In Search of Lost Time
No, I haven’t just eaten a madeleine. I’m talking about the idea of time, passing even as you read this–time, unstoppable, incessant, inextricably equated in our minds with money. “Every minute matters,” warns teaching guru Doug Lemov in his seminal teacher effectiveness text Teach Like a Champion. “Time is water in the desert, a teacher’s most precious resource: to be husbanded, guarded and conserved.” He exhorts teachers not to waste a single instant of class time, extolling the virtues of teachers who pepper their students with questions as they stand in line to enter class. “A walk to the bathroom is the perfect time for a vocabulary review,” he says, though I cannot imagine there are many who share this sentiment, certainly not anyone who’s been swilling from a Big Gulp cup of iced coffee for the last two periods.
Not wasting time is at the heart of the current canonical view of effective teaching. Time is the central unit of value, a commodity from which a maximum of measurable, testable instruction must be wrung. To spend the last minute or so of class relaxing and chatting with your students is to “leave value on the table,” the moral equivalent of walking away from a deal without reaming your opponent for every last nickel.
I’m not gonna lie: I left value on the table with some regularity. Most of the time, I