Summer Homework (and procrastination) by Akshat Iyer

Summer is a time in which kids of all ages get to chill out and escape the grasp of education for some free time, be it with their friends, family, or being antisocial in front of an electronic device like me. However, this doesn't mean that work doesn't exist in the summer. Starting the summer going into freshman year of high school, students who are taking honors classes have to do something over the summer, whether it be read a book, or write an essay, or both. These assignments are meant to be a big part of their grade, and are normally designed to be done throughout the summer in small chunks. However, for most people, they wait until the week before, or worse, the night before it is due. This is called procrastination. Procrastination follows us around everywhere, even outside of school. The things that don't provide you the gratification can wait until the last minute. I personally like Tim Urban's analogy that he made in his Ted Talk. In humans, we have three parts of the brain. One part of the brain, is the rational decision maker. This part of the brain is the part that actually thinks about the decisions that are needed to be made in the future. However, procrastination comes in when the "instant gratification monkey" comes into play. All he (or she, whatever you prefer) wants to do is to get instant gratification through things that don't necessarily have anything to do with what the rational part of your brain wants to do. This is where procrastination comes in. Whenever you have a deadline, the rational part of your brain wants to get something done, however, the monkey inside of your brain wants to do it's own thing. These symbols make it very easy to understand the concept of procrastination, but when do you stop procrastinating and get the job done? The job gets done when the panic monster appears. The panic monster scares the monkey away from gratifying you, and lets the rational part of your brain work instead of being gratified with more useless things. This is why procrastination is so hard to escape from. Through this, we can infer that procrastination is more likely to happen when people have many forms of easy, but useless, gratification. Video games are an example. They give you the gratification that you need, but they won't help you complete your task in any way possible. However, the truly deadly combination comes when you pair that up with something you REALLY don't want to do. This summer, our history class was assigned to read American Nations, a history of the eleven rival regions of America. The title of this book may intrigue you at first, but unless you are really into absorbing an amount of information an encyclopedia can't hold, then stay away. This book is a trap, because of the amount of facts that is put in it. It makes you want to throw this book far, far away, where nobody will ever see it (that's what my friend did to his summer reading book last year. It was quite comedic, when he casually grabbed his summer reading book and scored a 3 pointer with the garbage can). Anyways, back to procrastination. This summer reading experience for me has been plagued by the gratification monkey for the entire summer except for the last week of summer, in which I started having nightmares of not finishing it and not turning it in. However, my other friends started working on it later. School started on a Thursday, and the assignment was due on Friday. A number of my friends both started, and finished said assignment on Thursday, some pulling all-nighters to get it done.

Are teachers aware of procrastination? Yes, they are! Is summer homework going to be procrastinated on? Yes it is! Are teachers going to care? As of now, I don't think teachers care. Why do teachers assign a summer assignment, when they know that all of their students are going to start working on it a week before school starts? There might be some productive people out there (I can only name 2) but that is just a minority. Summer homework, in my honest and humble and ranting and run-on-ish opinion, shouldn't be assigned, or if it is assigned, make it manageable for the procrastinators. The gratification monkey is a part of every human being, whether you like it or not, and that will always cause the gratification monkey to win.

(Here is an art gallery down below of all of my ranting for this summer)

(Look at this book! Does it look good? No! Please, don't read this in your spare time... Do something better in your life)

(Whoop - dee - doo, another map for you. Time to die, because all things go awry, when you are reading this book)

Procrastination Haiku by Akshat Iyer

Procrastination,

You can't stop it, no one can,

(Hold on, I'll write the last line... or maybe later... or maybe a liiittle bit later. Mom, please wait, I'll finish it later! Jeez, sorry, she was on my tail.)