Daylight Savings Stole an Hour—But What If We Controlled Time in the Classroom?

Twice a year, time shifts under our feet. We lose an hour. We gain an hour. We argue about whether we should still be doing this in 2025.

But here’s the thing: Time isn’t fixed. It’s designed.

If you’ve ever read a book that plays with time—looping, flashing back, compressing years into a paragraph—you know that time in storytelling isn’t real time. Authors bend it, stretch it, and manipulate it to shape meaning.

Authors don’t simply tell stories in chronological order. They loop back through flashbacks, compress uneventful months into a sentence, or stretch pivotal moments across pages. They fracture timelines, create parallel narratives, and bend temporal reality to serve their meaning.

As my clocks jumped forward this weekend, I found myself thinking about time—not just the hour we “lost,” but how differently time works in literature compared to our classrooms.

Yet in teaching, we often treat time as fixed, linear, and uniform. One day per chapter. Forty-five minutes per discussion. Three weeks per unit. Five minutes per paragraph.

This disconnect has been bothering me lately. If authors know that manipulating time creates deeper meaning, why do we insist on such rigid temporal structures in our teaching?

How Time Works in Literature

Consider how masterfully authors play with time:

In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the narrative constantly loops between present and past, mirroring how trauma disrupts linear experience. The past literally haunts the present—time isn’t sequential but layered, with different periods coexisting and informing each other.

Or look at Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, where the protagonist becomes “unstuck in time,” experiencing his life out of sequence. This structure isn’t random—it reflects the novel’s themes about war, trauma, and the illusion of free will.

I often tell my students that Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day is one of my favorite books. “It’s like watching paint dry,” I say, “but I absolutely love it.” The novel’s agonizingly slow pacing—where seemingly nothing happens for pages—creates the emotional payoff. Those stretched moments of reflection give weight to the protagonist’s gradual realization of his wasted life. The slowness isn’t a flaw; it’s the whole point.

Even in more traditional narratives, time rarely moves at a consistent pace. F. Scott Fitzgerald compresses entire seasons in The Great Gatsby then slows to capture every word and gesture in crucial scenes. Jane Austen might skip months between chapters then devote fifty pages to a single evening’s ball.

Why do authors do this? Because time is a tool for meaning-making. It’s not just about what happens—it’s about how we experience it.

Authors manipulate time because human experience isn’t linear or evenly paced. Understanding, emotion, and meaning don’t unfold at constant rates.

How We Structure Time in Teaching

Yet in our classrooms, we often impose rigid temporal frameworks that work against how understanding actually develops:

The “single-use” lesson problem is perhaps most damaging. We “cover” a concept once, in a neatly contained time block, then consider it dealt with. If students don’t get it in that allocated time? Too bad—we’ve got pacing guides to follow.

Those pacing guides present another problem—mandating uniform time for diverse material regardless of complexity or student response. Two days for this poem, three for that story, one week for this novel—whether the material warrants it or not.

Then there’s the way we structure discussions and writing assignments as one-and-done tasks. Students rarely get to revisit ideas over time, to see how their understanding evolves, to experience the non-linear nature of real thinking.

That’s how you end up with:

• A rushed, compressed end of the year—where suddenly, students are expected to master everything in the final weeks.
• Discussions that never evolve—because we “covered” something once and never circled back.
• Writing that stays shallow—because we don’t give students time to revisit and refine ideas.

What’s most troubling is how this approach contradicts what we know about learning. Cognitive science is clear: understanding develops through revisitation, through spiraling back, through connections made over time. Just like in literature, meaning doesn’t emerge linearly.

My Classroom Revelation

This disconnect crystallized for me during our study of Frankenstein.

Initially, I planned our usual approach: read chronologically, discuss each chapter, analyze as we go, final essay. Nice and linear. But something wasn’t working. Student discussions remained superficial, their analysis predictable.

Then I tried something different. After their first reading, we revisited key scenes out of order, juxtaposing moments from different sections of the novel. We tracked specific words (like “beauty” or “creature”) across the entire text rather than analyzing chronologically.

The results were transformative. When freed from chronological constraints, students started making connections between widely separated portions of the text. They noticed patterns invisible in linear reading. 

Their understanding deepened not by moving forward but by circling back, by collapsing time between different moments in the novel.

One student observed that tracking the word “darkness” throughout the novel revealed a pattern we’d never have seen reading sequentially: how darkness transforms from literal to metaphorical, revealing Frankenstein’s psychological descent. This insight didn’t emerge linearly—it required seeing across time, connecting moments separated by hundreds of pages.

When Students See Through Time

Just today, a student approached me after class with a confession: “My thinking about this text isn’t really… linear. It’s more like a web with all these connections. Do I have to write my essay in a straight line, or can I show how all these ideas connect to each other?”

Her question stopped me cold. She had articulated exactly what I’d been struggling to name—the fundamental disconnect between how we think and how we’re taught to present thinking.

Her “web” metaphor perfectly captured what happens in authentic analysis. Ideas don’t proceed in a neat sequence; they form connections across concepts, motifs, and moments in the text. One observation links to three others, which each connect to something else. It’s organic, interconnected, and fundamentally non-linear.

Yet we consistently ask students to flatten these webs into straight lines when they write, ignoring how the complexity and richness of their thinking gets lost in translation.

I told her she could experiment with a more web-like structure, but I could hear the hesitation in my voice. I’ve spent years teaching thesis-driven, linear essays. What would a “web essay” even look like? How would I evaluate it? What if it became chaotic rather than complex?

But her question has haunted me because I recognized the cost of my hesitation: her authentic thinking might be sacrificed on the altar of traditional structure.

Redesigning Time in Our Teaching

This experience has me rethinking how I structure time in my classroom. What if our teaching could be more like literature—with flashbacks, varying paces, and narrative loops?

The Discussion Time Loop is one approach I’ve been experimenting with. Instead of having a single discussion about a text and moving on, we revisit the same question over multiple class periods, with students documenting how their thinking evolves. Initial responses become “flashbacks” we can reference when understanding deepens later.

I’ve also been more intentional about expanding and compressing time based on student engagement rather than rigid plans. Some concepts need more time than others—not because they’re more important in the curriculum, but because they’re generating deeper thinking in that particular group of students.

Perhaps most importantly, I’ve started thinking about teaching as storytelling—not in the sense of entertaining students, but in structuring learning with the same temporal flexibility that makes stories meaningful. Sometimes we need to circle back to earlier concepts, draw unexpected connections, or slow down to explore a critical moment in depth.

The Deeper Implication

What troubles me most about our rigid temporal approaches is what they communicate to students about thinking itself. When we teach as if learning happens in neat chronological blocks—read, discuss, analyze, test, move on—we’re teaching them that thinking works the same way.

But it doesn’t. Real thinking is messy, recursive, and non-linear. Ideas connect across time. Understanding deepens through revisitation. Meaning emerges through patterns that become visible only when we step outside strict chronology.

When I look at my students who truly excel—not just at school but at genuine thinking—they’re the ones who naturally work this way. They circle back to earlier ideas with new perspectives. They make unexpected connections across texts and concepts. They resist the artificial linearity of syllabus time.

What if, instead of fighting these tendencies, we designed for them?

What Happens When Students Stay in the Formula Too Long?

They mistake structure for analysis.

• “I followed the five-paragraph format, so my essay is strong.”
• “I included three quotes, so I proved my point.”
• “I used a thesis template, so my argument makes sense.”

But did they actually develop an idea? Did they explore nuance?

They learn to play school, not engage with ideas.

Instead of seeing writing as a tool for thinking, it becomes a task to complete.

• They write what they think the teacher wants—not what they actually think.
• They become really good at filling in blanks, but not at generating original thought.
• They panic when the formula doesn’t fit.

Ask them to write an argument without five paragraphs, and they freeze.

Ask them to build a thesis from an idea, rather than plugging into a formula, and they struggle.

They’ve spent so long following a template that they don’t know how to adjust when the task changes.

We tell students that formulas are scaffolds—but in reality, we’re spending so long teaching the scaffold that we never build the house. 

And that’s a problem.

The Paradox of Teaching Time

Here’s what I’m grappling with now: Our educational structures—semesters, units, lesson plans—demand linear progression. But meaningful learning rarely follows such a neat pattern.”

We still have pacing guides to follow, units to complete, standards to address. We still operate within a system that measures learning in discrete chronological blocks.

But those constraints fool us into thinking we are at the hands of time.

The truth is, we shape the narrative of our school year.

• We decide what gets revisited and what gets left behind.
• We decide where to expand and where to compress.
• We decide whether the most important moments get time to unfold—or if they get rushed in the final weeks.

When We Don’t Make These Choices Intentionally…

We over-plan the beginning and rush the end.

We front-load exposure and shortchange synthesis.

We spend weeks “setting up” ideas, then barely give time to let them develop.

What If We Designed Learning Like a Narrative Instead? Instead of treating time like a fixed schedule, what if we:

• Expanded revision time instead of cramming it in at the end?
• Looped discussions back into the unit instead of treating them as one-and-done?
• Designed the school year like a novel—where the pacing serves meaning?

I don’t have all the answers, but I know this: The most real learning happens when we break free from the artificial linearity of pacing guides.

That’s why I’m making thinking outside of formulaic structures the focus of my next membership challenge.

Next month, we’re experimenting with discussion loops, nonlinear reading structures, and rethinking time in the classroom.

If this idea resonates, come test it out with us. 

👉 Join us before April 1.