My students and I talked about this last night, about how much we thought we could accomplish in a few months … about how much of that stuff would have real import, about how much might have a positive impact on anyone other than ourselves. We had an interesting list as our brainstorming continued:
- get a job
- unpack in my new apartment
- do community service
- get together with other people to work on some big project
- do a lot of reading
- write a lot of essays
- start to learn something new
- maybe watch the news more
- travel
We talked about it for a while. Fourteen and a third weeks. Fourteen and a third weeks. They had some wacky, not-quite-reality-based ideas, too, but they kept cycling back around to getting stuff done in their houses or with their families and friends.
And then I asked: “About how many days is 14 1/3 weeks?” (And, after the mad scramble to do some math …)
“It’s like 100 days.”
“A hundred days? I heard something about that on TV.”
“Why, what’s 100 days?”
“Isn’t it something about the president?”
And there we were. One hundred days. About three and a half months.
I know the first 100 days is supposed to be a big deal, supposed to tell us what a new administration is going to be like, tell us whether we made the right or wrong choice at the polls months earlier … but can it ever actually to any of that? It is, after all, only three and a half months. What is the real point of putting this kind of pressure on our politicians? Are we really so hungry for instant gratification that we can’t sit back and give our pols half a minute to get things moving? At the same time, I understand wanting to see some movement in the first couple of months, but this still feels like an empty milestone.
So, what’d you get done in the last 14 and 1/3 weeks?
