After my post the other day, The Guardian published this excellent piece by Isabel Manley. I loved Odell’s book. I love this representation of that book and how one teacher tries to make sense of time. And Manley can actually draw.

This last panel got me thinking:

“The kind of time,” I would bet, is accompanied by a notion of the kind of space too. Most teachers want their room to feel like a studio, or an artist’s loft, or a museum office, or a newsroom. (It’s a great exercise to think about what space you want your classroom to look like especially if you make a list of the things that work against it.) But a good portion of those activities aren’t communal, and you also have more than a few minutes where it’s not about the work you’re doing as a group. It’s about the individual.

So you have to do the work to make it so that people want to be in the space but you also have to contend with the fact that your classroom is embedded in a school with thirty, forty, fifty other classrooms. Classrooms. Cells and bells, yo.

Think about when and where humans feel the “ah, let me sit down and create something?” Not in a vaguely-industrial, partially-cleaned space filled with a mix of friends and acquaintances, some of whom are feeling the same and others of whom are focused on where the next bag of Hot Chitoes can be found. And where one noisy person is telling them what to do.

(Student workspace on a Thursday afternoon in 308)

But Manley’s piece is about time, not space. Part of the reason why I’m up well before 5AM each morning is because it’s the only time I have to be creative. To try and write something. To try and be something other than teacher drone, beholden to the clock. Can I write something? Can I put myself in a position where I’m walking away from this life with one or more cool things to show for myself, just as I spend my days trying to put kids in a position where they walk away from our class with one or more cool things to show for themselves?