Two of the three students in my intermediate class of middle-schoolers attended class the day we read part two of a science fiction story involving time travel. Before we began, I asked if either student remembered part one, which we’d read six weeks earlier. One of the two remembered the story in great detail, though he had trouble finding the language to describe what had happened. My memory of the story was patchy, but it came back with his retelling, and I pitched in, supplying words when he was stuck. I’d have liked to have asked the other student to do that job—she’d have had no trouble with the vocabulary—but she had almost no recollection of the story at all. Less even than I had. “Maybe you weren’t here the day we read it,” I suggested. She cocked her head, as if tuning into distant sounds, and said the details from the other student sounded vaguely familiar. Vaguely familiar from a 13-year-old intermediate student! How was I supposed to help her when she sailed along so smoothly on her own? I could throw more cargo on her craft. I asked if she knew the phrase ring a bell. She did not, but I expected she would from that point on.
Then we listened to the audio of the second part, in which a girl named Jen and three school friends discuss their assignment to write about the moment in history they’d visit if they could travel in time. While they sit in Jen’s garden chatting, Jen’s little sister walks by on her way to the shed, her arms full of supplies for an experiment she is working on. Soon, from the direction of the shed come a strange noise and a flash of light. The friends run to the shed, but the sister has disappeared. Consternation. She reappears within minutes to proclaim that she has invented a time machine and has just been to the future. At this moment, Ralph, one of the friends, pulls a gadget from his pocket, explains that his answer to the essay question was the moment the time machine was invented. He’s come from the future to witness that moment, but now must return, he says, to his own time. He then presses a button, and, according to the story, disappears forever.
I looked up from the book, where I’d been following along with the text as I listened. Needless to say, I was very confused. “I don’t understand,” I said. “Why did he disappear?” I looked from one student to the other to see if they shared my perplexity. The boy shrugged. He neither had an explanation nor thought that making sense of the story was worth the bother. In contrast, the girl explained that Ralph had come back from the future to witness the sister invent the time machine. He had used time travel to do so.
“But why would he need to travel back from the future if he was already present in the past?” I pointed out that he must have been there all along because the essay assignment that is the impetus for his time travel puts him in the story before the time machine comes into it. Again, I turned first to the boy, to give him a chance to answer.
He looked at me helplessly. The girl, when I turned to her, again said the character was returning from the future.
“But if he was already there, at the crucial moment …” I trailed off. She knew as well as I did that the logic was flawed. But after all, her look seemed to say, this was just a story in an English textbook. A story, moreover, about time travel. Of course, it makes no sense. She, too, shrugged.
A few days later, I told this student that I was going to test her on a phrase she’d recently learned. “I want to see if you remember it or if it at least rings a bell,” I said. And then I waited. She waited, too, but for only the briefest instant—almost no time at all—before her slow smile showed that my waiting was not in vain. “That was the test?” she asked.
“Yes. You passed,” I told her. And then, not to lose an opportunity, I asked, “What is a split second?”
