The Vicious Cycle of Half-Assery
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The vicious cycle of half-assery:
- You half-ass it
- It takes so long and goes so slowly that you get bored and demotivated and half-ass your half-assery
- Back to step 1, except this time you're quarter-assing it
This is not the kind of compounding you want.
This vicious cycle of half-assery may sound funny, it may sound like a joke, but I’m dead serious. I’ve seen it happen with students in person back when I was teaching.
If you let them, many would drift from knocking out their assigned 40 XP in a 50-minute class period, to 20 XP because they’re goofing off half the time, to 10 XP because they’re goofing off three quarters of the time.
I really had to stay on top of them and hold them accountable for doing their work and not goofing off too much.
My classroom rule was that students can socialize and goof around here and there, but they need to knock out at least 20-30 XP during the 50-minute class period and then do the remaining 10-20 XP for homework.
If a student drifted below 20 XP per day, and/or if they complained to their parents about having too much homework, I would sit next them the next class and force them to focus.
And then they would magically get all 40 XP done in class purely as a result of staying on task, working problems out on paper, etc., which would make the parent realize that the kid was just making excuses to try to get out of the very little work that they had to do.
Also saw other teachers who did not stay on top of their students, the compounding of half-assery would take place, and the amount of work that many students did would follow an exponential decay trajectory down to approximately zero.
(That is, until the end of the semester, when they’d be way behind, and would lobby for grade deals that ultimately amounted to “if I work really hard week and get a quarter of the work done that I was supposed to do this semester, can I have a decent grade?”.
And if the teacher was predisposed to let the half-assery spiral out of control without communicating and demonstrating to the student/parents what was happening and what the student was falling into, then they were also predisposed to accept the inflated grade deal.)
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