They don't call it reproduction for nothing
When we had our first baby in the house, I was (as well as being quite surprised that they let us go home with a baby with so little testing or teaching) full of how we love life, and are so excited at sharing all the goodness with a new being. Here's Spring! Here's Love! Here's Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwiches!
After a few years, I find myself sharing things of myself that perhaps could have been left behind. Here's procrastination!
I'm one of those people that had to turn in an art history paper the day before high school graduation, and wrote one of my best papers on Latin poetry between 3 am and 5 am. But I don't really recommend this mode of academic life, and will indeed be horrified if my kids fall into a similar pattern.
Nonetheless, during the first "science project"* that my daughter had to do, we traveled a lot in the weeks before the deadline, so instead of working gradually on the project, we were packing and unpacking.
Fortunately, the very day before the deadline, school was out.** So there we are, working 11 hours in a row on classifying rocks. We started with a fun part, gathering rocks near the Potomac River, and using hard rocks to smash the softer rocks. That only took about 2 hours though, leaving us with about nine hours of classifying and writing. It was just me and the kids. She had to label the rocks, choose characteristics for sorting the rocks, and then sort the rocks, and then write up the results of the sorts, while my son was trying to play with her or the rocks. She finally got graduated to her own private work area, with hot chocolate and CD player, and parental work to ban the baby.
By the end, I was plying my daughter with cups of hot chocolate and inspirational talk, "There's nothing to do now but write. I know you are tired, but it is very useful to be able to keep working even when you are tired. You just have to sort the rocks by hardness now and then we can rest! Here, more marshmellows for the hot chocolate?" It wasn't exactly pulling an all-nighter with a coffee pot and cookies, but it was certainly the six year old equivalent. However, she finished, and we practiced telling the story of the rocks and the data, and I think it went as well as a science project as it went as an introduction to the procrastinator's lifestyle.
--Chris
* At TPES, they have these very fun but very labor intensive science projects. I know one parent that claims that their child does them on their own, but I suspect that is a bit exceptional. I know a number of moms that have managed to convince the fathers to ensure the kids does these projects. So far, in our house we are taking turns. On my turn, I didn't touch any of the materials, but I did provide a sort of quality control, and a sort of Socratic method of leading her through the intended steps of rock classification. "So, what's another thing about rocks?" "Color?" "We just finished color. Are there any more?" "Size?" "Ok, what categories of size do you think we'll find among these rocks?"
I also carried the very very heavy rocks from the River to home, and then again to school.
** The Montgomery County schools miss days a lot. Working parents find the schedule amazingly irregular. i sort of like it, since the main thing I'd change about the school is to make it slower and easier. I felt very lucky: during my daughter's first half of Kindergarten there were almost no five day weeks in a row at all. Between teacher work days, the Jewish High Holy Days, and a few other fall holidays, she got to gradually ramp up to a five day "work week."