| Another installment in the continuing story of Bungalo Bill ... |
[Apr. 9th, 2003|12:19 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | determined | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Santana - Shaman | ] |
I am taking charge of my life. I gave a rousing speech to my home-school Computers class. They had been given a simple assignment to familiarize them with entering text into MS Word and formatting the paragraphs for 1/2" indentation. Not a very big assignment especially considering that I suggested that they combine it with one of their other other assignments. Then they went on spring break.
Two weeks later, they show up without the assignment. They have written the paper that they were going to use as content but they haven't entered it into the computer. The kicker here is that I see these kids practically every day. They could have used my computer to do the assignment. They could have told me their computer wasn't working and I would have helped them get it working.
Their mother was very apologetic. I told her that I was holding them responsible for getting their own assignments. Then I told the kids that we could either have the class or not. I wouldn't get my feelings hurt if they didn't want to have the class but if they did want to have the class I expected them to do the assignments.
They were shocked. No one had ever been that blunt with them. They got busy and we had a good class.
Since then I have been thinking about what I told them. I have to challenge myself to adhere to the same standards. If I intend to do a thing I need to quit procrastinating and get on with it. Or at least be honest with myself and decide that I don't intend to do it after all.
I also gave the peanut gallery a lecture on planning and re-planning. I need to heed my own advice there. So often I come up with a really good game plan and as it slowly falls apart as it inevitably does, I just give up in frustration instead of sitting down and investing the effort in re-planning. |
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