Learning the value of commitment and productivity in the project based school

I was born and raised on an organic vegetable farm. I grew up spending my days climbing trees, scraping my knees and getting dirty. From a very young age I was left to my own devices while my parents worked in the fields. I grew up in a culture that strongly values the ability to work productively. Productive doesn’t just mean fast, it means that you can work hard for a long time while having the same thorough work the whole time. To be productive you need to have a good understanding and skill of what you are doing. This means that you need stamina and patience. This means you need to plan ahead. Most of all it means you need to put focus and effort into your work. My parents tried their best to teach me how to work productively, although I have learned many things from them sadly productive working has always been the most difficult for me to grasp. As I get older I have began to see how important it is to be able to work productively, and with every year I gain more stamina and more passion for work and soon I think I will be able to call myself a productive worker.

I moved off the farm when I was nine years old and was thrown into a completely new atmosphere. I had to undergo the drastic change from a dirty hardworking farmer lifestyle to a much more generic digitized western lifestyle. When I lived on the farm we had one house phone and one of those old TV’s that could only take DVR’s. I watched maybe 2 or 3 movies every year. Technology was not even a part of my life until I moved. Technology changed how I saw the world, It changed my lifestyle and my work ethic. I got my first phone when I was 12, within weeks I had games that I played regularly and more than one social media platform. I went from playing outside and exploring the boundless forests to sitting on my couch completely absorbed in an app. I didn’t realize it but I was becoming addicted to instant gratification. I still had a deep love for the outdoors but I discovered that the feeling of leveling up on a game or getting a like was so easy. I began to get bored by things I had once found fun. I was getting used to constant instant gratification. Working started to feel less like a game and more like torture. The mix between social pressure to fit in and the comfort of instant gratification pulled me and my peers into the rabbit hole. We became the opposite of what my parents had been trying to create. Instead of hardworking patient children we were lazy and always bored. It wasn’t our fault, we were victims of the system. I mean what child wouldn’t choose instant gratification over a less gratifying and less instant task? I believe that instant gratification has destroyed the ability for many young people to learn how to do hard work. We have become so accustomed to instant pleasure that when a task takes hard work and a long time we either think we will never be able to accomplish it or we lose so much interest that we can’t even force ourselves to do it. This means that for many people of my generation working productively is way harder for us to do, and we are horrible at it. I am not saying everyone is bad, or that technology is solely to blame but that our addiction to instant gratification plays a major role in our lack of ability to do hard and productive work.

Lucky for me my parents valued me gaining skill and ability over my instant happiness. This may sound harsh, and it felt that way when I was younger but now I have grown to be very grateful for it. They always made me do a sport, it didn’t matter which one but I had to always be engaged in something more than just school. My mom would sign me up for photography classes, art class, sailing camps, nature camps anything I showed the slightest interest in. In the beginning I always hatted it, but slowly I began to love everything I tried. This taught me the lesson of perseverance. It taught me that sticking to a task can be very rewarding. This was one of my first lessons of productive working. Like I’ve said before, my parents strongly value the ability to work productively. They have done as much as they can to give me this ability. Sadly most youth aren’t as lucky as me to have parents that value this skill in the same way. Many people overlook it, or undervalue it. And this is why most of the youth today do not have it as a skill. I believe that productive working should be taught in school. I believe that we should learn how to work well instead of just how to memorize material. I believe that schools should have more project based learning because that is the best way for us students to learn skills like productive working. Life after graduation is commonly very confronting for young adults because it is when they realize that they have just spent years memorizing relevant material but barely learning anything. I don’t think this is how it should be. I think graduates should go into the world feeling like they are truly prepared. This means they need skills like how to work productively and how to learn new skills.

In LEAP this block all of us students have struggled a lot with being able to work productively. The majority of us can’t stay focussed and working hard for more than 30 minutes at a time. At the beginning of building the playground we were all very focused and worked very hard. As the days progress we are all getting less and less productive with our work. We are on such a major time crunch with only one more full week of school left that it is vital that everyone is putting 110% effort. When I say I’m frustrated I mean I’m frustrated with myself as well. We are all having to learn the value of being able to work productively. I hope after we are finished with this project that we will all be able to work much more productively than before.