Elapsed Time

I sit at the “extra help” table with my few other fourth grade classmates who also found themselves struggling to understand the complexities of elapsed time. My worksheet is filled with clocks whose hands are pointed every which way. They almost look like faces, mocking me for not understanding them.

“How about we start with something easy,” my teacher says, looking over someone’s shoulder at the paper. “Let’s try number six. If a train leaves at 10:30 am and arrives at the station at 1:30 pm, how much time has passed?” 

She looks up from the paper and waits for someone to answer. I try subtracting the numbers like we were taught earlier in the week, but nine didn’t seem like the right answer. As I push the dwindling pink eraser into my paper, trying to remove my mistakes from existence, someone raises their hand.

“Three hours?”

“Correct!” my teacher responded as if this was the most enthralling thing she’s ever heard.

She might’ve explained how to get the answer, but I wasn’t listening. Instead, I was staring at my half erased work. I could still see the outline of my messy attempt and it reinforced the dread that was pouring into me. 

Why didn’t this make sense to me? Everything makes sense to me, but a clock doesn’t?

“Ok… Let’s try number 2 now. Sara leaves her house at 9:36 am and finishes her errands at 1:06 pm. How much time has passed?”

I grip my pencil tighter than before, trying to transfer all my frustration into it. I’ve barely finished my attempt when I see a hand shoot up in my peripheral vision. A hand that might as well be holding a big, neon sign that says  “YOU’RE STUPID” because that’s all I saw. 

“3 and a half hours?” is said by someone around me, I’m not sure who because I refuse to look up. You can hear an underlying confidence in their answer. A confidence I could only dream of having while sitting in front of this worksheet.

The “Yes! Perfect!” my teacher responds with, sounds shrill and piercing. She’s addressing the whole table, but she couldn’t be talking to me because all of my answers are wrong. Wrong isn’t perfect or good or ok. I clench my jaw to try and hold back my tears that will at any second begin to rush from my eyes. I can’t hold it in and my failure rolls off my cheeks, leaving the clocks in small puddles.

My teacher walks by, gently grabbing my shoulder to lead me out into the hall.

“Let’s stand in the hall for a second,” she whispers.

I stand up and walk away from the tear stained paper. 

“Why are we crying? If you don’t understand something I’ll explain it. I just need you to ask,” she tells me calmly.

“It’s not just that,” I respond, my sniffles echoing through the long, empty hallway, “I just don’t get why this is so confusing.”

“Well, sometimes we don’t understand things right away and that’s ok.”

“But I always understand things. I don’t need extra help,”

“That’s not something to be ashamed of.”

She doesn’t get it. 

“Ok,” I only respond so I can be done with the conversation.

“How about you take a walk to the water fountain and then join us when you get back.”

The water fountain is only a few feet away, so my walk is relatively short, still, when I get back, the tears on my paper are gone and it’s wrinkled where they dried. 

By the time we are finished with “extra help”, I’ve made holes in my paper from forcefully erasing everything and my eraser has worn to the metal. I would go home that night and sit with the worksheet in front of me for hours. I’m pretty sure I ended up at the “extra help” table again the next day. 

Time has elapsed since then, and I think I might finally understand it.