Deadlines are hard. I know how hard they are, because I have a deadline EVERY DAY - I need to have a lesson prepared, handouts made, handouts printed, handouts copied, and my room set up for a class. Wait, no, for 4 classes. Sometimes 5 classes. And having a deadline can be a good or bad thing. It can be good because it forces me to get my stuff together and just do something. If I have no deadline, I won't finish a thing unless I REALLY love doing it. But a deadline helps make me move faster. I think some students respond this way to deadlines. But other times, a deadline can be like a big wave coming to overtake me. It seems like I'm not going to finish it, so I should just quit now and stop since there's no way I can finish. There are days like that - on some days, I am planning some lesson, but then I stop and change my mind and have students continue what they did yesterday, because that does not require planning. But that's the important part - I have a plan B, a backup plan. And some students, when the deadline is coming, they think "there's no way I can finish" and they stop. But they don't think about a back up plan, like asking for an extension, or doing extra credit work, or thinking "I have 4 assignments due, and 2 of them are major assignments, so I'll do those instead of the smaller ones which won't make me lose too many points."
In high school, I was always doing this - balancing which assignments I NEEDED to do, and which assignments I SHOULD do, and which assignments were ok to not do. And my way of measuring all these was this: If my grade stays above an 80, I'm good money. And that was how I did high school, figuring out how to do assignments for my classes so my grade stayed above an 80 in all my classes. It worked most of the time, but I definitely went into the 70s in like math and science classes, since I really didn't like them.
Anyway, the other hard part about tomorrow is that students are going to be doing writing, and there's a lot of nervousness about writing. Students are often criticized by their teachers, they often don't have the right word to use, and writing about a topic you don't care about is boring. I also felt that way about writing. But I hope that writing about a topic they CHOSE (their research question and claim) will help students feel a little more comfortable with writing. I want them to feel comfortable enough that they just get it done, and once they have it done, they can feel like, "Damn, I wrote all this? That's cool." And then they get it peer edited by two people on Thursday, and I'm sure they will get good feedback, since their topics are all interesting. And then they can revise it, and I hope, I really hope, that this piece of writing will be something they really feel proud of, and it will make them feel like they can be a good writer if they try really hard. That's what I'm hoping for.