“I’ll do it at home, I can’t concentrate in a classroom.”

The excuses are endless— “It’s too loud to write,” “it’s too quiet and I work better at home,” or my personal favorite—” I work better under pressure, so I’ll wait until the night before.”

Regardless of the amount of rigor required to complete a blog post or essay, my students come up with excuses to not work in class. I’m not stupid, I see past the winning. My students just want to leave class early, and I don’t necessarily blame them, especially if it’s a Friday. However, it still doesn’t frustrate me any less. The majority of my students are just lazy, and don’t take the time to sit down and create a rough draft or edit before their final is due.

The lack of commitment to their writing might lay in the grading contract— they know they can do the bare minimum as long as they check all the boxes on the rubric. I’m not exactly sure how to combat the issue. Maybe I could do writing workshops with them, or talk one-on-one about their writing, or even go over plagiarism again (a lot of my students seem completely ignorant to what constitutes plagiarism).

I think the reason for my students’ apathetic view on writing, besides the grading contract, could just be the way the class is structured as a whole. In conferences, a lot of students (mainly former AP kids) expressed extreme disappointment that this classroom isn’t set up like a traditional English class. We’re not reading novels, examining critical texts, or writing about elements of poetry, and that can be puzzling and upsetting for many students. I tried to explain to them that the class is set up in a way that caters to all writing levels and works to establish literacy in diverse sectors, like research. Even with that explanation, at least half of my students remained disappointed.

It’s interesting to see how my students’ attitudes towards writing have changed over the quarter. Initially, the AP kids came in extremely confident, and the other students were terrified to write. The non-AP students belittled their work and often expressed how terrible they are as writers, while the AP students made it very clear that they were “experts” in writing.

Over the quarter, the majority of non-AP students have become excited for the research project, while the former AP students lament about not reading novels in the class. However, both of the groups procrastinate just as much, and I still don’t know what to do about it.