13: “Time Is Always Running Out” (2014):

It is beyond doubt that teachers and students alike experience this phenomenon of time always running out with great intimacy and regularity. Teachers and students alike have become accustomed to the mood, tempo and consequences, personal and pedagogical, of how attempts to try to keep up with this time that is always running out, seem, in the end and seemingly inevitably, to give us less and less time:

An old story, this. In some schools, this clockwork “machine time,” like a demanding Red Queen, seems to render classroom experiences to its relentless demands, pressing itself in on what we do, how we think and imagine, even whether there is time to think much at all. There is almost too much to consider in this orbit—market-driven obsolescence (“our work perishes quickly”), flickering attention spans (“speeding it up”) and how such spans then create a world (“simplifying it”) that does not require much attention, thus aggravating this circle of consequence. Once this voracious and insatiable wheel starts turning, something else kicks in: as the Red Queen suggested, the only relief or fulfillment of this itch is to be found in, not in speed but in acceleration.