20190415.0430

Today is, of course, Tax Day in the United States. Filings are expected to have been made by the time today ends, and there will be many who will rush to make their filings in the next hours, hoping that they will get things done when they are supposed to after having waited months while doing nothing, not even to organize in some fashion the piles of papers they have stuffed into shoeboxes. Seeing such, because I have worked in and for a tax office for some time now, and I do not find it difficult to imagine what kind of students the people were who now hasten to get things done and will find that matters are not to their liking.
Across the years of my teaching, nearly thirteen years at this point, I have seen the tendency to put off until the last moment what was announced as due long before. Student after student, class after class, institution after institution, students I have had have waited--not all, but more than should--until the day before a thing is due or the day that it is due to work on long-assigned tasks, scrambling to gather together what is needed and hoping that it will pass muster. For me, it rarely does, and I have often returned the comment that the work "reads as if composed in haste, which is not helpful." For there is a difference between doing things swiftly and rushing through them, and it is in more than the nomenclature.
I am not immune to such things, of course. There are any number of writing tasks I have before me, have had, that I ought to have worked on before now. Some of them will demand attention sooner than I realize, and I will work through them more quickly than they deserve. But that I recognize a failing in myself does not mean I am wrong to point it out in others, and I will still be done with my tasks in plenty of time; they are not due tomorrow, the things I have yet to do. And I am working with things with which I have long worked; they are familiar, intimately known, regarded well. They are not crammed into shoeboxes and hidden away, but face me daily, prominent in my office; I have given them thought, even if I have not put words to page for them just yet.
My own taxes are done, and with plenty of time to spare. I even expect money back, though I know it will take a while; I've paid my share and more, and will again. I could hope the same could be said for others, but I know it's true for fewer than it ought to be...