Time Is Not on Their Side

By Elizabeth Taylor/Chicago

For a child in kindergarten, the day is carefully divided into time for listening, playing, coloring, snacking and napping. Middle-class children, raised by parents who worship their watches, adapt easily to this regimen. But for many disadvantaged inner-city youngsters, the structure of the school day apparently seems totally unfamiliar. They often resist the idea that they should stop doing one thing simply because it is time to do something else.

Why are many children of the urban poor so uncomfortable in school? One explanation comes from University of Chicago Professor Dolores Norton, who is conducting a unique study of the intellectual development of children in poor families. Her conclusion: growing up in an unstructured home environment, they do not develop a sense of time that enables them to adapt well to school. "When they come to school, these children enter a world that was not created for them," says Norton, who teaches at the university's School of Social Service Administration. "Imagine yourself in a classroom with adults who speak your language, yet you are unable to interpret what they want you to do, even though you wish to please them." Not understanding the meaning of time, she asserts, is a handicap that may partly account for the poor academic performance of many inner-city children throughout their school careers.

Norton's insights come from first-hand research. For the past six years, she has been regularly videotaping, from infancy, about 40 children born to young mothers living in the most blighted, impoverished pockets of Chicago. She lets her camera roll for up to four hours at a time, capturing the ordinary rhythms and interactions of a child's life at home. Reviewing thousands of hours of ) tapes, Norton found that references to time were rare. Most parents hardly ever provided instructions like "Finish lunch so you can see your favorite TV program at 1:30," or even sequential statements like "First put on your socks, then your shoes." Daily routines, such as Daddy or Mommy leaving for work and regular times for bed and meals, are usually nonexistent in these cramped, dangerous quarters where even the most conscientious mothers have trouble keeping food in the cupboard and steering clear of gang violence.

Children from these homes may be able to read a clock, but that does not mean they understand time. Norton found that most of her young subjects scored lower than average on seriation tests, which measured their abilities to understand sequences of events. The less a mother had talked to her child about time over the years, the worse the youngster performed on the tests.

Other child-development experts concur with Norton's findings. Many poor children, they note, are mystified by the "time-slotted" school environment, where crayons are often taken away before the picture is finished because it is juice time. Says clinical psychologist Jeree Pawl, director of the Infant- Parent Program at San Francisco General Hospital: "The structured situation makes them feel powerless. It feels arbitrary, senseless and imposed because at home there is no predictability and rigidity." Confused youngsters may withdraw or rebel, prompting some teachers to peg these children as troublemakers or slow learners.

J. Ronald Lally, a San Francisco educational psychologist, recalls his own experiment in teaching concepts of time to low-income children in a Syracuse pre-school center. "There was too much attention to time in the curriculum," says Lally, and this pitted students against teachers in a power struggle. He replaced this rigid format with a flexible curriculum in which children could set their own agendas, while teachers gradually and gently introduced concepts of time. Notes Lally: "The kids learned about time, but it wasn't connected to discipline."

Norton thinks classrooms like the one in Syracuse can teach youngsters about time and thus enhance self-discipline and turn their attention to learning. The question is whether even an ideal school can reverse the damage done by the isolated, timeless world into which most poor children are born.