Everyone’s familiar with the effects the COVID-19 pandemic has had on our society. What we considered to be regular, everyday life stopped in its tracks. Schools and offices closed and hospitals were overwhelmed with Covid cases. In the midst of this global outbreak, another, unassuming disease had taken root, one that affected our academic skills instead of our health.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, over 7 in 10 schools moved to online learning in 2020 as a response to the burgeoning pandemic. This transition meant that students were no longer offered in-person instruction, and instead found their education exclusively in the form of virtual meetings and their computers. The distance learning model was certainly a better alternative to a prolonged educational hiatus, but it wasn’t perfect.
With online learning, the emphasis on deadlines was relaxed as students only attended a few minutes of class a day, with much more free time to do work at home, surrounded by a distracting and attention-grabbing environment. This abrupt shift to an unconventional learning environment, combined with less monitoring from educators, led to some students feeling like there was less accountability for them to consistently meet deadlines for assignments. Recognizing the struggles that students were facing with adjusting, teachers also lessened the priority of timeliness in grading, and this priority shift has remained in many students’ habits since.
“I think that deadlines are very helpful and that — something that I should work on — is being more on time because I always turn my things in, not on time,” Sauvi Coon, a junior at Ida B. Wells said. “I never turned anything in during distance learning, and I feel like because of that, I had poor grades freshman and sophomore year not turning stuff in on time… It didn’t really matter. You weren’t in person.”
This trend among middle school and high school students emerged during the times of distance learning, and it’s been carried over into today. Penalties for submitting assignments late have been common practice since before the lockdown, yet they don’t seem to be deterring students from their recently-exasperated habits of procrastination. In the last week of the school year, you can still find students who have for one reason or another been lagging behind, desperately scrambling to complete assignments with due dates weeks or months old.
“I know myself, and I think most teachers, were more flexible,” language arts teacher Kevin Kilgour said. “Basically, to a degree, we didn’t have any set deadlines other than end of term deadlines during the pandemic. I think shifting back into a world where it is important to do things in a timely fashion has been difficult for some people.”
While deadlines may always feel like the enemy of the procrastinating student, they are more helpful than you might think. Without a deadline set in stone, students would likely give into procrastination and do all of their work near the end of the semester in a rush to catch up on all their missing assignments. This inevitably creates extra strain on teachers to grade late submissions. With deadlines, it’s easier for students to complete assignments in a timely manner. Staying on schedule will allow students and teachers to have a healthy and consistently manageable amount of work. Adding late penalties to assignments creates accountability and an incentive for students to complete their assignments on time, benefitting both the student and the teacher in the long run.
“There is a big struggle with turning work in on time, but I also kind of feel like at this point, most of those adjustments have been made, or are definitely improving. People are recognizing why deadlines matter, and are much more disciplined at meeting them,” Kilgour said.
Instead of thinking of deadlines as suffocating, students may benefit from shifting their perspectives. Deadlines can help you organize your time and efforts so you can focus on meeting goals in a realistic and timely manner, instead of feeling overwhelmed and swamped with work that keeps piling up. Don’t let deadlines be the death of you!
