In one week, I had 2 separate conversations with 2 different teacher colleagues (1 in theatre and 1 in music) about “this generation” of students. The general sense in all 3 of us was that students are having less of a sense of urgency. 1 colleague felt this was detrimental, 1 did not. I expressed to both of them that I was fine with students not be urgent, but I did want them to be efficient. (I also did some TikToks on this over the summer)
Here’s what I mean by that:
Urgency doesn’t feel good to most folks. It’s stressful. We miss what’s important when we focus only on what’s urgent. We become task- rather than relationship-oriented.
Clock-time is a colonial construct, followed to support capitalism. We know that is only a construct, and that time is much more spiraling than linear. And yet, we have agreed to live in society following this guideline.
As a teacher or leader, I can’t create more time, but I can shift how we feel about time. In Laban Movement Analysis, Time is discussed as our energetic investment towards Time. Do I approach the moment with Sudden energy? Feeling its urgency, immediacy, and needing to jump right in? Or, do I approach the moment with Sustained energy? Feeling how the moment can suspend, elongate, and stretch? Clocktime isn’t changing. But I can change the approach.
Because we do operate in settings that follow clocktime
Class starts and ends at these times, and the semester starts and ends on these date.
The show opens on this date, and we can hold the house for 5 minutes, but no more.
we do have to, in our teaching, follow these structures and ask students to do the same.
Not everything is urgent. But we can always be efficient.
I think it is helpful to share this distinction with students- these are the tasks, this is the timeframe, we can do what we need to do within the frame, make what we want to make, how and when we want to make it, but inside the frame. And the frame does exist, and we have to stay in it.
Efficiency is transparent about the needs of the structures, systems, and institutions we are a part of. We recognize the tasks that need to be done inside of this framework. This does not mean we have to be urgent about any one thing. Instead, it recognizes the relationships between tasks, and the people doing the tasks. If we need to take more time for one person or task, we can. And then we accommodate with a corresponding change somewhere else.
Efficiency requires grace and adaptability. Not every teacher or leader is interested in those skills. It is easier to lean on the seemingly unyielding clocktime as the rationale to be a taskmaster. But a taskmaster is only that- focused on tasks. If we are truly interested in humans, and helping students be the best humans they can be, we can shift. We can change our lens to one of efficiency. A lens where we see flow as necessary. In which inter-relationality exists. Through it we see, as Irmgard Bartenieff said, “A change in a part creates a change in the whole.” We can hold change. We just have to want to.
Efficiency requires that teachers and leaders give up their ideas of what a process “should” look like. Instead, it asks, “what do the people doing this process need to do it well?”