Friday's child
February 5,
1999
You get up in the morning; it is still dark, but it is
daytime. After breakfast, you go to school, and you should
be there on time. After lesson time, there is break time,
which is followed by apple time. Then dinner time, followed
by playtime followed by more lesson and a short playtime.
Then, home time. At home, perhaps TV watching before tea
time. Maybe someone will say "That's enough time watching
that box, off you go and play." A returning parent may be
pressed into quality time over bath time. Story time, bed
time, no time, too much time, time we saw your grandma,
happy time, time getting short, no time like the present...
For teachers, one of the difficulties of teaching time is
lexical. Adults use the word "time" to mean opportunity,
occasion, appointment, memory, measurement. From our point
of view, these are logical meanings to derive from our
division of the cycle of the turning Earth. From a child's
point of view, learning the conventions governing the hands
of a clock or the sums needed to use a digital display has
no necessary connection to the pattern of everyday life.
OK, there are these hours, minutes, seconds, but so what?
Lucy's Minnie Mouse watch, of which she has to turn the
hands herself, is just as good as a Rolex to her. Better.
It can be controlled so easily, see?
Lucy can learn the measurement, but what has that got to do
with time to get up, quick we'll be late, we're just in
time? The poet John Donne has a lovely phrase about "hours,
days, months, that are the rags of time" suggesting just
Lucy's puzzlement. Here on the one hand are the fixed
points: school at 8.50am (but we call it "ten to nine"),
home at 3.15pm ("a quarter past three") bed at 7.30 ("half
seven"). And on the other, the much more real experience,
that misery lasts an eternity while you cry in the
playground with a grazed knee, that the golden moment when
you held the new hamster in your hands for the first time
fills the universe and bursts in a flash, that no one ever
had to wait for their birthday as long as you, and that the
summer holidays are vanished.
Unlike simpler societies, where life is regulated by sun
and weather, we need our citizens to manage their
timekeeping. So children have to master telling the time.
Lucy asked, "How can you tell the time when it is all so
different?" Her teacher satisfied her. "Time is like a tape
measure. But it never goes round the same moments twice."
Lucy went home and threw away the Minnie Mouse watch. "It's
not a real one," she pointed out. Her older sister
retrieved it. "It'll do for Barbie. She doesn't need time."
Lucy cried. "I don't need time, either," she sniffed. "But
I've got to have it." Older sister was unmoved. "Time you
grew up."
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