Excuses, excuses, excuses

Excuse: an apology for; seek to remove the blame of. We hear a lot of these, right? Phrases such as "I didn't have time," or "The directions were confusing," come to mind. In a desirable society, an excuse would be an outrageous claim for unfinished or unsatisfactory work.  However, the current society desperately needs a doctor check-up for its excuse infection.

Let's begin dissecting the first excuse listed above. "I didn't have time." Out of all possible excuses, not having time is one of the most offensive.

Take an English essay, for example. The assignment was given yesterday, due today, one page required. You have exactly 24 hours to accomplish the task.

You go throughout your normal day with the task looming above your head. After checking e-mails, surfing the web and grabbing dinner with your friends, you realize it's midnight. You decide to go to bed with the plan of telling your professor you "didn't have time."     But let's do some math. If you spent 15 minutes on Facebook just for the first 10 hours you could have been composing your essay, that's two and a half hours you wasted. After calculating this, the snarled look on your professor's face may begin to make more sense.

Moving on to the second excuse of "directions were confusing," we visit the concept of responsibility. Let's go back to that English essay. Imagine your instructor gives the class instructions for the writing prompt.

You read the first three sentences and are completely lost as to what the directions are stating. You and, most likely, 20 other confused people sit through the rest of class. However, when the professor inquires, "Does anyone have questions about the prompt?" not a soul raises their hand.

The next day you turn in three jumbled paragraphs of lost words and unintelligible ramblings, under the idea that if the directions were confusing you could turn in disappointing work.

Self-accountability plays in here. If you are not grasping a concept, especially in academia, you must ask questions. Even if you have the social anxiety of raising your hand in class, there's the ever-impersonal e-mail that you can always send.  It is not your professor's responsibility to know when you are lost. You must come to them. They don't have "not-smart-dar" after all.

Excuses are not simply an apology or a justification for actions. They truly are a mask of personal non-effort. If you "didn't have time" for an assignment, admit you spent too much time on YouTube watching cute kittens. In the case of "confusing instructions," come to terms with yourself. You were simply too lazy to ask for an explanation.

It all comes to down to self-accountability, though. If you are responsible for a task, get it done, whatever that takes. If you have to write thirty e-mails to clarify a prompt, start writing. If you have to lock your computer in another room to stay focused on schoolwork, find a key you can throw away, because truly, there is no excuse.