Up to that point in the course Adam had not made many efforts at preparing for such a quiz, at least as far as I could tell. So I wasn’t shocked that he felt a bit lost with the concepts and processes I was hoping to assess. Nevertheless, Adam’s comments struck a nerve—a sensitive one—and ultimately helped to remind me exactly why I’m professionally committed to teaching and learning.
I suspect that anybody involved in education is acutely aware of time constraints. They are ubiquitous and suffocating to students and teachers. The tyranny of the schedule can be senseless, and the pressure of curricular outcomes can be extreme. There is never enough time to accomplish everything that is required in a given course—especially, it seems, when teachers are saddled with the responsibility of preparing students to write terminal or qualifying exams or standardized tests.
On top of these “internal” pressures, the broader climate is also one of time-induced stress. The planet is beset by numerous local and global crises: environmental and climatic, cultural, financial, political, personal. And as everything is in critical condition, time is money, and everyone is under the gun.
Given these realities, it is far too easy for educators and learners to be swept away in the busy currents of anxiety and impatience as they all try to live up to the impossible expectations of our time-starved world. It was and is easy for me to be so swept up, anyway. That’s why I was thankful for Adam’s complaint. By drawing my attention to his own personal experience of time constraints, Adam called me back to myself and helped me remember that education is not essentially subservient to the pressures of time. It is not a time-sensitive business transaction—it’s not about deposits and withdrawals, rewards and punishments (not even at tuition-driven universities!). For those are the operations of a heartless educational economics, a sick and limited model of accountability.
Great teachers and great communities of learning, it seems to me, operate under an alternative model of accountability—an economics of grace. According to this radical model, all learning is gift and mystery: We are astounded to be able to learn anything at all (like walking and talking, for a start!). We are privileged to be able to help each other discover fresh insights and deeper understandings about ourselves and the other creatures with whom we share the planet. We are grateful for mistakes and failures that help us to see things more clearly. And most of all, we rest patiently in the awareness that there will be enough time to learn exactly those lessons we are meant to learn when we are meant to learn them. So we can take our time. We can attend to one another and to the big ideas of our teaching. We can even dare to waste some time together. Because, in the educational economics of grace, we have all the time in the world.
So, yes, I think it’s about time Education is about time. But not about “getting it in” under the wire, just in time for the exam. It is, rather, about giving the time, making the time, and taking the time on behalf of our students, our planet, and ourselves.
Just for the record, I did collect Adam’s incomplete quiz, and the class moved on to the next activity together. We arranged a later meeting in order for Adam and some other students with similar concerns to have another attempt at showing that they were indeed capable of accomplishing the work that was originally quizzed. They took some extra time to prepare, and I took a bit of extra time to meet up with them and set up another quiz. Nobody was punished or penalized, and I daresay some of the students really wrapped their heads around the key concepts. It was time well spent.
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