Procrastination

If you were to look up procrastination in the dictionary, this is the lovely face you would see smiling back at you.





Last week was finals week for the college set. I can’t believe I know this, but I do. I know this because I have a kid in college. I am still not sure how that happened. Will has been slogging through Spanish 1 and 2 this year. Spanish 1 was hard for him last semester but he did fine. Spanish 2 this semester about did him in. Verb conjugation and agreement was the culprit. Isn’t verb conjugation and agreement always the culprit? Is verb conjugation and verb agreement the same thing? Humm, perhaps I should ask the student taking Spanish. Oh yeah. He probably won’t answer me because he has sworn off Spanish forever.

He had a very good professor who did everything but give him points. He allowed him extra credit for everything he could think of. He had him going to Spanish movies at a Latina cultural center (not hard to find in DFW) he had him bringing in canned goods for the food drive (not sure how that pertains to Spanish but whatever) he gave him every single opportunity to pass this class that he could think of.

And yet, it came down to…pass the final=pass the class, fail the final=fail the class. He failed the final. Those darn disagreeing verbs! We thought all was lost. But wait? An email from the prof. The email said that Will had from Monday afternoon (evening when he got the email) to Wed at noon to do as much online extra credit as he could to pass the class. The prof outlined exactly how much he needed to do to bring it up to passing. It was a lot. Now ask me why Will was not doing this online extra credit all semester? Yes, excellent question. One I asked as well. Only to get the typical teenage ‘I donno’.

Will had just come home from work where he had signed up for extra hours now that he was done with school. He had to call his boss and back out of one shift. He worked a bit on the extra credit, and then went to bed. He got up, worked a bit on Tuesday morning then went to work. He came home from work late Tuesday afternoon and hit the computer. He came out for dinner then went back to work. His dad and I went to bed and he was still working.

Turns out, he worked all night! He was supposed to show up at work at 10 am on Wednesday and had to call his boss and tell him he’d be late. He was just 2 lessons away from being done. He finally finished and went to work at 11. (Remember NO SLEEP ALL NIGHT). He came home at 7, then went to youth group. (His choice, I told him to go to bed!) He came home from youth at 11 and finally went to bed. He got up again at 6am and went to work all day. Working hard outside landscaping work! HOW do they do it? I’d be a walking mess with only 7 hours if sleep in 2 days! TEENAGERS!

We didn’t hear until Thursday afternoon that he did indeed pass the class with a 70.95%. Cut it close much? Sheesh! We’re all exceedingly happy that he does not EVER have to take any more Spanish! In fact I think it will be a good long time before he stops cringing when he hears the Spanish language being spoken.