"Four months before that emergency landing, Southwest had agreed to pay $7.5 million to settle charges that it operated planes that had missed required safety inspections for cracks in the fuselage. "
Okay, I know that for some, the link between metal fatigue in a plane's fuselage and time management skills in a homeschooled child would seem thin, if not non-existent. Bear with me and I will show you how the two fit together:
As someone who both attended college and taught classes in college, I know that many students arrive on the scene with NO time management skills. They wait until the very last moment to write papers, study for exams, etc and then claim that the reason for this 'delayed' response is because they have too much work to do. Airlines use the same reasoning when they skip scheduled maintenance on planes. Inspections and maintenance are 'onerous,' especially when the airlines have schedules to meet. In the first case, the only one who suffers for sloppy work and poor planning is the student. In the latter, the possibility exists that many people will be injured or killed. But here is the question: Where do the people (working for the airlines) learn/develop the habit of 'putting off until tomorrow'? I would argue that they learn it early, at home, and have it reinforced by their own behavior in college... especially if they can get away with it.
Let me backtrack for a moment: When I first started teaching, I would assign a paper, offer an 'optional' deadline for drafts (if the student wanted me to review their work BEFORE the final turn in), and give a deadline. Most freshmen did not take advantage of the optional draft turn in and the papers that they DID turn in, often in the last five minutes of the day, right before I headed home, showed clear evidence that they had been written in a rush, probably the night before. I would spend, quite literally, hours going through those papers, editing the ENGLISH so that I could read the essay. When I finally had the essays in readable form, I would find that the argumentation and the evidence were poorly done, if they even existed at all. After two semesters of this, I changed my approach. I made the draft mandatory... and after another semester, I made it a rule that if I found more than five errors in the ENGLISH, the student had to take the paper to the English tutors and correct the draft before returning it to me to read through for the History. Students groused about this, complaining that they didn't 'have time', that their course load was 'too heavy' to waste time working on drafts. What kept me firm in my new approach was the fact that I had students, many of them older students who were also holding down full time jobs, who were ABLE to do what was asked. The difference between the two groups was that the first group (1)lacked time management skills and (2)did not have a developed appreciation of doing quality work. To this first group, class assignments were just a box that needed to be filled on the way to something more important and as such, these assignments were 'unimportant' in and of themselves. A similar attitude can be seen in companies who 'skip' maintenance and inspections because they are 'onerous' and 'unnecessary.'
Colin Powell is credited with saying " If you are going to achieve excellence in big things, you develop the habit in little matters. Excellence is not an exception, it is a prevailing attitude." Thomas Jefferson said 'I'm a great believer in luck and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.' In fact, if you do a search, you will find that many of the most successful -- and by this I mean people who have left a positive mark on the world -- people are those who understand the value of work. Moreover, they are individuals who have developed the 'habit' of paying attention to the 'small' things as much as to the big. When someone is trained from the beginning to focus on seeking to create excellence in what they do, whether it be writing a paper for a history class or meticulous maintenance of an airplane, the work is not onerous, it is simply 'right'. Pearl S. Buck, a fine American writer, noted that "the secret of joy in work is contained in one word - excellence. To know how to do something well is to enjoy it." But in order to 'pay attention' to small things and to achieve excellence, one must know how to manage time. Much of the time the excuse for skipping the small things, for doing shoddy work or no work at all, is that there wasn't enough time. But things done poorly, or not at all, most often end up costing MUCH MUCH more -- in terms of time, money, and even lives.
So here is my point: Time Management skills are as important as mathematics/reading/writing/science in ANY educational program. I used to grouse about the fact that when I was in school, home economics class taught us to wash eggs and how to cook peanut butter cookies with peanut butter frosting. They did NOT teach us useful skills -- like how to create a budget, balance a check book or how to schedule our time effectively. Those were skills that would actually have CONTRIBUTED to our success as adults. To my knowledge, schools still do not teach those skills... though there may be the exception. For the most part, if you want to be taught those skills, you need to seek out a course and pay money for it... I did that when I was a senior in High School. I told my father, 'I have found a two day, weekend, course that will teach me note-taking and time management -- and I will need both to succeed in college.' My father agreed, I spent my money, and he made sure that I was able to make the course. How much simpler it would've been had I had those things taught to me earlier in my educational career...
Homeschool parents are in a unique position, one that we do not always appreciate, I fear. We have a chance to look back, over our own education, and to see what skills we wished we had been taught -- life skills as well as academic subjects. For me, one of the most critical skills is Time Management and one of the most critical attitudes is the high valuation of excellence, especially in the small things. With training in time management and an appreciation of/determination in excellence in both small and large jobs, I know that my sons will succeed in whatever they chose to do... and that, in the end, is one of my goals for our homeschool.
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