By Jono Mischkot
In “Tick-Tock, Next: Epochal Time in the Writing Center,” Anne Ellen Gellar distinguishes between two ways of experiencing time in a Writing Center session. The first, more problematic sense of time, she calls “fungible time” or “mechanical time,” (8) referring to the assembly line-like pressure that builds when both consultant and student are too aware of the hour ticking down and the deadline approaching. She believes that when a Writing Center session is dominated by the clock, we tend to focus on efficiency rather than ingenuity, speed rather than substance. In contrast, borrowing from physicist and writer Alan Lightman, she presents the notion of “epochal time” or what physicists call “quantum time”—a nonlinear sense of time that is defined more by the event than the act or, as Lightman describes, a sense of time that “squirms and wriggles like a bluefish” (5). In the epochal state, a student and consultant are no longer preoccupied by the clock, but by the ensuing conversation. They are no longer deadened by the requirements of a paper or the constraints of a session, but enlivened by the possibility of discovering something new.
The above might sound idealistic and impractical in the space of an hour where work must get done, but Gellar offers some compelling anecdotes that model this move away from the mechanics of time and mechanical work. I’d like to offer one of my own:
A student came in with a case study where he was asked to analyze the failings of a particular company (the poor accounting practices of Sunshine Food Co.), and offer a recommendation. He asked me to “check it” to make sure he had “done everything right.” As we read along, we made some small changes here and there and quickly found ourselves at the end of the document. Technically, he had “done everything right” and the session could have ended there. But it was clear to me that he wasn’t satisfied with the paper; he seemed frustrated by his own lack of investment on and off the page.
I decided to open up the session, moving beyond the paper in front of us. In what may seem like a digression, I asked him about his past writing experiences. Soon, he began telling a story about high school. He’d once had a teacher who’d asked him to write an argumentative essay on abortion. When he wrote a pro-choice essay, the teacher (according to him) gave him an F because his politics did not coincide with hers (she was decidedly pro-life). I also shared an experience from my college days where I felt unfairly graded by a religious studies teacher who took issue with my skepticism.
This moment of commiseration, this departure into the past, this straying away from the present context and the looming clock, opened up several realizations. Writing can be frustratingly subjective, so much so that one can easily lose his/her perspective. Different teachers and different courses often call for different approaches, but at what point does one sacrifice or lose his/her voice? What does it even mean to have a voice in academic writing? I should also add that this seemingly impractical departure led to a very practical application: the student saw that his argument, for this particular paper, could and should be expressed more strongly.
Gellar closes her essay with a reference to Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth (21-22). At the end of the classic children’s book, as the boy protagonist, Milo, returns home from his journey across the lands of Dictionopolis, Digitopolis, The Doldrums, and the Mountains of Ignorance, he realizes that only an hour has past since he’s been away from his bedroom, and yet his entire perspective has changed.
And so both Juster and Gellar seem to be saying that we can accomplish a lot in little time if we move outward, like Milo, to the Lands of Beyond.
Works Cited
Geller, Anne Ellen. “Tick-tock, next: finding epochal time in the writing center.” Writing Center Journal 25.1 (2005): 5-24. Print.
Juster, Norton. The Phantom Tollbooth. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.
Lightman, Alan P. Einstein’s Dreams. New York, N.Y.: Pantheon Books, 1993.
Published June 8, 2015
