“Wait time” is a concept familiar to all teachers and one of a myriad of strategies that educators use when working with students every day while asking them questions. It is the amount of time a teacher waits between asking a question and the beginning of a student’s response.
It’s a concept some new teachers struggle with early in their careers, as silence after even just a second or two can make a teacher think he or she needs to give students the answer or start talking again instead of just waiting a few more seconds. For some, that silence my seem unbearably long. Yet extending the silence for several seconds to give students time to think results in better learning.
It’s one of a plethora of tips and tricks I learned almost 20 years ago when student teaching under a master teacher who taught me in four months a multitude of skills I use to this day when working with students.
Wait time took on a different meaning for me last week, however, when I was on a phone call with our vet’s office and in the role of the student.
My wife Jen and I noticed shortly after adopting our 5-year-old Bernese mountain dog, Alicia, that she might have either a urinary tract or a bladder infection. We sent our vet an email to share what we were observing, and his office called us back the following day.
We happened to be meeting with our accountant to get our taxes done when the call came through, so I stepped out of his office for a moment to answer while my wife stayed behind.
The receptionist had spoken with our vet, and they suspected the same but wanted to test Alicia to confirm.
“Please get a urine sample and drop it off sometime tomorrow,” she told me.
Silence.
More silence.
Another second of silence.
I’m pretty good at using wait time when posing higher-level thinking questions to students, so I extended the silence for a few more seconds before finally asking the question that had been running through my head for the past five seconds.
“Um. I’m sure you get asked this question a lot. But how am I supposed to get a 100-pound Bernese mountain dog to cooperate with such a … more silence … undertaking?”
I couldn’t see her face through the phone but her light-hearted response made it clear she was smiling when she said, “We get that question all the time.”
She walked me through how to get a dog to cooperate — putting her on a leash, using a flat, low-sided container to slide it under once she starts to do her business. It all sounded so easy over the phone.
When we returned home from the accountant’s office, we took the dogs outside to do the homework our vet had assigned. The low-sided plastic container that was now sitting on top of our recycling bin in the garage but last night had held our carry-out salad from an Italian restaurant looked like the perfect tool for the job at hand.
To this day, I hope that our neighbors were not home. If they were home, I just hope they were not looking out the window. If they were, both sets of neighbors were treated to Comedy Hour at the Peeper House.
We tried with a leash and without a leash, and despite our best efforts our confused Bernese mountain dog would not do her business.
I mean, would you if there were a 6-foot-180-pound guy following you around with a round plastic bowl that the night before was full of lettuce, cheese, croutons and a delicious house salad dressing? And to make it worse, the guy following you around with the plastic bowl tried to go into stealth mode each time you tried to use the bathroom?
They say that one definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. So of course I tried the same process again that night and at 5 a.m. the following day only to get the same results.
By 5:15 a.m., I surrendered as I told Jen that we needed to call the vet back to ask for a Plan B.
When they asked if we wanted to drop her off that morning so that they could get the sample, there wasn’t even a nanosecond of wait time as I said yes.
By the end of the day, the vet called back to confirm that Alicia did have a slight infection and that she would need to take some medicine for the next couple of weeks.
“So you were able to collect the sample from her,” I asked.
It took less than a second of wait time for her to say they were able to but that they had to do a small procedure since she wouldn’t go for them either.
It made us feel a bit better that it wasn’t just us.
And as we took the dogs outside later that night, I looked at Jen and said again that I hope the neighbors weren’t watching last night or this morning as I chased the dog around the yard with a plastic bowl. If they did see, let’s hope their wait time is very long before they ask what in the world we were doing.
jdpeeper2@hotmail.com
