What is the right time to arrive at a party? Arriving too early, even only a little, is kind of awkward, on time is fine, but it is definitely cooler to arrive ‘fashionably late’. Much later, however, is also not done. Luckily, most partygoers are able to navigate these unwritten social rules regarding time. These kind of mundane questions seem to us a modern luxury problem, but are they really something new? This is the topic of a lesson our team developed for secondary school children (ages 15-17). The outcome is clear: also in Rome, there were plenty of social conventions about appropriate timing.
The universality of the theme makes it of interest to audiences outside universities as well, such as adolescents. Roman time, moreover, is recognizable, as so many of the structures we use today find their origin in antiquity, such as the names of the months, the week and the 12-hour day. Even without much background knowledge, students can recognize Roman elements of time in their own daily lives. This is not typically part of the school curriculum, however. Of course, some handbooks do pay attention to the Roman calendar or the pagan origin of the week, but they typically present this information in a rather encyclopedic way. In our lesson, we want to reflect on the social experience of time as well, and invite the adolescents to reflecting on the role of time – and social conventions around time – in their own lives.
This past autumn I tried out this lesson at several schools in Amsterdam, in classes 4 and 5 VWO (ages 15-17). I gave these lessons to students as part of their Latin classes, but the material could easily be adapted to be well suited for a history course as well.
As an introduction the students were asked about their associations with the word time, which lead to a conversation about clock time, calendars and concepts such as ‘history’ or ‘the future’. Based on their input we spoke about the different possible rhythms in a year and how individual rhythms can differ between classmates. Ambiguities came up, such as school hours not measuring 60 minutes like a regular hour. And when we talk about the beginning of the year, do we mean the calendrical year or the school year? By speaking about time in an open dialogue, the theme of the lesson became clearer to the students.
Then I moved to a mainly instructive part where I taught them about Roman time measurement for hours, days, months and years. They could identify the remains of an older Roman calendar in our contemporary calendar and understood why the week is fundamentally different from days and months. We spoke about the introduction of a fixed day of rest on Sunday, and the possibly non-Christian predecessor on Thursday, illustrated by a papyrological source.
In the next part we looked at archeological sources regarding time, such as ancient clocks and a mosaic on being late and ended the lesson by reading three poems by Martial (Epigrams 2.27; 4.8; 8.67), in which he discusses everyday life and its rhythms. The students answered questions on these poems in small groups, and were asked to connect themes from the introduction to the texts. For instance in Epigram 8.67, where it is made clear that being on time for a dinner appointment is important, but it is equally not done to be so early, that you are almost on time for breakfast. To wrap up, we considered on which occasions the students desperately wanted to be on time (school!) and when it was actually better to be a little late (parties!), illustrating the close connection between time use and social norms.
The object was to make students reflect on the use of time and its connection to social norms, in the time of the Romans and now. They learned more about the Roman way of measuring time and structuring the year, and were invited to consider their own rhythms and customs as well. This combination of information and reflecting on personal experience proved well suited for the age group.
I was struck by the interest of many students, who kept asking relevant questions about the subject.
Making the connection to their own personal time use worked quite well, I think, although not all were eager to share information about their weekly rhythms – which was of course not mandatory.
The part of the lesson were I simply talked about historical time measurement and explained how the Romans structured their year was clearly the favorite element of the lessons for most students. They were intrigued by the differences regarding time to what we are used to in our time, and I think this is mainly to be ascribed to the aforementioned universality of the subject.
The question remains how this lesson can be logically embedded in the curriculum. It would fit well into a lesson series on daily life, or could provide more background information when reading Martial.
In the near future, we hope to publish a didactic article in the journal Lampas on the lesson including historical background information, meant primarily for secondary school teachers. The material for the classroom (in Dutch) will be published around the same time on this website.
Elsa Lucassen
