Time of Their Lives
Students must make the best use of their college years. That means recognizing the benefit of certain ‘wasted’ moments.
By Debbie Chachra
On their first day of class—on their first day of college—I took my engineering students for a walk.
In a course about infrastructure systems, we followed the 19th-century aqueduct that crosses our 21st-century campus for a half mile or so to a small Victorian stone-and-brick shed. In part, I wanted to show them how these fascinating systems surrounding us remain invisible unless we are alert to them. A more important goal, though, was getting them to think about how they will learn and, in particular, how they will use their time.
As educators, we want our students to develop the skills of lifelong learners. But what does this mean? Certainly, it means getting practice in finding, evaluating, and synthesizing information from the world around them, especially online, because college may be the last time that others carefully scaffold their learning for them in the form of well-defined courses.
Our students will graduate into a future where any work that is routine will almost certainly be automated within their working lifetimes. For them to be successful, they must learn to be creative, to explore, and to work closely with others. As with our stroll along the aqueduct, learning sometimes requires departing from what seems an efficient use of time. Students often feel their time is “wasted” if it takes time for their team to reach consensus or when they follow a research thread that leads nowhere, or when only one of several good ideas can move to the prototype stage. We need to help them see the value of this time.
More than anything else, the four years that undergraduates are in college represent protected time in which to learn. Yet even that time is under threat. Our students are reaching adulthood in a world of weaponized distraction, where the richest corporations in the world are competing with one another to build the stickiest tar pits for users with strategies that include infinite scrolling and the intermittent positive reinforcement of “likes.” We need to help our students develop their own tools to deal with this brave new world, and that means reconsidering our own mind-sets as educators. I find myself drawing from artist-educators like Austin Kleon, Keri Smith, and Jenny Odell, author of a recent opinion article in the New York Times entitled, “Can We Slow Down Time in the Age of Tik-Tok?”
If we recognize that our students aren’t unmotivated, weak, or unusually distraction-prone, we will also realize that focused work isn’t a matter of willpower, and there is no shame in using technological tools to protect our time and attention. There are simple, practical strategies we can suggest to our students. For a start, there are blockers that can limit access to particularly distracting and time-sucking websites like social media. I use a colorfully named Chrome extension, “Go F*cking Work,” which redirects my browser to a page with those words in very large letters when a preset time limit is reached at a given site. The Freedom app is another popular blocker.
Another strategy is time-boxing—asking students to spend a set amount of time on an assignment rather than simply completing it. This is expecially good for creative work, like ideation, because it gets them past doing it “efficiently” and encourages them to dig deeper. A related strategy for aiding focus is to set a timer (commonly for 25 minutes) as in the Pomodoro Technique.
The writer Cory Doctorow noted some years ago that reading on a screen is not a problem—many of us spend hours each day reading on devices—but sustained reading on a screen is, because distractions are just a click away and they are calling to us subliminally (or literally, as notifications). We can counteract this by leveraging the specific affordances of paper, like giving students readings or handouts in hard copy as well as in electronic form. We can encourage students to use notebooks, index cards, sticky notes, or plain old looseleaf to capture ideas and information—since almost all of them have cameras in their pockets, it’s easy to convert a page of written notes or sketches into electronic form for uploading or sharing.
For all that academics complain about the very real demands on our time, we do have an unusual degree of freedom in how we structure it. And we’re not only educators but also professional learners—as researchers, we are expert at learning our way through uncharted territory. We can model strategies for our students, and we can help them learn how to protect, structure, and scaffold their time for learning. And sometimes, that means going for a walk.
Debbie Chachra is a professor of engineering at Olin College.