Your child has waited to the last minute to complete a project. It’s due tomorrow and it’s 10:30.
Do you let the child stay home and finish it the next day? or
Do you make him/her go to school with the project unfinished and suffer the consequences of a bad grade.
There are two ways to look at this and both require some good coaching.
- If this is the first time they have been caught in this situation, I would use it as a learning experience.
My youngest daughter found herself in this situation at 10:30 on a Thursday night. She had not planned on the amount of time it would take to type her paper. She was a novice at typing, as they didn’t start keyboarding until sixth grade. She was sitting at the computer, crying, “I’ll never finish this. Can you help me?”
I never was an enabler, but what she was experiencing was a result of having never had to type a project before. She had no clue as to how much time was required to do the typing. I didn’t want her to think she could abuse my time, yet I saw a wonderful teaching opportunity. This is how the intervention went:
“I am not happy that you want me to stay up and type this paper. I have to get up early tomorrow and I didn’t plan on this. How do you feel about the situation you are in?”
“I am mad at myself. I didn’t think typing would take me so much time.”
“I know you haven’t done this before, so I will help you this time, but don’t expect me to next time. What are you going to do to avoid this again?”
“I’m going to start typing two days before it is due.”
“In that case, show me what you want to have typed and I will do it for this time. Now you know how much time you need to allow for typing. That should help you in your planning next time.”
“Thank you Mom. I promise I won’t do this again.”
After the project was returned, we sat down and did a little self-evaluation session. In it, we discussed the steps she had taken and if she had allowed enough time for each of them. I asked her what she learned from her experience and her answer was very mature, “I think next time, I will need to add a couple of days to each step just in case something happens that I didn’t expect.”
She held to her promise. Did she come up short due to other reasons she hadn’t anticipated? Absolutely. But because of this, she did backwards planning with the next project and padded each part of the project to allow for glitches.
2. If this is a repeated infraction and intervention has been offered, don’t let the children stay home and require that they go to school with the incomplete assignment. Follow it with a self-evaluation to determine what happened to get them in the spot they were in and require them to come up with some solutions to avoid the situation again.
Get them in touch with how it feels to be in this spot, and ask, “Do you want to feel like this again? Then what can you do to avoid it.”
Poor planning is not their fault if they have never been taught how to “Backwards Plan.” To a sixth grader, a month seems like an eternity. It creeps up on them. If the project had started with some backwards planning, I guarantee the student would not be waiting to the last minute.