From Late to Early

Hunor Gangel


Our main character Ethan was a ninth grader. And he didn’t take deadlines very seriously. He always left his assignments for the last minute and usually stayed up late rushing through them. One day he got really unlucky and received four assignments with the same deadline. As usual he started working on them about an hour before the deadline. He successfully completed two assignments before the deadline, but he finished the other two well past it. The next day he went to school as usual, but he was a bit scared on account of submitting those assignments late. Everything was going well until the last lesson, which was one of the lessons for which he failed to submit the assignment on time. When that lesson came, Ethan felt a bit tense, but it didn’t seem that the teacher cared about his negligence. After the lesson ended, Ethan thought he was off the hook, but the teacher told him to come to her because they needed to discuss something. The teacher told him that she knew that Ethan didn’t send his assignment in time, so he was going to get an F. Ethan got his first F ever. He realised that he couldn’t continue this lifestyle of leaving all the assignments for the last minute, or this would occur more frequently. He decided to change and try to complete the assignments the day they were uploaded. Because of this he usually ended up completing the assigments first. About a month passed, and in the last lesson before the holiday, the teacher told Ethan again that they need to talk. She told him that she knew that since the last time they had talked, Ethan had always submitted the assignments way before the deadline, and their quality also improved because he wasn’t rushing them anymore. The teacher told him that she was proud of him. Ethan felt that he should be proud of himself as well, because he had changed for the better. And that was Ethan’s story of becoming a bit more reliable.