Jan. 25, 2006

I could have made an easy five bucks Monday.

Kelvin &8212; who we&8217;ll now call the king of procrastination in our fourth-grade soap opera &8212; offered me $5 to take his reading test for him. Never mind that I&8217;ve never read the story the test was on. That&8217;s insignificant.

Of course, I turned the offer down (though it would&8217;ve been a nice supplement to my newspaper salary).

The cash offering was only one of many ways Kelvin avoided taking his test altogether in the hour and 15 minutes I was there, but there was a plot to his procrastination, he told me once Ms. Bell turned her head.

&8220;I&8217;m waiting for her to say, &8216;Just write the answers,&8217;&8221; he whispered, instead of writing the questions and the answers.

Think back to the reading tests of your yesteryear. Something about the idea of reading makes teachers think there should be lots of writing involved. Reading tests aren&8217;t quick write-the-letter, circle-the-answer, fill-in-the-blank tests. Usually &8212; Monday included &8212; you have to rewrite the whole question, then the right answer.

All that writing takes a lot of time, time Kelvin preferred to waste. So, once he got half of the first question written, he needed a break.

Now, true procrastinators (and I think we&8217;ve established in previous columns that I&8217;m not one) weigh bad options against worse ones. The task you are procrastinating is, at the present point in time, the worst of all options. Anything other than that is acceptable, even typically bad things.

Essentially, Kelvin&8217;s way out of work was to get in trouble. He spent his time talking too loudly, picking fights with classmates and talking back to Ms. Bell. In his mind the consequences of his troublemaking were better than actually writing out all those test questions.

(He even tried to get me to take him home, told me his address and everything.)

Unfortunately for Kelvin, I think Ms. Bell was on to him.

He didn&8217;t get removed from the classroom. He didn&8217;t get taken to the hall for a talking to. He didn&8217;t get his test paper taken away. And he didn&8217;t ever get to hear her say, &8220;just write the answers.&8221;

Kelvin wasn&8217;t the only procrastinator in the room. About every two or three minutes someone would raise a hand and ask just to write the answers. The response was always no.

Then finally, in the last few minutes of class for the day, Ms. Bell told specific students &8212; the ones who&8217;d been working &8212; just to write the answers. But she didn&8217;t tell Kelvin.

I&8217;m guessing he failed that test. I never saw more than one sentence written on the page.

What began as putting off a task ended not just as procrastination, but as failure.

In the meantime other students finished their tests and moved on to more fun tasks.

Many got on the computers to take Accelerated Reader quizzes &8212; a program that rewards them for points they earn. Destini and Jamie stood in the corner and read a book by dividing it into parts and sometimes talking like a character.

Sidney, Ayana and Brianna went to the clubhouse &8212; a space under some tables &8212; and read books they&8217;d chosen.

All the while, Kelvin had to sit at the table with his test in front of him.

How is procrastination possibly the best option?

I tried the reverse psychology gig on Kelvin, telling him I didn&8217;t think he knew the answers to the questions he was refusing to write. But in all actuality, I think he did. They weren&8217;t hard, and he&8217;s not dumb.

But because he didn&8217;t want to do the legwork, he chose to fail his test.

Why not do it and get it over with? It must take a procrastinator to know the answer to that question.

Happy two days late birthday Destini, and happy two days early birthday Ayana.

Julie Finley is the education reporter for The Natchez Democrat. She writes a weekly column based on experiences with Marty Tuccio&8217;s homeroom class at McLaurin Elementary. She can be reached at 601-445-3551 or

julie.finley@natchezdemocrat.com

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