Teaching the temporal dimension of service-learning projects

How long will this take? This deceptively simple question is often very difficult to answer, especially if the student being questioned has litle or no experience with the event in question. This temporal difficulty is further compounded by the fact that many students are notoriously poor judges of time. Service-learning projects, or any task for that mater, can fall victim to this phenomena. When students submit a project at the end of the term, they are often just relieved to have it finished. And, if they have not been keeping close records, they likely don't have an accurate (or even a ballpark) estimate of the actual time they spent working on the project. Without some reflection on and management of the temporal dimension of a service-learning project, students are likely to miss important deadlines, cram a project's workload into a single, stressful week(end), and be unable to accurately answer a community-partner's question of "how long will this take?".