Growth Looks Different at Different Ages

Through my emails with Shawn I have realized, and perhaps remembered, that a freshman student lives on a different time frame than other students and people in general. His utterance of pulling his failing grades to passing in a single sentence seems to have been typed with relative ease where I seemed to have had a near heart attack when I read it. I think it is just another example of the pace that a high school student lives.

 

This made even more aware to me when I had the opportunity to shadow with Shawn. I had forgotten the fast paced scurrying between classes, volleying for seats, shuffling books and materials, and the relentless assault on the senses that accompanies high school; lockers banging, students laughing, books dropping, pencils dropping, everything dropping, lights off, lights on, notes out, desks cleared, chairs in, the constant movement is endless. The students live in this high paced environment and learn to survive knowing that life can and will change minute to minute.

 

I think sometimes this can be detrimental as students always think there is more time and more opportunity left to “fix” a situation; to bring up a grade or to rewrite a paper. And yet, it also is creating students who can think fast on their feet and are used to constant motion and adjusting on the fly. Only time will tell if this generation benefits or is hurt by this way of life.

 

In my teaching I am hoping to combat this a bit by helping students manage their time better. Having larger projects broken up into smaller pieces with individual deadlines for each piece allows students to have the opportunity to slow their lives down a bit and meet these deadlines thereby gaining more and more confidence. Time management is skill just like laboratory skills or test taking. It is one that students often need help developing. Besides breaking projects into smaller pieces, helping students organize class material and clearly designating areas where homework, test dates and other important material is located will also help students develop good time management skills.