Time bomb

1. Whenever I told anyone that I was a journalist for several years before I turned to teaching, the standard musing would be: ‘So how does the gentle pace of a classroom compare to the frenetic pace of the newsroom?’

The reality is that I carried all the frenetic pace into the classroom. And it was a casual comment from a student that made me do it. One day, after returning an assignment where my students had written an analysis of a political cartoon to my class, I gave them a brief on all the points of analysis that I expected from them. After I had finished speaking, a student remarked, “If I had a full day to analyse the cartoon, I would be able to think of all these points, but I cannot possibly do it in an hour.” He was not grumbling about his marks; in fact, he was simply joking.

But the comment remained with me through the day. He was right about the fact that every test and every examination in our education system is actually a speed test. You need to come up with the answer within the stipulated time limit – else there is no point in coming up with the answer at all. And I realised that in the case of analysis of any text, or working out a complicated Math problem, it is not always that the student does not have the answer – it is just that they have not been able to think of it in time.

And that was the day that I changed the gentle pace of the classroom into the frenetic pace of the newsroom. It is not fair to keep the pace gentle and give ample time for classwork, and then ramp it up to a speed test suddenly, during examinations. I decided that everything the students thought, said and wrote should be within a time limit, in order to better prepare them for tests later.

Initially, most students gave me incomplete work, since they were used to a gentler pace in class. “What’s the big hurry?” was the chorus in class. But I kept at it. Just like merciless newsroom editors enforce strict deadlines to ensure the newspapers being printed in time, I shifted the classroom focus from "turn it in when you're done" to fixed time limits. Slowly, at a glacial pace actually, my students got accustomed to speeding it up. If not the writing, at least their thinking.

And that’s when I unfolded the idea of ‘PechaKucha’ to them. PechaKucha, meaning ‘chitchat’ in Japanese, is a storytelling format in which a presenter talks for 20 seconds per slide, usually continuing for 20 slides. And yes, there is machine precision here for the slides change automatically every 20 seconds. I started with 5 slides, instead of 20. And I gave them a day to prepare their topics.

The first day, the result was much like slapstick comedy. Those students brave enough to volunteer for PechaKucha, were left fumbling for thoughts, and barely got in a few scattered words in 20 seconds, after which they collapsed into giggles. Since the laughter took the pressure off, I called out to my students to come forward fearlessly to entertain the others. I knew that if even one of them could make sense of their topic in 20 seconds, the situation would change. But there was no such luck on day one. The situation was so comic that even I dissolved into helpless laughter by the end of the class. In fact, I began to wonder if it would work at all.

Students, being students, began to clamour for it again, after a few days, sensing entertainment. I agreed, but this time, made it a marked assignment – just to take the laughter out of the equation. (Mean of me, I guess, but I did mean business here.) And gave them two days to practise for it. Now, students usually take their marks pretty seriously. Day two went better since neither was the idea new now, nor was it completely free of pressure. A couple of students managed well, most were not bad. Most of them asked for another chance to better their marks, and I was happy to agree.

Thinking fast, and within a time limit automatically ensures speaking succinctly. There is no time to waste on empty words, since each word must count. And that, I believe is the beauty of PechaKucha. Apart from making you think quickly, it also makes you weigh your words, which is a gem of a skill in our verbose society.

P.S: Months later, when an invited speaker went well beyond his time limit, speaking on for nearly an hour, a student whispered, “He needs to practise PechaKucha.”