It’s impossible. It’s something that students suffer from throughout their years of academics. The curse that I am talking about is the curse of the long-term assignment.

We all get them. Teachers like to put this burden on us, and at the beginning, we, as students, love to get them. Think about it. We receive the syllabus for the class and notice that we have a long-term assignment that represents a hefty chunk of our overall grade. The best part about it is that they’re not due right away, and we have pretty much all semester to do it. So, we put it on the back burner and concentrate on the more recent assignments.

If we really worked on the long term ones a little at a time, we could probably bang out a solid “A” paper or project. But something internal kicks in that prevents us from jumping ahead of the game and being on top of things: laziness.

Laziness is something that has been inherent in humans since the dawn of time. It’s the one thing that prevents average students from becoming great students. During the week, we are trying to juggle short-term daily assignments with part time jobs, television, Ebay addictions, or video game fixations. We just don’t have the time during the week to do that reading or research that slowly lifts the long-term burden off our shoulders.

Then comes the weekend. The weekend presents itself as a period of time that, if used wisely, could produce an abundance of excellent, well planned work. But what is the weekend really? It’s a time where we don’t have to be thinking about school. It’s a nice two-day break where school work is the least of our concerns. Instead of being productive during this 48-hour span, we are exploring the city, shopping, creating hangovers, or spending entire days nursing them; just to name a few things. It’s supposed to be a time of rest and relaxation, not hectic homework frenzy.

The worst of the long terms assignments are the dreaded group work and group presentation assignments. You all know what I’m talking about. This is when the teacher talks about the assignment, then randomly splits you up into four or five groups for the project. Obviously, you always end up in a group of complete strangers, away from your friends in that class. Then, there’s that awkward meeting time when you have to meet your group and trade phone numbers. It’s better to go the e-mail route, phone numbers can get a little weird and are usually never used for contact anyways.

So basically, for this assignment you have all semester, but only use the class time specifically allotted to group work to try and get it all done. When that doesn’t work, you have to scramble to meet up with each other a few days before the project is due. But, like always, the stress factor can get high on the scale during this mad dash.

So, how do we get over this laziness and unwillingness to take control of our own academic destinies? I would have to guess the answer lies somewhat in the motivation and initiative factor. A co-worker of mine once told me that I “do pretty good work when I actually do it.” This isn’t bragging, it’s showing that I fall victim to the laziness bug just like everyone else. We put things off for so long so that we have the lightest possible load of work for the present. Why take on that extra long-term assignment when it isn’t even due for another couple of months? This is a great debate and mystery that will live on for years to come. We stress ourselves out to the max and have ourselves praying for coop to come sooner than later. That way when coop finally arrives, we can start putting off long-term assignments there that we’re actually getting paid to complete.