I found myself giving one of my standard classroom speeches yesterday about how there is no such thing as a world beyond the present that is somehow more real than this one, the obvious point that what students are doing now is every bit as meaningful (or not) and equal to anything that will happen to them later.
I get crotchety at the ways in which college professors are used as bogeymen (bogeypersons?) for high schoolers—so watch those margins!—then later we use employers and bill collectors to the same effect. Students by now have realized that college isn’t an altogether different, impossible realm, and they will soon learn that life beyond college is not an altogether different, impossible realm. They are the only constant, and we are stubbornly constant creatures. The same good and bad habits they have now will persist.
In one of those odd synchronicities between strangers (although I do send him money each month), this is the essence of Jason Fried’s post yesterday at Signal vs. Noise, “You Play Like You Practice.” He has some colorful examples, but the upshot is:
Skip steps now, you’ll skip them later. Cut corners now, you’ll cut them later. You get used to what you do most of the time.
My local example: if you fail to bring your books and homework to class now, you’re going to fail to put the coversheet on your TPS report later. Both equally important—and equally trivial—in their day-to-day context. But the habit of caring about your performance—or even the appearance of your performance, and optics can be almost everything—in any given context is a habit that carries over from one situation to another.