The Catalyst

By Chase Martin, Photo Editor

Perhaps four fingers are better than five? Are shoes an unnecessary invention for the weak at sole? In the wee hours of the morning one begins to ponder the most eccentric concepts of the mind’s inner workings, including exceptionally outlandish puns. Most have experienced it: getting home exactly at the family dinner hour, being sucked into the realm of an endlessly addicting television drama, trying to listen and grow accustomed to the latest artist at the top of your friend playlists, and before you know it, the next school day is less than ten hours away and you have a large amount of work to do that was set aside during class – to be done at a later date. Well that date did come, much later into the night.

Staying up late into the night is perhaps the most customary consequence resulting from procrastination. The average American teenager needs approximately nine and a half hours of sleep to function at a normal level for the next day, says the American Sleep Disorder Association. However, the issue is that once all or most homework is factored into a teen’s evening, it’s likely that they are not getting to sleep until well past ten o’clock. Even if a student can wake up at seven in the morning, only 25 minutes before the school bell promptly signals the start to a new day, this allows only nine hours for sleep.

So what leads to this loss of time late in the day? Only a few years ago, television was the main source of all complaints regarding the lack of work ethic and determination in teenagers. However, in today’s cyber world, teenagers have access to almost everything on television by just logging onto the World Wide Web.

So let us again revisit the day of a teen: after school you use your cell phone with internet access to tell your Facebook friends how amazingly awe-inspiring the food at Sonic is, or Twitter your latest revelation on the meaning of the world. You once again return to the domain of your home only to make the straightest possible line towards the computer. It’s this invasion of the cyber world that has conceivably led to the decline of a teenager’s possibly “normal” study hours.

Even though the problem leading many teens to procrastination is their intimate relationship with technology, it’s not feasible in any way to completely eliminate it from a student’s life. For one, technology is an essential learning tool for every student, and the social networking that comes along with this technology can be just as beneficial to a teenager’s development. Therefore, it’s hard to see a solution to a problem that actually has some benefits in the first place; when it comes down to it, it’s the basic theme of student procrastination that must be solved.

And it is in this that lays the heart of the issue: motivation. For many, high school is just a means to meet and end, with that end being college education. For this reason, they only try to accomplish what is necessary to get them to the next level. It seems that this is the real center of the issue. Because this desire to “get there” seems to outweigh the desire to learn, learning for the sake of enhancing one’s knowledge has faded throughout many levels of education.

Teenagers have fulfilling lives that are often scheduled to the max, working down to each new hour and new minute. Even with these schedules inhibited by new technology and social interactions, it’s ultimately up to the student to take care of their own motivation.

Perhaps the most probable way for this to occur is through a combination of meeting an end with having a learning attitude. High school can often feel senseless when compared to the future of a college education or a future career. But it’s this unnecessary attitude towards school that originally provokes procrastination. In order to prevent this, the student must look at what they learn as something that they will not have to relearn to further themselves in the future. If they learn it now, they will have more time to learn greater necessities when they are truly necessary. High school may just be a means to an end, but the learning can also save precious time on whatever is to come. A sense of learning for the sake of just learning may allow students to better their education and time management. Focus on the present while planning for the future.