Tick Tock

Time is a hard concept to teach.  I have recently been made aware that my kids cannot do elapsed time.  They can be staring at a clock (digital) and I will say we are leaving in 45 minutes and they will still ask what time that will be. The boy brought home a sheet of homework with clocks and word problems about elapsed time with the notation "struggling" at the top of it.  We worked on it together and we were both struggling to tell elapsed time at the end.  He worked the problems out with a T chart and I was trying to show him to just move the hands of the clock.  I don't know what the hell he was doing with that chart and he didn't know what the hell I was doing with the hands.  Let's hope he can program his phone in a few years to tell him when to be somewhere.

I am not sure older kids grasp time either.  Tell one that they are six weeks away from graduating and being done with high school forever and they moan and tell you it is "Such a looooooong time!”  In the same breath, they will tell you a paper is due tomorrow, they haven't started it yet, but they still have plenty of time.   I also know that they can't tell time because they ask me every day, every period, what time the period ends.  They have no idea, they just stand up like Pavlovian dogs when they hear the bell and shuffle out.  I myself have felt like every day in April lasted ten days yet I am surprised to see tomorrow is the last day of April.

I have this book called "Q&A a Day: 365 Questions, 5 Years and 1,825 Answers".  Every day for five years, you answer the same question on the same day and then see if your answer changes from year to year. Sometimes they do, like the days they ask you what three foods you ate that day.  (Three?!?!?)  Some days they don't.  For example, on January 31st it asks "Who do you want to be?"  I am proud to say I have answered "me!" all three years.  Sometimes the questions are so dumb that I just draw an X through it year after year.  "If you were a dance, describe it".  Please, I am committed to this thing, but I am not going to patronize it either.  Lately as I have been writing in my 2014 answers, I am surprised how much has changed since 2012, or even 2013.  This makes me think that perhaps elapsed time is a harder concept to grasp than I thought.  I think about what I was going through and what I wrote as answers and think that time was not on my side for a portion of it.  Read my sad sack posts from last year and you will know.  It was timing, it wasn't the right time, I had too much time on my hands, or not enough time with Bill because he was traveling.  The kids were growing up too fast while at the same time they were stuck in the same phase for too long.  Too much time, lack of time, time that drags, time that sped by.  Time: elusive and hard as hell to pin down.

Even adages and proverbs and sayings can't agree on time.  Does it "move by so slowly" or does it "go by so fast"?  "Time is money" or is "the best way to fill time is to waste it"?  Lately I am struggling with telling someone who is hurting that "it will get better with time".  How can I use time as comfort when it has no real measure?  I can't say if that time will be ten days or a month or three years.  Why would I think that saying "give it time" would give someone who is struggling to get up, to go to sleep, to keep going on about their day any measure of peace?  I know that it is true, but I know that if the situation was reversed and I was the one hurting, that would not bring me comfort.  I would know the other person was right and I would swallow their well-meaning words, but it would be a placebo and not the medicine my wounded heart or ego needed.

Think of that first year of a baby's life.  That child goes from teeny tiny screaming meatloaf of a human with a cat-in-the-hat shaped head who does little but cry and poop and sleep to a standing, maybe walking, talking, smiling and laughing human who still cries and poops and sleeps.  365 days of amazing.  Now think of a child between 9 and 10.  They grow.  They expand their learning.  But they don't transform before your eyes like that first year and yet there are still 365 days in that year, exactly the same amount of time.  Time is eternal when we are waiting or hurting or in limbo and time is gone in the blink of an eye when we are harried or happy or challenged.  I think that perhaps the boy is right with his struggle with elapsed time. It isn't as cut and dry as I thought.  I think I will send his homework back with a quick notation to his teacher.  Underneath where she wrote "Struggling", I am going to write "Me too!”