“There will be time”: Considering Time in English Classrooms

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
– T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock”

Time is always a significant complaint in the English department; we never have enough of it. Never enough for reading all the books we’d like, for planning innovative lessons and assignments, and, most of all, for marking. We try to be intentional in our choices, but, sometimes, we make choices based on time limits, on ensuring that we can “get through it all”, be it our material or marking load.

For the last few years, I’ve worked on strategies for making marking more efficient. I’ve developed ways to write more concise feedback (though making it less repetitive is still a goal) and, with my team, found ways to make rubrics more specific and useful so that we don’t need to write much feedback – the rubric says it for us. It has worked to a large degree, and my load of 59 students in the second semester of the 2025-2026 year, while still tiring, was completed before exams began. For an English teacher, that’s a real accomplishment, sad as it may seem to those in other fields.

For Cohort 21, I’m considering a couple of options for making more effective use of a teacher’s time, and a desire to avoid burnout is definitely a motivation. How can we give students more feedback faster? How can we help them develop skills for more on-the-spot thinking and communication of those thoughts? With universities turning to more interview-like responses for applications, on-the-spot responses are increasingly important for students – they need to think faster while also thinking deeply, whether about themselves (reflectively) or about a particular topic (such as a literary text or idea). My team and I have been working to include more student-teacher conferences for metacognition, especially on written assignments, and I also want to try more peer review workshops with my AP-preparation class – a group of students with enough understanding of “good” writing to give effective advice to their peers. One colleague in guidance also suggested assigning short, reflective responses that draw from application questions like “describe a challenge you faced and how you overcame it?” and “describe a leadership opportunity you took and how you demonstrated your leadership qualities.” Because, for the grade 10 and 11 programs, we already have students writing in a “Quick Write” journal at the beginning of most periods, we should be able to easily incorporate more on-the-spot questions in ways that build student resilience to pressure, as well as their quick thinking and communication skills. Ideally, we should also include spoken interview situations – the problem there is actual time, class time versus class sizes. With a class of 20 or 21, at least 2 periods would be necessary to accomodate each student, so what does that look like for the rest of our schedule? Do we “cut” texts in favour of these situations? Or, do we find other ways of encouraging students to read and engage with a wide range of texts? These are questions that I’ll investigate throughout this year with Cohort 21.