One of the things that I really love doing is writing with my students when they are writing. Most recently I was working on the argumentative prompt for our upcoming BEST writing practice. We had to read about whether is better to have scheduled or unscheduled leisure time activities. Besides practicing and gaining a better understanding of the elements of the updated rubric, I discovered some terms and some research that I had not read before The term that I was most interested in was this idea of time contamination. This word seems to have come out in the literature around 2018 and somehow I missed this. I’ve been really thinking and trying to avoid time contamination for the past few years without really knowing that was a thing. Time contamination as I understand it is this idea work permeates our lives, even when we’re away from work, due to the invasiveness of technology. One of the things I’ve been working on for the past few years is really to avoid sending emails to teachers on weekends and after work hours. I also really try to avoid sending texts. These are some conscious behaviors I’ve been making because as a teacher leader because I think it also sends a poor message about work life balance, which is something I’ve not been good at (ok I suck at it), but I also don’t want people being anxious about work on the weekends or at all. I’m really good at not responding to texts or emails after 7:30 PM because I’m typically asleep which is a good thing. But thinking about time contamination, for example, this past December, I had a teacher text me on a Friday night before our return to work on Monday from winter break. She’s not somebody I would normally hear from, but she wanted to let me know she was not coming back to work after Christmas and wanted me to be the first to know. I really thought to myself Who did this really benefit? Why couldn’t that have waited until Monday when we returned to work from vacation? Because although I’ve worked on conditioning myself to not stress, ultimately there was a layer of stress about her leaving since she was the yearbook sponsor. As a side-note, I’ve actually had a lot of fun these past two months, working with a yearbook students and we have our final deadline tomorrow, but let’s get back to time contamination. Although I’ve been trying to be considerate of my colleagues, I’m really going to work on being considerate of my family, and not letting our time get contaminated because the moments of solid uninterrupted time together matters. One of the best way I can do this is by being out in nature with them, and also leaving the phone behind. How do you handle time contamination?
The phrase is new to me, too! I love the word contamination for this. I just gave birth to our third son three months ago, and this is becoming ever more important in my life. It's so difficult, but incredibly necessary. I just returned to work this week, and my teammates have supported me beyond belief: "What do you need to be able to leave at a respectable time so you can go cuddle your baby? Copies? Here, take mine. A model? Here, let me show you how I did it..." Those were exact words, and I was almost in tears. Thank you for sharing this today.
ReplyDeleteI hadn't heard of this phrase, either. Thanks for sharing it! It was fun to learn it while hearing about it in action (or dis-action, as the case may be). Someone at my school last year taught us all how to "schedule send" emails so people won't see them before school starts again, and the principal encourages us to use it. That's been helpful for me to know about and use.
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