Time Until

Something interesting that I observed when I went to service recently was the way that the children view time in relation to their behavior. I noted that my teacher, Ms. Lance, frequently let the children know about time by stating it as “if we spend time doing X we won’t have as much time for Y.” In this way, she was telling time not based on hours and minutes, but based on how the time was being used. For example, it did not matter if Friday Social, during which time the kids get to watch a video, was supposed to begin at exactly 2pm. If the clock struck 2pm and the kids were not finished with their math activity because they had not been following directions, the transition to Friday Social would not begin. Just because it was 2pm and Friday Social began at 2pm did not mean that the time would start to be used for what Ms. Lance had planned to use it for. In this way, the kids seemed to understand their role in the passage of time as relating to their behavior. If they behaved and followed instructions, and were thus able to complete their math activity, they would be able to start Friday Social on time and have the full time that they were supposed to have for the video. If they chose to use their math activity time incorrectly, they would lose time to do something else. Another way Ms. Lance measured time was by telling it as “time until.” So she would tell the kids they had 2 minutes until it was time for social studies, which told the kids that they had 2 more minutes to use their time wisely before they ran out of time and had to leave the previous activity unfinished. I found the “time until” particularly interesting because, obviously when you’re in school, you have to be very aware of time, because teachers schedule chunks of time for different purposes. The kids, though, don’t need to be able to tell time conventionally (on a clock) in order to be participants in time and learn how to use their time effectively and not waste time. By telling time as “time until” or “time spent on X is time lost for Y,” kids learn to conceptualize how they use time and how they participate in time without necessarily even knowing what time it is.

I noticed this alternate kind of participation in time when I was reading Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. Ms. Lance told in terms of “time until” and Bechdel does a similar thing when she is talking about her father. In the classroom, the kids spend all day anticipating Friday Social, which they know is coming, and they know when it is coming (after math, science, and reading time). From the beginning of Fun Home, we know that Bechdel’s father commits suicide. We also know when he does it, Bechdel describes “he didn’t kill himself until I was nearly twenty” (Bechdel 23). The story begins in Bechdel’s childhood and takes frequent sojourns into the past, when she was born and before she was born, in an out-of-order timeline. The entire time, the reader knows that her father’s suicide is coming, and they know where in her ordered-time it is coming (just before her twentieth birthday) but they must wade through the entire book waiting for it. This brings the reader a sense of urgency, because they know that the suicide is the crux of the memoir but they do not know what it will be like when Bechdel introduces it. Just the way math games engaged the first graders enough that they forgot about Friday social for a little while, the reader forgets about living in this “time until” when they become absorbed from stories from Bechdel’s childhood told in her compelling style. Then, just as the sense of urgency to get to Friday Social doubles when Ms. Lance’s alarm goes off and it is time to transition, the reader is reminded of the impending suicide through different (sometimes subtle) references in the book. These references remind the reader that what the characters are experiencing is temporary, and that all of the memories Bechdel is conveying to us have been colored by this experience with suicide. This makes living in the “time until” feel complicated; we know that it is a “time until” and the author knows this too, but the actual characters in the story don’t know this. It presents a different setup than in the classroom, when the kids know they are in a “time until” and so does the teacher. The teacher never forgets the “time until” just as Bechdel never forgets, but the reader, taking the role of the student, forgets and remembers with reminders or absorbing stories. It makes time pass in a different and strange way, sometimes making us want to speed through it with urgency, other times making us want to savor what we have because we know it will all change.