Managing time in a liberal education. (My View).

I'VE BEEN OBSERVING the development of college students for over twenty-five years, first as a psychology professor and then as a dean, and also as a parent--a surprisingly different perspective. Unce dismissive of parents' concerns for their children's futures as too careerist or too protective, I now share the anxiety of parents who entrust their children to a college before their development to effective adulthood is assured. In spite of widespread parental misunderstanding of a liberal arts education (see Hersh 1997), listening to parents' concerns about their children's preparation for life after college can be beneficial.

As an educator interested in liberal education, I speak of opening students' minds, broadening their horizons, acquainting them with different disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives, developing depth of understanding in an area of concentration, etc. But, as the mother of a college senior and a high school senior, I am concerned that my son and daughter not only develop new knowledge and perspectives, but also develop the discipline and skills necessary to set and accomplish their objectives and, in general, to be effective adult members of society. That same concern is one I frequently hear from other parents of college students. I have begun to realize that one major task in becoming an adult is learning to manage time. As a dean, I recognize that we may not be helping with this area of intellectual development. Earlier, I argued the importance of taking time to think (Gerdes 1998); now, I am arguing that the education we give our students should address how to think about time.

Although success in high school is largely dependent on getting high quality work done in time to meet deadlines, high school is broken into many daily classes with frequent short-term assignments, usually with parental or other adult oversight of students' use of time. In contrast, college life requires greater skills; students have few hours in class and large blocks of "free" time in which they need to organize all aspects of their work and play. Students' responsibility for their own time is a distinctive feature of the college years.

Under these open-ended conditions, most first-year students have difficulty managing time. Gradually, their ability to handle competing time demands improves, even though instruction in the area seems primarily of the sink-or-swim variety. Within each semester, students gain experience learning to plan and prioritize their academic work so that they can optimize what is accomplished in the time available. Professors emphasize the importance of students' getting their course work done on time; however, we may be paying too much attention to success in particular courses and too little to developing skills for life.

Outside academe, time demands are not conveniently chunked into semesters; therefore, focusing on productivity as the main issue in time management is a short-sighted and narrow conception, if a liberal education is intended as preparation for life rather than as preparation for particular tasks and jobs. Further, focusing only on accomplishing tasks can result in an artificial separation of oneself from time, making it the enemy. In actuality, one's life is one's time. And time is the major thing one has to give. The issue of using time well is larger than productivity.

Time and liberal education

I have been wondering how to view this broader version of time management as part of a liberal education. Obviously, time is part of the subject matter of many liberal arts disciplines from classics to physics, and human awareness of the finite and uncertain amount of time each of us will have in our lives is a crucial issue in those disciplines that deal with human identity. But, it seems we typically address the necessity of dealing well with time simply in terms of productivity. Only in first-year student orientation or in conversations with students who are in academic difficulty do we explicitly raise the issue of time management. As evidenced every semester in my office, poor performance often is caused by a student's inability to structure time rather than lack of ability to cope with the subject matter. Moreover, acts of academic irresponsibility often result when there is not enough time left to prepare the work by legitimate means.

In contrast, those who successfully manage their time are rewarded with better grades. Although higher education has taken responsibility in recent years for teaching writing, critical thinking, information retrieval, and even oral presentation (rather than simply rewarding those who already demonstrate these intellectual skills), managing one's time rarely is directly addressed as an intellectual skill that can be learned and that has lifelong implications.

What should we be teaching our students about time? Many of us in academe began to understand what was important about intellectual skills, such as writing or critical thinking, by examining our own and our colleagues' performance of those skills. Looking around me, I know professionals in academe who understand the importance of choices about their time--and act on them--and others who do not. Administrators, at least at the higher levels, are selected partly for getting work done and meeting people's expectations that they do so. Within the faculty role, a few professors have great difficulty bringing their articles or books to completion, have difficulty returning papers to their students, can't cover everything on their syllabi, miss appointments and meetings. These stereotypical "absent-minded professors" illustrate the negative consequences of failing to control one's time. Other faculty members successfully balance the complex, competing demands of teaching, scholarship, service, and attention to famil y and friends.

First message

From comparing those who deal successfully with their time to those who do nor, I as dean can imagine giving my students one message:

* Don't let time run away with you. It is natural far from a due date to consider all options/alternatives to possibilities for the large block of time available and then to focus more specifically as the deadline is approaching. This isn't true only for students. Administrators and faculty members, and other professionals and business people also move from more relaxed and less focused to more focused and less relaxed as we approach a deadline and feel time is "running out." But just letting this occur is ultimately more stressful and less effective than, instead, taking time to plan and set priorities.

* Organizing techniques help. Some people find lists and calendars oppressive. I usually spend part of the dean's orientation for new faculty members arguing that they can use a calendar to reduce stress, to make themselves feel more free from time pressures. Putting deadlines on a calendar and working backward to determine when you actually have to start a project provides blocks of time without worry about that particular project and removes the overwhelming anxiety of worrying about everything at once.

But perhaps we can learn only about the productivity aspects of time management by observing people at work. To learn about time management as part of being liberally educated for life, we need to observe priorities in a broader context. My own attitude toward time changed dramatically not when I was an undergraduate or graduate student, but when my first child was born, before I had published sufficiently to warrant being granted tenure. I realized then that there wasn't "enough" time, that any wasted time at work was spending time away from my child without good reason, that cleaning off my desk was a lower priority than finishing a paper or preparing a class. In contrast, nothing done with my son or husband, or later with my daughter, was wasted time. I have never had enough time since then to return to cleaning off my desk routinely, and although I still work too many hours, I can leave the lower priority items piled on my desk without feeling guilty.

Because of the extreme time demands involved, parenting provides other examples. Several years ago, a student in my Psychology of Women course startled the rest of the class by mentioning that her mother, a busy physician, had once sent a taxi to take her home from junior high school when she was quite ill. (The fact that we would have been less shocked if her father hadn't made time to care for her is a different topic.) For the young woman this was a memorable incident that has since served as a reminder to me, and, I believe, to others in that class. From an early age, my daughter recognized the principle here; when I was late leaving work to pick her up, she would announce, "You made something else a higher priority than me."

Second message

Accordingly, my second message or goal for my students would be:

* Don't think about time only in terms of what you can accomplish or produce in a given time period. How you spend your time exemplifies your values. People who don't accomplish much are seen as lazy, but people who spend their time only on production are labeled "workaholics."

* Set aside time for those you care about. We often hear of people whose greatest regret, later in life, is not having spent more time with their children while they were growing up or with their parents before they passed away. Giving time is how we care for others.

* Besides saving time for people, another important choice is saving time to contemplate, relax, listen, wander, to "stop and smell the roses." People need idea time, not just production time. "Saving time" for people or for contemplation means you must make choices rather than just letting time flow; in making choices, you take control of your time. This lesson seems particularly important now when cell phones and portable computers are always within reach. If you don't set the boundaries between your production time and your set-aside time, productivity demands will follow you everywhere.

Getting the message across

These are my personal choices for two principles of time management to teach our students. But, whatever principles of effective time use we identify, communicating them is not enough. How do we help students make the transition from parentally guided use of time to adult independence in their ability to set priorities and to organize their time to meet those priorities?

We know that students don't learn intellectual skills such as writing or critical thinking very well if we just demand that skill and grade them when they fail to demonstrate it. Rather, we have to be explicit that our goals include the particular skill and about what we mean by effective writing or critical thinking--or time management. And we have to find pedagogical methods that lead students from where they are to where we want them to be. One method seems to be making students self-conscious about the choices they are making in using the skill.

Recently, a professor at Bucknell asked students to describe what they learned about themselves when completing a particularly ambitious assignment. Many of the students wrote about their poor choices in using time. Perhaps, series of assignments that allow choices in time use, with earlier assignments providing greater scaffolding than later assignments, would help to "shape" independent use of time. I am nor so presumptuous as to suggest here that colleges might teach time management across the curriculum. I simply suggest that we look to the pedagogy that works for other intellectual skills for ideas about how to teach about time.

As a parent, my suggestion is bolder: that teaching students how to use time would enhance the future effectiveness of everything else they learn in college. Like most parents, I want my children to become happy adults, successful in whatever work they choose, and able to meet their commitments to other people. I am convinced that their ability to control their time has something to do with each of those wishes I have for them; my perspective as a parent now informs my perspective as a dean. I believe that parents know something about what their developing children need and that professors and deans should take seriously parents' concerns that their sons and daughters as adults be able to make effective choices about their time. Addressing this as part of a liberal education also could address what Hersh calls the "practicality gap" and improve parents' appreciation of other aspects of a liberal education as preparation for an effective and fulfilling life.

WORKS CITED 

Hersh, Richard H. 1997. Intentions and perceptions: A national survey of public attitudes toward liberal arts education. Change. March/April.

Gerdes, Eugenia P. 1998. Remembering the contemplative life. Liberal Education 84: 58-62.

EUGENIA GERDES is interim vice president for academic affairs, dean of the college of arts and sciences, and professor of psychology at Bucknell University.