Procrastination Panic

Luckily this entry deals not with my habitual procrastination, but rather my students'.

On the first day of class, attached to the syllabus, I give a two month long personal time-line/checklist for my writing students to keep track of their progress on. The time-line indicates that they should have comfortably had their argumentative topic chosen and their research completed two weeks ago. The trouble with time-lines? You have to look at them.

Their drafts are due a week from today. Panic, it seems, has sprung. Most random questions thus far today:

Student A - "I want to do my topic on the dangers of tanning, but I can't find good research talking about how it's bad for your eyes from the library database."
That's because I'm doubting that research exists, and even if it does, this argument is ridiculous.

Student B - "I think I want to do my paper about the end of the world."
Okay...so how is this an argumentative research paper?

In both examples I encouraged these students to rethink and reframe their arguments. We've spent the last several weeks talking about how we break broad topics down into arguable, manageable thesis statements. I've been hammering the point that your research may end up governing the final argument you make, and not the other way around.

Now, I'm hardly a procrastination hater - one of my classes deals with teaching active strategies to avoid it, but I'm as guilty of the vice as anyone else. As an undergrad, I did all my papers the night before. Grad school was even worse, usually with me starting a paper the morning it was due. The difference is that I always knew what I was going to write about, and had the research collected.

Writing this, I can't help but wonder the bigger lesson is: how to write an argumentative research paper, or how to master the academic skills that let you put it off until the last minute, but still get a good grade. Either way, final drafts are due soon, and we'll see what kind of apocalyptic, tanning-bed related papers they've come up with.