Assignments, stress and lack of time

Person working on an assignment (source: Wix Multimedia).

Pros of assignments

First of all, let me start by saying that I think assignments are good. I realise that this blog has become a stack or regular post with various complaints and negativity. I guess it's so much easier to see what doesn't work when you have to reflect about various topics and feel that you don’t have enough time for everything. But back to assignments.

I think assignments are a good way of learning plenty of life skills that aren't even directly related to the specific topic. For example, they usually require a certain amount of research since googling Wikipedia is not where the research ends. Wikipedia is indeed a good way to start, especially if the article is well written. Wikipedia pages generally have a short summary of the topic at the top of the page, a table of contents and a list of references. Sure, everybody can edit these pages, but I've seen many very well written articles with amazing references. I've had teachers who sometimes printed and handed out Wikipedia articles when they felt that the explanation was a lot better than the one provided in the textbook.

Assignments also teach organisation and time management. You shouldn't do them the evening before the deadline if you want to have a stress-free life. In fact, if you underestimate the amount of time that it will take to complete them, you might end up working till 3-4 am. Everybody has underestimated an assignment at some point. That's not bad. You just learn from this experience and try to schedule in more time for the next one. Or you don't and end up pulling a lot of allnighters. I hope my future students will learn from their mistakes, but who knows.

Stress and lack of time

Tired person working on something (source: Wix Multimedia).

What about stress? Lack of time? After all, I promised you stress and lack of time in the title. Here is why. Something that I feel is usually considered when teachers assign projects or assignments is the amount of time it will take students to complete them. However, there is another key element that I feel is only considered very rarely and that is when students will be able to start these projects. When teachers assign projects at the beginning of the year, they don't always take into account that their students will need to have acquired a certain amount of knowledge before they can truly start these assignments.

This is more important than it may seem! If your students have five classes that include assignments, regardless of whether they are supposed to be done in a group or individually, it doesn’t mean that they can evenly distribute said assignments throughout the semester. What usually happens is that they will have to wait until about half of the semester is over to be able to start thinking about them.

I'm not trying to excuse procrastination and general laziness. These are very individual things and are not related to how the assignment is conceived. Some students procrastinate a lot, others procrastinate a bit and there are even some of them who don't procrastinate at all. This is up to each student. I mean situations where assignments have to cover topics A, B, C and D, but topics C and D are placed towards the middle or even end of the second half of the semester, and A and B are only truly finished at the beginning of the second half of the semester. You can probably guess where I'm going with this. It's not always easy or even possible to start writing about A and B if you don't truly have the global view that you're supposed to include in the assignment. The problem is not that one or two assignments are conceived like this. The real problem is when this is the case of most assignments. I think we should try to include when our students will truly be able to start the assignment in our planning of the assignment to avoid unnecessary stress. Most students know which teachers are strict and hard, but fair -even if they may not admit the fair part out loud-, and which ones have unrealistic expectations.

I'm not suggesting treating students as if they were made of very breakable glass. Learning how to deal with stress is part of life. Life isn't always fun and easy. Nevertheless, I think that, as future teachers, we should try to avoid doing things we considered mistakes when we were students ourselves just because we suddenly get the power to do them.

Have you ever had this kind of assignments? Do you consider when your students will be able to start doing them? Feel free to let me know in the comments.