Today I read Laziness Does Not Exist by Devon Price, on recommendation from the chat at the Grading Conference.
His fundamental premise is that what is often perceived as laziness is a barrier or unmet need.
There are always barriers. Recognizing those barriersâ and viewing them as legitimate â is often the first step to breaking âlazyâ behavior patterns.
He spends time at the beginning of his piece discussing what he learned about the struggles of being homeless:
Kim is the person who taught me that judging a homeless person for wanting to buy alcohol or cigarettes is utter folly. When youâre homeless, the nights are cold, the world is unfriendly, and everything is painfully uncomfortable.
This resonates:
And when you donât fully understand a personâs context â what it feels like to be them every day, all the small annoyances and major traumas that define their life â itâs easy to impose abstract, rigid expectations on a personâs behavior.
But theyâre already doing the best they can.
What if we assume that everyone is doing their best? â I think this was an essay that I came across in the past year. I didnât read the full essay if it was indeed an essay. Or maybe it was a tweet. In any case, I find it a beautiful question.
Devon talks about procrastination in particular as being viewed as laziness:
When a person fails to begin a project that they care about, itâs typically due to either a) anxiety about their attempts not being âgood enoughâ or b) confusion about what the first steps of the task are. Not laziness. In fact, procrastination is more likely when the task is meaningful and the individual cares about doing it well.
I agree with what he says above, but I have questions about when a person fails to begin a project that DONâT care about. My first instinct is to wonder about procrastination as laziness then, but what if I reframe as an unmet need of meaning? Framing it that wayâŚway more compassion and a desire to make what we do meaningful. That desire manifests in something that Devon says later:
Needing or benefiting from such things doesnât make a person lazy. It just means they have needs. The more we embrace that, the more we can help people thrive.
The deep reasons why teachers complain about students:
A lot of my colleagues would look at this student and think she was lazy, disorganized, or apathetic. I know this because I;ve heard how they talk about under-performing students. Thereâs often rage and resentment in their words and tone â ==why wonât this student take my class seriously? Why wonât they make me feel important, interesting, smart?==