Ready Player One and 4th Grade

The first thing I noticed when I walked into Ms. Carmen’s 4^th grade class at for the first time was how kind the students were.  I expected the greetings of a substitute teacher, but they listened.  When I returned the next week, I would have been happy with a glimmer of recognition, after all I was only with them for an hour an entire week earlier.  If they remembered my name, that would have been beyond any expectation.  But, when I approached the class for my second day, it was as if no time had passed.  More than that, as they ran up to hug me, it was as if our short time together had been extended.

During my first visit, I was asked to take a small group of students out into the hallway a tutor them in long division.  The English major in me went through a moment of pure panic.  I was suddenly transported back to my 4^th grade self, who, in frustration at this very topic, would frequently break pencils and scare my older siblings away.  Time does wonders for patience.  The hallway was, literally, a liminal space.  But I have always found that some spaces have a strange liminality hanging over them, like airports after midnight or grocery stores.  A hallway during class, empty and drowned in florescent light, is a place where time feels different.  It was slow and lagging, yet almost removed from play.  If an abstract concept can have weight, it felt heavy.  I was given half an hour, but with no clock and this slightly oppressive atmosphere, I had no sense of time passing.  If it had been 15 minutes or an hour, I could not tell you.

It was in this hallway (when we were most assuredly not doing long division) that one of the students mentioned he had gotten in trouble because he played a video game for 5 hours the night before.  When I asked how he could possibly play for that long, he claimed that he didn’t even realize time was moving.  There is a similar moment in Ready Player One where Wade plays PAC-MAN for 6 hours straight.  At first we get lengthy descriptions of his initial attempts to complete the perfect game, we get the sense of time moving slowly.  However, once Wade gets in the rhythm of the game, things happen much more quickly, almost all at once.  Like Wade, the student also was in “the zone.”  This zone is like another dimension, one where absolute focus takes you out of the realm of your immediate surroundings.  It is not escapism per se, but you are removed from time.  Similar to the atmosphere of the school hallway, any amount of time could have gone by, as I had no sense of it.