What is the best thing your teacher ever told you?

I didn't understand this when I was in middle school. Doc Atkinson was a very wise man. He was a lawyer at one time in his life. I'm not sure if "Doc" was an honorific or what, but he was a math teacher when I knew him. A heavy-set guy who I for some reason remember looking like Colonel Sanders mixed with Jason Robards, he was one of the few teachers I respected, partially because he was compassionate and tried hard not to send me to the office during a year when I was getting sent to the office by every other teacher on a regular basis.

Towards the end of a class period, the class started packing up early. This isn't an uncommon phenomenon in classes. It's usually during the last minute or so of class. This day, we must have been trying to pack up something like five minutes early. He stopped us, then started talking about time. I'm going to kind of paraphrase what he said, since it was said back in 1988 or 1989.

"You'll be in here for 180 days. If you pack up five minutes early every day, that equals 900 minutes this year. That's 15 hours. Imagine that. Look at the clock. Stare it it while I talk about what a minute feels like." We watched as he narrated a minute. What once felt like a few seconds now drew out to what felt like an hour. "Notice how the hand, when you look at it, slows down. It's taking forever as it passes the five towards the six. Notice how the nine feels like forever from now?" When it finally hit twelve, he told us that we were willing to do that for five full revolutions of the second hand. Why? All because five minutes wasn't enough time to do anything. It had no value.

"Time is the most expensive commodity in the world. You'll find someone who is willing to give you money for  your time. It's called a job. At the end of your life, when you've wasted lots of time, try finding someone who will trade you time for your money. It isn't happening. You'll sit there, regretting all of the minutes and even seconds that you wasted."

I'm sure others have said it. I've said it in my class dozens of times. I've added to Doc Atkinson's speech. "The average lifespan is around 75 years. You'll spend roughly 1/3 of that asleep. At that point, you're down to 50 years of being awake. Subtract time you've spent watching bad TV, standing in line, waiting at traffic lights, cleaning, pumping gas, filling out forms, listening to pompous windbags like me, and all of the other ways in which we waste time, and you'll have maybe 15 minutes of real joy. Every second is worth something. The time you spend working now is time you get to enjoy later."

I doubt my high school students understand what I'm saying, but maybe they'll think back and remember it someday. Thanks, Doc!

Written by,

Daniel Kaplan

https://www.quora.com/profile/Daniel-Kaplan?ch=10&share=f7a2cc22&srid=CId2

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