in this class. To a person, it is because you are missing homework. You do not know how to time manage." They closed their mouths (those who jaws weren't on the floor) and got to work on their schedules.

I felt vindicated in the first class I did this in when one of my students informed me that he plays for a basketball team and that he has practice every night from 6PM to 9PM. When I told him that I was beginning to understand why he was missing so much work and why his quiz grades were not up to what I consider him capable of, he looked puzzled. I told him to ask his coach to let him miss some practice time. When he said that he'd be off the team for that, I told him that he needed to make an informed choice for himself: scale back (or quit) basketball and devote more time to his studies, or face the prospect of failing Religion and Western Civilization. It hit him hard, but no one had ever said this to him before. I hope he doesn't have to quit basketball, but all of my kids obviously need to get a handle on their time.

So with that, I fall one day further behind in my quest to reach the end of the Second World War before the middle of June. But I'm hoping that it wasn't "time wasted."