Knitting Class Flunkie

As a lifelong overachieving student, I've never experienced being one who falls behind with assignments. I can't remember turning in work late and certainly never missed an assignment completely. With my current extracurricular knitting class, however, I have fallen far behind with our weekly assigned squares. Today we received our 37th pattern for the afghan that we are working on and I just barely finished working on the 17th pattern. This means that I am 20 patterns behind!

I'm not too concerned about my lack of progress, because I'm taking the class merely for enjoyment, and I am certainly not the only one in class who is behind. Nevertheless, I've fallen into a bit of complacency about ever catching up. It has been an eye-opening position to be in, because I realize that this must be the feeling that other students get when they start missing assignments or their grades start to slip. I can finally understand how easy it is to feel like there's no point in putting out the effort to get back on track, because you feel like that is never going to happen anyway.

I realize that this logic is not true, because I have tried to explain the faultiness of just such logic many times when I was teaching. I would always remind students that even if they fell behind or their grades were low, they shouldn't just give up, because that just makes it all the worse. Now here I am 20 patterns behind in my knitting class, and rather than buckle down to catch up, I've left my knitting bag in the trunk of my car yet again. I'm just as bad as all of those other students I used to lecture! At least now I can better empathize with their lack of ambition.