Last week, Professor Alberto Ricciardo arrived at his theoretical thermodynamics class to find most of his students feverishly typing away on their laptops. When he asked his students what they were doing, he found out that they were scrambling to complete their assignment that was due that day, despite the fact that is was assigned over a month prior.
The experience of Ricciardo and his students is far from unique. Truly, procrastination is a plague that affects teachers and students alike. Yet some have put forward solutions to this problem.
An on-campus society called the Just Don’t Do It Club swears off all forms of homework, claiming that it serves no purpose other than to make students miserable. While many students say they find Just Don’t Do It’s message appealing, the club struggles to gain traction and stay alive. This is due to the club’s extremely high turnover rate, owing to members constantly being denied readmission as a result of its members’ imploded GPAs.
Some have turned to drugs, instead. A new substance available to those in the know called Clockstopper slows down users’ perception of time. Anonymous users claim that it buys them crucial time to think and plan when doing assignments on the night (or morning) before. However, like most illicit drugs, there are negative side-effects. In Clockstopper’s case, users begin to hallucinate visions of alternate universes, all of them worse than our own. Eventually, prolonged use results in users losing all sense of time and reality, an experience said to be similar to browsing the internet, but more so.
Unfortunately, hallucination is still a risk even if you don’t take drugs. One anonymous student stayed up all night trying to complete four major assignments in as many days. Toward the end, she attempted to write her last essay on what she thought was her laptop, but was in fact a very angry Canada goose.
One student named Henry Gregory Swell claims to have invented a means of travelling through time, which he used to go back in time and badger himself into doing his schoolwork. Swell would not share his method of time travel, nor did he use it further because on one of his jaunts into the past, he ended up creating a bizarre alternate timeline where Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, and has been unable to fix the timeline. Swell says that getting good grades is not worth creating dystopian futures.
A much more practical and down-to-earth solution was proposed by Dr. Wilhelmina Sanders of UFV, who after years of study and research claims to have found a foolproof method of defeating procrastination once and for all. She is due to hold a guest lecture at Evered Hall. Unfortunately, her scheduled appearance has been postponed 19 times in a row, with no established date in sight.
In the end, the student’s best bet is probably either counselling, which can be had an average of one hour every two weeks, barring cancellations, or the Long Night Against Procrastination, which is held every semester around exam time. According to reports from past attendees, the Long Night Against Procrastination makes a welcome change of pace from the Long Night Because of Procrastination.
Image: Flickr
