Towards the end of last year, one of my colleagues (also an ABD literature student) pointed me towards the ‘pomodoro’ method of increasing productivity. The time management idea apparently comes from a book by Francesco Cirillo, and the idea is that you take about five minutes off for every 25 that you work on the task in order to keep your mind and focus fresh for the task at hand. Part of what made this stand out to me is my interest in trying to avoid a repetitive stress injury while writing my dissertation since the effects of the injury would be present for years to come. Coupled with concentrated efforts to reduce multitasking and distractions, the benefits of this kind of time management have become almost cliché among graduate students trying to finish their dissertations or theses. Having found it to be useful in my own work, I have begun to question why our time management goals differ so dramatically from the way in which we ordinarily structure classroom time.

Given this fact, what does this knowledge and these practices imply about the way in which teachers traditionally order their classrooms? From my experience, the conventional knowledge in many institutions of higher education is that variety and changing teaching methods (group and individual work, lecture and discussion, reflection and recall) can help students maintain focus, but is there too little room for downtime or breaks? Are students in 3-hour evening classes, for instance, better served by an intricate and wholly uninterrupted class that allows them to cover the maximum amount of material, or would they be able to engage with the material more with structured time that permits them to relax or pause their focus during the class period? Perhaps it is this need for this kind of structuring that makes integrating downtime in the classroom so difficult, as it is easy for students to ‘lose focus’ when instructors provide down time or early dismissals without the structure needed to make the downtime productive in the long run. How might one assess downtime and its purpose, student focus in a way that permits a variety of learning styles and differences?

-Donovan Tann