Zip zip zip. Ruffle ruffle. Squeak. Onomatopoeia helps recreate the sounds of every class at 48 or 13 minutes past the hour. While the notebooks slam shut and pens are capped, perhaps a vocalized sound may be deciphered amid the background: the professor's voice. The background noise can only mean one thing: Obsession with time has gone too far.
Worrying less about time would improve the intellectual atmosphere of the University. Such a fixation on time makes learning a rote task.
How to remedy time's chokehold grip on our consciousness? The answer recalls the advice of my high school football coach: "Don't be a clock watcher."
That said, let us make a covenant among students: Let's not pack up to leave until the professor's lips close.
Tick tick ticking away, time has come to dominate modern lifestyles; no matter what the moment sees us doing, we must know what numbers time the moment. But within our academic community, within the classroom, time should not matter as much. I never wear a watch to class, and those who do I pity. For them, classes just drag along. Do students have to be ready to jet out of the classroom at precisely :50 minutes past the hour? No. As students we should allow a few more moments to wind down -- not tick down.
Tell me someone, what is the rush to leave class? Students fleeing vex me. Is there some secret place where people flock right after class? Is there a club hidden within the stacks of Alderman Library that only meets Wednesdays at 11:55? Are there many classes at the high-speed physics lab on Observatory Hill?Whatever the motivation for leaving class -- lunch, naps, email -- does not trump the main reason for going to college:learning in a classroom.
This gets to the root of why we are here in Hooville: Is it a duty or a desire? If it's the onerous former, we have to attend five classes per week. Professors are paid to just give a lecture and then leave. Class must not go longer than fifty minutes, zero seconds because that is the agreement. If it's the preferable latter, teacher-student relations are so much more human. College ought not to be a mechanical routine.
Under timed pressure, learning is burdensome. With time pressed under, learning is delightful. Removing the watch removes the stress.
Sitting in class is so much more enjoyable when its remaining minutes are not counting down -- 24, 16, 12, 8, 5, 3, 2, 1. "Getting it done" shall be the mantra of coal miners, not students.
Constantly glancing at timing devices makes going to class more of a routine obligation than a learning opportunity. Every watch of the watch is a missed opportunity to contribute in class. But professors do not aspire for their students' contributions anymore; they are desperate for their mere attention.
On more than one occasion, my sociology professor had to plead with our class to not prepare prematurely for departure. I could only empathize with her pleading. Not only was she asking for more time -- she wanted to prevent the mechanization of classes.
The professor does not want her relationship with us to equal that of a provider-customer. Fittingly, the class is "Sociology of Consumption," yet she stopped us from becoming consumers who had enough and stopped consuming her teaching. Efforts like this help prevent higher education from becoming a marketable commodity.
Instead, it is many intellectual relationships not to be frittered away by the minute hand on a clock.
Time also can disrupt the learning atmosphere during office hours. I resent whenever a professor looks down at the watch to signal our conversation must end in favor of more important motives. That mechanical behavior resembles that of a gas station vacuum cleaner that stops once the quarter's value has expired. It has performed a service. Economic rationality forbids it from further functioning. If professors become minute-programmed machines and students their customers, that can only be bad.
If students are willing to listen wholeheartedly to their professors in class, the other side of the deal is that professors must subordinate their research for teaching whenever a student comes calling. Time should not interrupt an intellectual dialogue started by either the student or teacher.
When professors rather than students end a class, all will be happier. Time on the students' watches will not then erode relationships. Professors will not have to beg their students to stay attuned, though it is they who should be attentive to the watch while in the classroom. We will all get to the next class in time. The most poignant words often flow at the end of class. Wisdom will flow into our minds if notebooks don't flow into our backpacks, if, for example, our attention directs at cross-racial Brazilian ideals of unity instead of a watch.
(Brandon Possin's column appears Fridays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at bpossin@cavalierdaily.com.)
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