A week ago, I got my first Christmas catalog of 2023. It was from the Vermont Country Store. It had a pink Christmas tree on the cover. What!?! It was immediately followed by one with fall messages and products for the changing season. It was just a glimpse. The curtains split open for a moment, and there was the Sugar Plum fairy, the twinkling lights, the soft opening notes of the Waltz of the Flowers.
Then back to flannel shirts, sweaters, apple cider, and hot chocolate mugs. The peek had done its job. It cognitively primed me to three months forward. Dates on calendar are closer than they appear. Fifteen weeks to 2024.
When I taught college students, they thought the semester was long. I came to realize they were primed to see February 27 as three months away from April 12.
I had it as six weeks and 16 class hours away -- disrupted by Spring Break. They and I had different cognitive priming. The traditional month-by-month calendar said, February is this month, March is a month away, and April, with its pictures of flowers and bunnies, is a whole season away. I was working with a syllabus and trying to fit all that content into three hours a week at best.
They had the syllabus, but it had more pages than the calendar. It spread out the semester even more falsely.
One year I got the idea to print the semester as a continuous flow of weeks with no month separation. If February 28 was a Tuesday, the next square on the line was March 1. Then I printed it on an 8.5 x 14 sheet of paper. All the class meetings and assignment-due dates were noted.
It was actually scary.
I use one myself. I've increased the scope first to a year, and now 18-months. We've experimented with longer, but the uncertainty increases exponentially over time, and 18 months is the edge of the practical limit. Right now 18 months takes me to the edge of 2025.
By then, two Christmases will have passed.
What are you doing New Year's Eve 2025? Where do you want to be?
Warmly,
Francis Sopper