Time in Covid Classroom

Ignorance is supposed to be dead in the classroom, but that is alive and well. The only things that are dead right now are this student's phone and my enthusiasm for the day. It is the middle of the day and nearly time to file out into the hallway to go to lunch. The classroom is bare as is the hallway especially without the resounding voices and movement of restless children. I had just gotten done teaching my 7th grade English class. The fifth new classroom of my career but the first in the presence of COVID. It all had been too much. The internet service errors, the sleeping children, the black screens, the constant texting to the parents.

She asks me, while walking to the trash to throw away a full plate of food, “What time is it?” I could have sworn I saw a phone in her hand earlier. It had to be dead. There is an analog clock that sits above both our heads and I turn to it as she drags her feet back to her seat. I tell her the time absentmindedly. I had heard of elementary school kids not being able to tell time on analog clocks given the rise of direct digital access to time via their phones. Now these children are in middle school and I do not favor middle school at times like these where the pressure is beyond small children. I don’t have kids and I am not specialized in teaching elementary anything. I only teach secondary English.

Twenty minutes pass. “What time is it?” she interrupts my train of thought as I plan for her education.

“Why?” I ask.

“I can’t ask the time?” She rebuts. I am silent. I am annoyed. Possibly triggered. Definitely triggered at the word triggered. I know why we both are going back and forth about the time. Ignorance retaliates in the midst of new information. I am baffled because in this place of education, where children sit for enlightenment, this baby cannot tell time. In this place of education, where children sit for enlightenment, a teacher struggles with teaching her student something she was never taught to teach. We are both annoyed. I reach back in the recesses of my mind to 1st grade to stumble over words of “big hands” and “little hands” and basic multiplication, in hopes to not fail her as I have so many times before, I am sure, especially since we have come to this. She stares at me intently as I speak and it is the most intent she has been all year. I pointedly say, “I'll be asking what time it is in a little while, be ready,” and continue my planning.

Plan what though? The baby can’t tell time. Math teachers, and reading teachers, and parents left me with a complicated burden today that tarnishes the planning of my gilded guided practice. This girl was absent of big hands and little hands to guide her all this time. She was left to devices and her own devices. While she knows numeric symbols however, dear reader, where the hell is the telling of time in her memory.

Then there is the lack of curiosity that leaves you to wonder why the arrangement of clocks lay that way? How can she not have that? How can we teach that? How do you miss wondering about the absence of moon and sun positions, sundials, and watch winding and such. How? Numbers are cool but contexts hidden within an analog clock are cooler.

She gathers her things, anxious after a day filled with nothing. She doesn't do work at all in class. She can’t complete her work in the middle of a pandemic classroom because of a broken computer. She has been failed by me, this school, her family, many times with our lack of knowledge and resources. All day she has done nothing. When she is ready to go she yells, “it's 12:10!” My vexed heart calms a bit, and I foster a bittersweet smile. Context and curiosity fostered a connection today. Ignorance lives, thrives even, but it does not control this moment.