Time to Think

A little over 7 years ago, as I sat at a large table with 4 other students in Mr. Quackenbush’s AP Physics class discussing Einstein’s Theory of relativity and the Time-Space 4-dimensional structure concept, my brain exploded.

There I was nodding my head along with the other students trying desperately to get the hamster in my brain back on the wheel and understand what he was explaining to us. I found out a few years later that of the 5 of us, 4 had no clue what was going on and their hamsters were just as lost as mine, but I’ll explain that in a second.

For a little background for all your non-science and math people on what the heck Einstein was thinking: let’s say you’ve got a twin. You stay behind on earth while your twin goes in a super awesome high-tech space ship that can travel close to the speed of light to visit Pluto and frolic in space for a while. Here on Earth, they’re gone for a very long time; you get old, get wrinkles, and finally get that senior discount at the grocery store you’ve always dreamed of. Upon your twin’s return they don’t look a day older than the day they left however many years ago. Why’s that? Well in that super fancy space ship time didn’t pass as quickly as it did back here on earth, so what seemed like forever to you, was just a few days to your twin. Your mind has now been blown AND you hate your hypothetical twin—well that stinks.

Now, back to that one kid (oh how we hated him for kicking our butts on the AP test), why was he able to understand this concept better than the other 4 of us were? Turns out Native Americans think about time differently that English speaking Americans. (check out this cool article by Guy Deutscher for more info)

To us, Americans, time is a VERY important part of our culture—we even have jokes about how you need to be 15 minutes early everywhere or else you’re late. Our schedules depend on time: when we’ll do this, how long it takes to get there, how much time to save up money to buy what ever we need. Time, in its finite intervals, define our lives.

As Jerome Kills Small states in the audio file, in his Native American culture time does not work that way--to them time is not measured like it is for Americans. He explains the concept of reliving memories. While an American might see an old man sitting down under a tree as a person who’s wasting time, he sees a man who’s mind is traveling 100 miles per hour down memory lane. He is completely immersed in his memories and oblivious to what is going on around him. Therefore in his environment time stops, but in his head he’s revisiting times that have already occurred.

This is why the concept of time as a 4^th dimension was so easy for my friend to understand—his mind ALREADY worked that way. He understood what Einstein was talking about, differing situations with differing time intervals/conceptions because it was a part of his culture. All the while my brain was trying desperately to wrap itself around a concept that was foreign to me. In my mind, time isn’t variable, it’s fixed, and my Timex watch tells me so.

So what implications does this difference in perception of ideas have for us as educators? Well for one: just because something makes sense to you as an educator, or to a few of your students, don’t assume everyone single student has the same ease of understandings. When in doubt, spell things out.

Additionally it’s good for educators to understand that students bring unique perceptions on the world into our classrooms. If we had given our Native American classmate 10 minutes of class time to explain how he views time, or have given him the chance to explain how he was thinking about time there’s a possibility it would have clicked with me and maybe (just maybe) I would have passed that modern physics class I failed in college.

Just some thoughts to ponder.