I’m not sure I’m going to get done the thing for T—- for noon … but certainly that’s less late than I am for A–’s class, oy, which I thought I’d just swoop in and polish off after class until the emotions of a nearly-5 and 6.5 year old child just overwhelmed the rest of the week, any sense of aheadness I thought I might have. 

Wait time

April 24 2020

I don’t totally understand what this phrase, ‘wait time’, is doing floating and unpunctuated at the bottom of this entry, and that intrigues me. It’s a teacher term, the kind of phrase I’d use to half-draft an essay that ends up emailed to myself and forgotten about. But no such essay seems to exist.

Not yet anyway!

What has ‘wait time’ meant to me as a teacher over the last 13.5 months, and counting? In a physical classroom, wait time allows a teacher to use silence and the anticipation of bodies leaning forward in a shared communal space where only awkwardness is happening. Wait time is the teacher applying awkwardness to a room to break that silence. It’s a creative, productive kind of peer pressure to talk that the blank boxes of Zoom do nothing to match. In normal remote learning, time functions much differently, as does waiting. There, it’s a way to create a stable environment for learning: X days are for resting and getting ahead, Y days are for producing the ideas and responding to others, specific point in time Z is when we all expect it to be done.

Yet: a/synchronous online learning in emergency remote conditions has its own relationship to waiting and to time. It’s possible to manipulate those things, positively, to make them into an instrument capable of music, to find the ways that pressure can be productive amongst peers.

But to do that, a relationship of peers must first be cultivated.

What T—- did a great job with in Spring 2020 was the maintaining of that blog, which was public and interactive and save-able as a record of our learning as a group. It maintained and continued the development of peer relationships that had started to form in person. In her class, A– affirmed a practice underway in my own classrooms, namely the use of active learning practices to work in Docs together to co-construct meaning in real time, compartmentalized time away from the emergency, but in a space where you could come back and contribute in a specific time frame if the emergency was making it hard for you to do so. And there was a limit to how long we’d all wait: we’d move on, in basically the same day, the next time class started, the academic calendar version of an irregular dawn. How rare and lucky I was to have talented teachers from whom I actually learned something about effective teaching as a student in Spring 2020 (nevermind the content, which was obviously rich).

Yet in both of the classes described above (never mind the other one I was taking, taught by the brilliant FM, a totally effective but very traditional pedagogue who just kind of lectured over Zoom for two painful hours), the “I” in the quote above is still all by itself. The work the “I” has not completed is not connected to the work of another “I”. There’s no social consequence of my not finishing it. No one is stuck in time, waiting for me to get them what I’m working on. No one, to put it bluntly, cares if that “I” finishes or not. Much as I liked the material in both of those classes, the work I turned in at the very end was, basically, terrible and useless.

And that’s not the case now, either in the classes I’m teaching or, certainly, the classes I’m taking, thankfully. On the teaching side, there is some anticipation and curiosity about what others think of a thing we’ve all read together. And it’s that togetherness — something I’m experiencing now with Persuasion as the #APStogether read — and an inclusive version of it, that I’m primarily focused on in my teaching and thinking about teaching work.

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.