Wednesday, August 26, 2015

Wrinkles in time

An hour is an hour is an hour--except for the faculty office hour, which sits in some sort of anomaly in the time/space continuum so that the time slows to a standstill or speeds up depending on the circumstances. 

If it's the dullest time of the afternoon, when my body is tired from teaching back-to-back freshman classes and my brain is oozing toward snoozeland, and if the only thing standing between me and home is that afternoon office hour, time stretches until the clock simply stops moving forward at all and I sit there, stuck in a holding pattern without respite until the end of time.

If I've scheduled student conferences and I need to meet face-to-face with students who need intensive help with their reading or writing or scheduling problems, the hands on the clock speed up until I don't have time to breathe between appointments, much less run to the rest room or refill my cup of tea.

I'd like to find the happy medium, but someone absconded with the local tesseract. 

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