Excuses are a part of our life. It doesn’t really matter whether you are a school student or going to college or even a grown up person with a family and a job. We all make excuses at some point in order to give a valid reason as to why we weren’t available for a certain task.
Why do we make excuses?
There are some common scenarios that I feel when people are most prone to making excuses –
- To avoid getting punished: Yes majority of the excuses made by people is to avoid getting punished by their supervisors for –
- Reaching school/ work late.
- Not complete the homework/ office work on time.
- Missing an important class/tutorial/presentations/seminar.
- To help us get out of sticky situations: Excuses are a great means to exit out of situations that you might feel uncomfortable in like
- Getting out of an awkward party.
- Helping escapes a bullying situation.
- Avoid hurting other’s feelings: Some excuses are made to keep people’s feelings from getting hurt. It could be your near and dear ones, your best friends and other people you care about.Like complimenting your best friend on finding the perfect prom dress while in actuality you know it is a fiasco.
Though excuses are to help lessen the severe outcomes of your action, but sometimes go the other way around enough to land you in double trouble. What could the reasons behind their failure –
- Your Reputation
Your reputation as a student will be playing a major role in deciding the success of your excuse. Are you a good student who are regular to class and hand in homework in time or are you the complete opposite missing classes and homework deadlines? If you belong to the second category who does repeat the same mistake again and again, excuses will not save you. However, as a model student, you may be excused once or twice.
- How convincing is your excuse?
The excuse that you give out to your teacher or principal or even a supervisor must be convincing and believable. It must not sound like too complex neither should it sound out of the world. Like for example – ‘My dog ate my homework’ is most likely to be rejected as an excuse.
Secondly, some students give in intricate details which are the tell-tale sign of someone who is lying. Practice it on your friend first. Avoid too many details and if it sounds convincing enough proceed.
- Confidence
Confidence is the key to success in life. Whether it is studies, job or even excuses, you have to be in complete control. Your teachers have been students themselves and have also handled hundreds of students and their excuses. So on a bad day, they might cross-examine you asking minute details pertaining your excuse.
Say if you have relative in the hospital, you might face questions about ‘Which hospital?’ or ‘which disease?’ etc.
The thing is if you falter in your replies or sound nervous then boy! You are in some serious trouble. Stay calm and explain quietly and politely. If you aren’t aware of the answer, say so instead of giving wrong answers.
- Background Check
One reason why excuses fail is because of lack ofa background check. This happened to my best friend John in the eighth grade. John was excused by our math teacher for not handing in his math homework because his mother was in the hospital. Unfortunately for him, his teacher made a call at his landline in the evening which was received by none other than his mother. You can guess what happened next. As a punishment, John was supposed to hand in twice the amount of homework he was excused from.
So boys and girls, if you are giving in a cooked up story make sure it doesn’t fall back on you.
- If your Teacher was a master at excuses himself/ herself
There is this good idiom in English that goes – ‘Set a thief to catch a thief’. This means you employ a thief to catch another one because only thieves can understand what other thieves think. In fact, we see plenty of movies and drama series on TV to prove that.
So, in this case, if your teacher was good at making excuses himself/ herself, there is a higher chance of you getting caught. They will see through most your lies and can even use a few good techniques to get the truth out of you. Unless your reasons are genuine or have a rock solid background, you will definitely have a tough time convincing such teachers.
- Bad Luck
Sometimes it is fate. No matter how confident and convincing your excuse sounds, things can still go wrong. Like, in this case, that happened to me in middle school. I had spent the entire evening watching the football match as a result of which I couldn’t perform well in my biology tests (I thought I could scrape the test with just 2 hours of preparation but failed nevertheless)
My teacher accepted my excuse of being unwell but unfortunately called in my parents still to discuss my performance. I had to confess this to my parents. They didn’t rat me out in front of my teacher. However, I was grounded for a month. It took me quite some time to regain their trust back, but I made sure never to do something so stupid again.