Sunday nights....

I detest Sunday nights.

Just the dread of starting the "work week"--- I hate the feeling hovering over me. I always say that I will get "everything" I need to get done for the weekend completed on Friday, thus leaving me a worry-free weekend. Completing all my work on Friday generally does not happen. I then have all these aspirations of getting the work done over the course of the weekend, in dribs and drabs... leaving work on Friday, my pseudo-briefcase is brimming with paperwork....so much paperwork that when I make a swift turn with the car, papers go flying out of the briefcase and land on the passenger seat on the floor.

Quick flash forward to our current Sunday night.

Those papers are still on my passenger seat floor.

Agh.

I'd grade them if they weren't shit. My students seem so incredibly unmotivated. I try to give them "meaningful" assignments. Recently, a student put me "on the spot" and asked about the purpose behind the class's weekly vocab assignment. I didn't get offended or angry; I simply told him the purposes of the assignment. He still hasn't handed in any of the weekly vocab assignments.

I feel like no matter what I do, some of these students will still be ridiculously unmotivated. I can't help but feel that some of us teachers have made students this way. We seem to "do everything" for them. I laugh when my colleagues give students a super-precise study guide that maps out the exact format and questions that will be on a future test or quiz. We're not really making them independent are we now?

Back to Sunday nights. They amaze me so much because they are full of procrastination. Depending on the "most important task" of the moment, it's interesting what things I will choose to do with my time other than the actual task. Case in point: i'd rather rake or run miles upon miles instead of doing "work work." And I'm not a fan of raking or running at all. It's just interesting how your mindset about something changes when that "thing" is the alternative to a "thing" you want to do even less.