There is a tide in the affairs ofstudents that taken at its crest leads on to learning

Teaching and the Quality of Time James Herbert

It has always seemed to me that knowing how to present knowledge to students required understanding what students are already thinking. One valuable way of achieving this understanding is to be aware of the circumstances in which students are doing their thinking. An impor- tant aspect of those circumstances is what I have come to think of as the rhythms of their semester. It is useful to keep these rhythms in mind as the course proceeds, but it is even more effective to anticipate them while planning the syllabus for a course. Since these rhythms vary from place to place, there is no substitute for a teacher's actual experience on his own campus.

To academic planners, a contact hour is usually just a contact hour. To scholars, a sequence of fifteen weeks can look like the number of units into which a logical exposition of their topic can be divided. But teachers come to realize that a lot more learning takes place in some weeks than in other weeks.

In planning a syllabus I first try to take into account the overall schedule of campus activities likely to engage or distract students' energies: preparing for and returning from holidays, the pressure of exams and papers in other courses, basketball tournaments, student elections, and so on. Then I try to think about when students get involved in courses, and when they begin to turn their enthusiasm to

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anticipating the next semester. The first weeks of the semester involve a natural building up of steam and the last weeks a sort of decompres- sion. I try to schedule the most challenging, rewarding, and important readings or topics for the weeks when the students have become comfortable with the course but when their enthusiasm for it is still very high. In my experience, this has meant that the third, fourth, and fifth weeks of the semester account for about forty percent of the actual learning in the course. By careful attention to breaks and djversions it is possible to allow for a second burst of excellence around the tenth and eleventh weeks. I have always regarded this second wind as bonus, when the course can achieve much more than can normally be expected. To scramble sports metaphors, arranging a syllabus seems like planning a batting lineup. The heavy hitters go in the third, fourth, and fifth slots. This is because teaching is like coaching basketball. The game has internal rhythms which are far more important than the regular sequence of minutes on the clock.

Each class has its own special rhythms, and each student his own ups and downs within the group. The experienced teacher learns to adjust to, and make the most of, these special qualities. But the variable quality of students’ time seems one of the circumstances which teachers need to understand.

For a while the vogue was to regard the syllabus as a learning contract agreed to at the beginning of the course by teacher and students. This never worked for me. At the beginning of the semester my students were in no mood to negotiate contracts with a stranger. By the time they were ready to engage in such negotiations, the course was already well under way. I have found it useful, however, to ask students to reorganize the syllabus at the end of the semester, looking back on their own experience and forward to the likely experience of other students. In this sense, the syllabus can be considered a contract, a contract, as Edmund Burke said, between generations. This is part of the reason I think that teaching is above all a tradition of practical wisdom.

James Herbert is the director ofthe Study of Governance and Education at th Camgie Foundationfor the Advancement of Teaching, Washington, D. C.