better never than late

So my favorite teacher in high school had several favorite sayings. One of which was a play on a cliche, "Better never than late." He'd usually say it when people came to class late.

But over the semester I've been thinking a lot about late policies and deadlines. We're all just so lazy, it's really tricky to come up with a way to get kids to do their projects well and do them on time, because every way I've seen didn't really work. And me being chief among procrastinators, I'm trying to be real and a little bit pessimistic about what really works.

One of the ways teachers do it is to simply give a project deadline really far away and tell them to do it, maybe even remind them why they're worried all semester. Naturally the majority of the class waits until the last moment to finish it. Then again, D&C 84:85 says, "Neither take ye thought beforehand what ye shall say; but treasure up in your minds continually the words of life, and it shall be given you in the very hour that portion that shall be meted unto every man." This was kind of the lifeblood scripture for me on my mission, and has sort of turned into a procrastinator's mantra as well. In the realm of creativity, inspiration is key. To treasure up a project in your mind is basically to worry, to keep your eyes open, to dabble here and there. And when it comes down to crunch time, brilliant ideas will seem to come out of nowhere. But they don't come out of nowhere, they're coming from the buildup of ideas beforehand, your brain finds one from the store and gives it to you as a possible solution.

Then again, maybe a lot of kids don't think like me. In fact, I know most people don't think like me.

Another way is to split the project up into smaller projects that are due at certain checkpoints throughout the semester. Here the problem is that often creativity doesn't happen like that. Also, people end up doing something crappy just to have something done to turn in.

Back to the supposed topic: late work and deadlines. I keep thinking of examples that each bring me back to the same conclusion: people work differently. I thrive on having just one final project to turn in. I would rather have just one thing and one date to worry about than several little things and several dates. Other people might benefit from the babysitting step-by-step process of projects. So I suppose an option would be to split the grading of a project up. For those who just want one project to turn in, they have a rubric that tells them what categories will be graded. For the other bunch, they can turn in smaller assignments that align with each of those categories and provide the same grade.

This is already a pretty long post as it is so I won't elaborate yet. It's an idea at the least.