The Readiness Is All

            Last summer one of my friends – one of my former high school teachers – started a franchise of a tutoring company. I was looking for education-related work experience. She signed me on, and by October when I knew I would be leaving my job at the daycare, I had my first client.

So far all of my clients have been grade twelve students. Each of them has had unique needs, and interestingly enough, all of the things that I learned in teachers college about different learning styles can be put into practice in a one-on-one situation. But finding out how a student learns is just the first step to helping them reach their academic goals. One thing that I have noticed is that many students need a little bit of help getting organized.

Although I would never do this in a formal academic piece of writing, here I am going to make a sweeping generalization: student success can be greatly improved for some students if they learn how to organize their lives. There is a reason why schools provide students with agendas, and that is because as life gets busier, they need to get organized. This is one of those “implicit curriculum” things that I learned about in teachers college.

Sometimes I feel like a hypocrite when I chastise my students for being disorganized or losing track of due dates. The only assignments I have ever handed in on time, I think, were my major research projects for my B.A and M.A, and everything in teachers college. It took me until my eighth year of university to get organized. I don’t want my students to finally get a handle on things when they are in their mid-twenties; it would be so much more beneficial for them to develop these skills now.

At the moment I am writing from my very own classroom, in which I teach Grade Twelve English. My students are writing a quiz on Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Some scholars argue that Hamlet’s problem was that he procrastinated and over-thought his actions. Granted, the consequences of Hamlet’s actions would have been far greater than losing 2% a day on a late assignment, but the fact that procrastination (coupled with a desire for revenge) was turned into a tragic flaw really says something. “The readiness is all”, says Hamlet in the final scene of the play. Again, I realize the gravity of Hamlet’s words within their own context, but there is a lesson to be extrapolated here.

Being organized, using an agenda/day-planner has proved invaluable in the past few months. Between volunteer work, tutoring sessions, and teaching a class, my agenda and my wall calendar are the best tools that I have. This is a concept that I am trying – relentlessly trying – to get my students to understand. That way I can avoid conversations like the one I had earlier today:

Student: "Miss do we have a quiz today?"
Me: "Yes."
Student: "But I didn't know!"
Me: "I reminded you last class, I wrote it on the board, and it has been posted on the website since just after March break."
Student: "Awww. Is it hard?"
Me: "If you didn't study or do your homework, yes. Yes it is."

Life is a lot harder if you’re unprepared. Just ask Hamlet.