By: Savannah Guyer [Activities Editor] @SavannahMGuyer

Deadlines on papers and how long they need to be are stupid. Yeah, sometimes it’s easy to shove a topic into a student’s mind, give them a day or so, and make them turn in their finished product. Other days, it’s not so simple. When a student is sitting there, staring blankly at a computer screen wishing for death or maybe an easier way express their feelings than written expression, it can be hard for them to figure out how to type out a coherent sentence when all they can think about is, “This is due tomorrow. This is due tomorrow. In exactly eight hours,” when their brains are fried.

It comes to the point where some students would write a page and a half of how they truly feel about some Emily Dickinson poem, but then stress out about how it isn’t two pages, so they opt to write the word tomato over and over again and hope the english teacher graces the paper with an A over the student’s “creative mind”. How can one set a deadline on creativity? Writing isn’t as easy as assembling a Lego set, and as any parent would attest to, those things tough. Writing not only requires smarts, but also the element of the student putting at least some of their emotions and feelings into it.

Yes, students understand that teachers can’t dish out an assignment and tell them to turn it in whenever they feel like it, but it’s not that hard to warn the students earlier of their paper, or give them a few more days to finish it. Maybe then students won’t spend their nights cruising the english language and everyone who ever threatened to teach it, and teachers could expect a more heartfelt essay.