We skim our newsfeeds and social media. If a video is over 10 minutes, we seldom open it, and even a short video is abandoned if it doesn't engage us in the first 15 seconds. We depend on abstracts and summaries.
This impatience extends to other areas of our lives. For instance, I've been ordering groceries online because it's faster. I can sit in my car, reading Facebook, while a clerk loads the trunk. I'm usually in and out within 10 minutes.
As a teacher, the length of an assignment is something I have to give special consideration to. Will this engage the students? Will they watch/read the whole thing? Will they stop and think about it? Or will their response be "tl; dr" (too long; didn't read)? I'm beginning to prepare some videos for an online course I'm teaching in the summer, and the current recommendation is to keep videos under 5 minutes. Five!
The benefits of slowing down are obvious. It takes time to consider multiple sides of an argument, to fact-check, to consider our logic, to formulate a response. Inspiration takes time. Art takes time.
A recent book by Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeber, The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy, advises faculty to reject the corporate culture of speed and train our students to slow down. But that's not what I'm arguing for today.
What I would like to suggest is that people have always been in a hurry. Always. Humans feel the pressure of mortality and passing time. Think of Keats' "When I have fears that I may cease to be," or Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress." Before television and mass transit, a family sat in their drawing room, sewing or playing games or reading, and wondering whether their lives were worthwhile. Now we're in a hurry faster, but Time's bending sickle is headed for us all.
Urging people to slow down isn't the answer. Instead, we should focus on consciously choosing what we spend time on. As teachers, we can train future generations to use their limited time well, to consider what is best summarized and what is best read in depth, or what are the best sources for recaps. Accepting a natural, human impulse is a much better use of faculty time than complaining about students who are in a hurry.
