"What should you have been taught in the LIB100 class?" queries the bulletin board.
See, I do a lot of work in Clemson University's library, down in the basement next to the Congressional reports from the 1880s and the shelves of appendices to the Iran-Contra investigation, and the entrance on the floor above is dominated by a bulletin board on which students are asked a different question each week, ranging from "Give us a midterm assignment!" to the above. Rainbow sticky notes and markers are provided for answering. I stop and read them every Monday; they're like one of those witty, brilliant Facebook or Twitter conversations in concrete form.
My second-favorite answer was this gem of wisdom: "That procrastination is inevitable ... grab a coffee + embrace it." This is one of those important lessons I learned in college that it's hard to convey. Sometimes, you just work best under pressure. Sometimes a task needs to be completed in one marathon block.
Interestingly enough, the students who best understand this, I've found, are ex-military men. I assist a few in the Writing Center, and generally they're not coming in an hour before the paper is due wanting to be told how to make it an A, but coming in a couple of days before with a polished product waiting for critiques.
In every tutoring position I've had, I've realized that moral support is a massive part of my function. My entering freshmen, smart kids who'd happened to flunk the Writing Placement Exam for one reason or another, had overall much higher GPAs than freshmen who didn't have tutoring; a success for the pilot program I was working for. They often found my editing and chatting about their topics useful. And yet I'm tempted to suspect that a significant part of their grade increase might have been as a result of having someone to ask where they could go to get the free cough drops and stress balls, what recourse they had if they were being taught by an incompetent TA (or a competent TA and a lazy professor) -- someone whose dad was the football captain in '85 at the high school where they graduated in '10, someone who would listen as they talked about their depression over being unable to bridesmaid at their sister's wedding due to an exam -- someone to suggest a mediator for roommate disputes. Someone, in short, to talk to.
I'm less patient these days with students who spend their half-hour appointments telling me how hard everything is ("It's college. College is hard," I want to say. "Did you expect this was easy? Do you think I did it because it was a cake walk?"). Yet I understand that this is part of my job -- not as large a part as some students like to believe, but an important part, like the secretarial work and plagiarism reports that also form part of my week.
And yet -- to circle back toward one of my points -- ex-military students don't tend to need this. The student who recently returned from his tour in Iraq and who comes in with a bleakly and elegantly phrased cause-and-effect paper about how his PTSD has affected his wife doesn't want my sympathy, he wants me to help find comma splices. He wants a good grade, not a shoulder. The man who served for 29 years doing First Aid training is far more interested in whether he wants "quicker" or "more quickly" than he is in telling me how difficult it is to be a returning student of non-traditional age. I'm not saying these issues aren't hard or deserving of support, only that it's nice to be helping people by providing them with my expertise, not by functioning as a listening ear that anyone could be.
It was the above-mentioned First Aid trainer who explained to me why military students don't seem to have a problem with procrastination. "You don't get advance notice," he told me. "You're given a project and you do it now, and if you complain you end up with more work and the same deadline."
"So you don't have the same trouble handling the stress of it?" I asked.
"None at all. This is business as usual. You get the work, you do the work as best you can in the time you have."
Bravo, sir! That's a healthy attitude for all college students to adopt. Procrastination can be treated as scheduling if a student is well-acquainted with his or her working pace and ability to cope with the stress of the fast-approaching deadline. Now that's a real life skill -- one that I'm still developing as I learn how much copywriting I can actually do in a given period.
My favorite note on that board, however, wasn't actually the one about procrastination. It was the green one that asserted that LIB100 should teach students how to "bullseye Whomprats with a T130." A blue one below advised the original sticky-noter to turn off his targeting computer.
The world isn't doomed.
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