In Praise of Education as a Time-Release Capsule

A Distant Encounter with a Poem

ONE OF THE IRONIES of the time-release phenomenon is that time may actually erase any memory of the original implantation—the moment at which something was first encountered. In such cases, there will be no attribution of an education effect at work; it will seem as if the information being taken in or the insight that is forming is completely new. This possibility was brought home to me in a personal way not too long ago.

I first read Matthew Arnold's “The Buried Life” when I was well into adulthood, and the poem seemed to define rather poignantly a vague sentiment that had been harassing me for some time. “What luck,” I declared, marveling that I should come into the orbit of a poem with such clarifying power. “What a find!” One stanza in particular seemed as if it had been telegraphed directly to me; I recall my face warming when I read it, as if the lines had exposed something that had been, well, buried and was now being unearthed. It was only when I was rummaging through some old boxes in my parents’ garage a few years later that I discovered a decaying spiral notebook from a high school English class, and in that notebook awaited a surprise: a well-worn mimeographed copy of the very stanza from “The Buried Life” that had caused my blood to surge only recently. When I realized what I was holding in my hands there in the garage, I was momentarily seized by a spasm of confusion. Apparently, here was life imitating art. In my slightly disoriented state, I began to wonder. Had I responded so viscerally to the poem because I had been, in a sense, primed for it years earlier? What if I hadn't located the notebook, with its evidence of my earlier history with “The Buried Life”?

This chance encounter completed a virtuous circle of awareness, offering a connection back to something that had been interred and had lain dormant until the moment and the conditions were right to reclaim it. I hadn't done enough living to make the poem matter when I was in high school; I wasn't ready to receive and fully appreciate whatever was on offer in and through it. But the ground had been prepped for my eventual return; “The Buried Life” was placed in a shallow grave (not sealed off in a crypt), accessible easily enough after some passage of years and enough living of my own to grasp layers of meaning that were simply out of reach in younger days. Perhaps the ghost of the first encounter had hung around silently, presiding over the gathering of experience and the advance of years and gently nudging me toward an introduction (really a reintroduction) at which I would say, “We've met before, haven't we?” Education—that sum total of the things we've read, the lessons that have been imparted to us—has the quality of an old acquaintance whose companionship or relevance to our lives often becomes apparent only upon some unforeseen prompting. At its best, education is also like the casting of spells, in whose thrall we are in for who knows how long.

Delayed but Thoughtful Response

THE SAME is sometimes true of unsettling questions. I once asked a teacher in casual conversation what her independent school was doing to address its low minority representation. As it turned out, she didn't have a ready or practiced response to my informal query. I made nothing of this, as I was not there to judge the quality of her reply or its delivery. On two separate occasions in the weeks that followed, though, she went out of her way to let me know that she was sorry and a little embarrassed that she didn't have a better answer but that the question had, after all, got her thinking. She had allowed herself to be genuinely troubled—in a productive sense—by what could have been nothing more than a fleeting inquiry, and her example illustrates the power of time-release dialogue or exchange in which questions and answers don't necessarily flow in rapid succession but instead are permitted the concentration and contemplation they deserve. The pregnant pause has gotten a bad name; we too often see it as a sign of weakness or unpreparedness or unfamiliarity with subject matter that one should command without hesitation.

If we could but “await with deep humility and patience the birth-hour of a new clarity,” as Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in a letter to a young poet (p. 30), we might be quite pleased to discover that what is taking shape is infinitely more valuable than the quick—and often pre-packaged and perfunctory—response. The teacher in this example could have easily interpreted my question as a call for her to justify the school's record on diversity; in other words, she might have read the situation as a challenge in the style of “thrust and parry” and played it out accordingly. When we ask questions in ways that suggest a duel rather than a dialogue, we virtually guarantee a defensive rather than a developmental posture.

Instead of penalizing students when they are unable to produce immediate answers or perform according to expectations, we should be comfortable with the possibility that the giving of answers and the performances may be more profitably delayed for some undetermined amount of time. At the very least, we —teachers and students alike—ought to see the value in a troubled mind that keeps working (often inelegantly) around problems put to it. One of my graduate students recalls a formative experience in her first year of college—what she has since dubbed “my second chance moment”—in which an English professor wrote on a paper, “Nice try. Now go back and try again.” That bit of generosity, by no means uncommon in academe, ended up having a profound influence on the student's view of learning and teaching as an evolutionary process.

Let it Percolate

WHEN WE ADVISE students to let the mate-rial go to work on them at least as much as they go to work on it, we are essentially advocating for the merits of time-release thinking. Of course, it's understandably difficult for impatient and anxious students (or anyone, for that matter) to put their faith in so serendipitous or mystical a process, beyond the control and certainly beyond the timetable they wish to impose. The admonition to let it percolate—to allow understanding to emerge out of mystification—often elicits bemused looks from disbelieving students, who are conditioned to operate on the deadlines that we and the rest of society erect. So I make sure to share with them the notable occasions when the elusive piece to some puzzle that has confounded one of their peers finally and almost inexplicably presents itself after a nap or even after several years’ worth of naps.

To wit, as I was nearing completion of this very essay, I unexpectedly received an e-mail message from a former doctoral student of some years back, with the following subject line: “Finally got it!” I opened her message to discover this: “I picked up pleasure reading since graduation … which was something I rarely did before. As a result, I think I finally understand something you tried to get me to do in one of our classes.” She went on to refresh my memory of what it was I was trying to get her to do (essentially, to read far afield—well beyond the narrow confines of the disci-pline—with an eye to discovering relevant connections in unconventional places), and she recounted, “I knew I was missing something … I just didn't know what. Now I know! Thought you would like to know about my little epiphany!” Indeed, for now her example will be the one I share with skeptical students as proof of the time-release concept. We need to foster an appreciation for the virtues of this approach, in which we paradoxically arrive at clarity only after we've ceased looking for it.

Even as We Sleep

LIKE A COLD MEDICINE, education does its work even as we sleep. This is not news. The trick is to trust in this aspect of the education process when we don't see the clear and immediate evidence of its effects. Coaxing some meaning and value out of the material isn't an overnight or semester-long proposition, although that's often how we'll measure or evaluate it. The assignment is always one that will take considerably more outside work than the syllabus lets on, for it will require a heap more living and understanding and troubling than any student would be prepared to give it overnight or over a semester. It would be nice if there were a system in place so that students could come back to educators ten or twenty or thirty years down the road and say, “Here's my revised assignment. I had to gather some more sources, and I think the additional time really improved the final product.” On the other hand, we don't really need a system to grant permission for a process that already happens quite naturally. One thing we can do, though, is recommend plenty of do-overs and second passes, not necessarily for a new grade but for the genuine personal satisfaction of continuing to work through interesting problems in private. Not everyone will warm to this suggestion, of course; the point is to remind students that a superior education is always a work in progress, not just a series of completed assignments for the instructor's consumption.

We ought to be in the business of getting our students to grasp intimately—not just abstractly—the full force of the idea that “each moment is the fruit of forty thousand years,” as Thomas Wolfe put it so memorably in Look Homeward, Angel (p. 3), or that “proceeding by loops and zigzags, we now and then arrive just where we ought to be,” as George Eliot phrased it in Middlemarch (p. 25). This, ultimately, is one of the master teachings of the whole enterprise of education, that everything is joined up, but often in unidentifiable or bewildering ways. The fruit of 40,000 years, 600 tiny time pills—the sheer magnitude is nearly incomprehensible, and with good reason. For all of its focus on problem solving, the process of education remains a grand mystery, because each unit of information taken into the brain acts as a complex system in itself, not always pre-programmed for a particular on-demand or just-in-time performance but ever sensitive, so that how it behaves depends very much on the circumstances at hand. The perfectly reasonable answer to the question “When will I need this?” is “Who knows?”

How Educators Can Help

THIS SENSE OF UNCERTAINTY about when insights present themselves need not be disabling, unsatisfying, or depressing, especially if it is coupled with some sincere guidance as to how students might respond with greater equanimity to the convoluted puzzles they will encounter in school and in life. I've lost track of the number of times that students have asked me what they should do when they're “off the rails” or “in a ditch”—in short, what to do when it's just not working. This is a serious question, one born of frustration from trying to rush their progress. So I give them a serious answer. I tell them to break off and go for a walk, go for a long drive, go to the movies, or do any number of things that would look to the rest of the world (especially to the accountability regime) like nothing so much as task avoidance. If they've already labored furiously but inconclusively, they've put the machinery in motion. It will continue to whir on autopilot after they move on and sometimes because they move on. The machine will keep processing. This is the reason that days of drift and anxiety so often seem to be followed by an efflorescence of ideas and productivity.

This advice is actually an invitation to students to liberate or release themselves from the tyranny of the timetable. They just need to hear—and be shown by examples like the ones outlined in this essay—that waiting humbly is acceptable and even effective, that it can be a sound strategy and not just a cop-out. As educators, we should be energetic proponents of reflection, seasoning, and the occasional detour. None of these items tend to show up on the typical syllabus, but all of them can be encouraged and facilitated.

We can also help to cultivate in our students an appreciation for the delayed and circuitous effects of their education by developing our own capacity for patience. Just when we think the poem has fallen on deaf ears or the question has simply stumped the student or the admonition to “let it percolate” has provoked disbelief, we may be depositing a seed that germinates not under our watchful and expectant gaze but according to another time frame altogether, and the results will likely be far more fruit than under the compressed schedule of a semester's work. We may not get credit for it, but we can be confident that we're helping to prepare for the moment in time when our students will be stunned to hear a faint voice-over in their heads: “This epiphany brought to you in part by … something you read or heard or first encountered a long time ago.”