It occurred to me today that the assignment is due and… I might not have actually done the assignment.

As a teacher, you hate to hear a student say that they didn’t do the assignment. It makes you question why you went into education in the first place, if the students aren’t even going to do their part?!?!

Of course, there are different kinds of students. There are students who, if they told me that they’d not done the assignment, would surprise me greatly, since they tend to do the assignment every time.

But, to be sure, I have other students who don’t do the assignment and it doesn’t surprise me at all. In fact, with these kids, it’s unfortunately the case that I’d be surprised if they did the assignment.

Through the years, as a teacher, I’ve heard all kinds of excuses for not doing the assignment. Excuses are, needless to say, what we offer when we don’t want to be brutally honest. For most of my students, most of the time, they don’t do the assignment because they don’t want to do the assignment. But, rather than tell me this, they give excuses.

And so, it comes down to a question of interest, perhaps. If I gave assignments that students wanted to do, I would be more likely to have students completing the assignments. But, if the assignments are so awful, why is it that some students do the assignments? Are they just more obedient? Is doing something that you’ve been assigned, even when you don’t want to do it, a question of the level of your obedience?

Most definitely.

Anyone will do something that they want to do when you ask them to do so. It’s when we are asked to do what we don’t want to do that the level of our obedience is on display. And, while a student who always does the assignments in a class might come across as looking obedient, it could just be the case that they are already interested in doing what they are being asked to do.

Try asking the student, who seems obedient in a class, to do something that they don’t want to do; then, you will be able to get a better measure of their tendency toward obedience.

I wonder how many times in my life I’ve been given an assignment that I didn’t do, simply because I didn’t want to.

* * *

My children have a system of chores that they are responsible for doing at home. It’s a decent system, if you ask me; we don’t ask the children to do too little, or too much. When they complete this system of chores, they are eligible for privileges around the house.

Now, some of my children are more likely to complete the system of chores than other children. And, to greater or lesser extents, I think that each of my children look at the list of the chores and think negatively about having to do them. But, if Child A only really hates two of the chores on the list, while Child B hates five of the chores on the list, it doesn’t take a Rhodes Scholar to know that Child B is going to complete the system of chores less often.

One of my children (Child B) was trying to wash the dog the other night. Washing the dog is not on the system of chores.

I started to wonder why she would be trying to coerce the dog into the bathroom, to be able to give him a bath, and then I realized…

She’s trying to avoid doing what she’s been assigned to do.

Now, to her credit, she was trying to do something decent and productive with her time, but she wasn’t doing what she’d been assigned to do. And, to my knowledge, she never did figure out a way to entice the dog into the bathroom, so she didn’t even accomplish the thing that she was trying to distract herself with, to get her mind off of the fact that she wasn’t doing what she’d been assigned to do.

I wonder if I have ever been engaged in an activity (or two, or three) that wasn’t what I was supposed to be doing, because I didn’t want to be doing what I’d been assigned. I suspect that I have.

* * *

I do this all the time at work, when I have a million things on my plate, I avoid doing what I don’t want to do because then I get to do the other things on the plate that I’d rather do.

The problem is that it doesn’t end up well; that stuff is still there, on the plate; even after I’ve finished all of the other things that I wanted to do, I still have those things that I need to do. They didn’t go away and I am not looking forward to them anymore than I was at the beginning, when I had a bunch of options on what I could do; if anything, I’m looking forward to them less, because in the back of my mind, during that whole time when I was doing the other things, I was thinking to myself, “I am eventually going to have to get to those other things.” That dread just grows my distaste for the things that I don’t want to do.

* * *

As a Christian, I’ve been assigned a list of things that I need to be working on. I wonder if God looks at me the way that I was looking at my child, trying to wash the dog the other night. I’ll be He’s shaking His head and thinking to himself, “Didn’t I give you a list of things that you’re supposed to be doing? Have you accomplished those things, or are you avoiding doing them by thinking up all of these other things that you might do?”

The truth of the matter is that I often don’t want to do what God is asking me to do, mostly because it will make me uncomfortable. When God told Adam in The Garden that he wasn’t supposed to eat the fruit from a certain tree, God stepped back to see what Adam would do.

Adam disobeyed.

As often as I’ve smacked my head and thought to myself, “It was one tree. All of the other fruit in The Garden, you just had to stay away from one tree!”, I know that I don’t do a very good job of being obedient in doing the assignments that I’ve been given.

I guess I need to start thinking about getting those assignments completed, before The Teacher asks me to turn them in.