Perfect Timing*

The day Zach asked if we could listen to the song “Perfect Timing” started like most days in my third-hour Grade 11 English class.

“Shut up, Zach,” Caleb barked. “Shut up about ‘Perfect Timing’”.

“I want to listen to ‘Perfect Timing’!” Kyle countered.

“Let’s just listen to music today instead of doing work,” Martin proposed.

We did not listen to Shedeur Sanders’ “Perfect Timing” that day, but we would soon. Both the song and singer would direct the trajectory of time and my teaching for the rest of the academic year—functioning as evaluator, tutor, coach, spirit guide. 

I inherited this group of students when I switched from 25 years in higher education to high school teaching. The juniors, a full two years younger than my college freshmen, worried me most. I was uncertain how much reading to assign, what to expect students to understand, how much they could reasonably write. The most challenging class was third hour, my smallest, a group of nine boys and two girls. The boys seemed very young—younger than the boys in other sections. At the end of the first day, after I’d introduced myself and explained my circumstances, one of the girls, Amelia, came up to me and apologized for the upcoming year, during which I would be sentenced to this particular group of immature boys. She said this gravely, as though she’d decided nothing in my professional lifetime of teaching adults had prepared me for what I would face. 

Third hour did cause me troubles. The boys were frequently distracted and impulsive, calling out to one another across the room, insulting one another (why is your face so red today?), and relentlessly touching one another (batting one another on the backside of the head, placing their feet against the back rungs of a classmate’s seat, scooting their desks up next to one another, shoulders and thighs touching). My strategies for redirecting mostly failed. Moving the desks farther apart, or creating a seating arrangement with a spare desk between each person, only increased the call and response interaction. For several weeks I started class with focusing activities designed to connect the right and left sides of the brain and activate students’ frontal cortexes, but these physical activities, recommended during the pre-semester teacher workshops, typically culminated in hand slapping and high fiving. Or the boys would throw in experimental flourishes, such as the time Luis banged his knees together, which made a thigh slapping noise he and his peers found especially pleasing. The room erupted in a chorus of slapping, not unlike the frogs singing by my pond in late June.

“Their frontal cortexes are not ready to be activated yet,” my husband explained. 

The two girls were as exasperated as I was, a reality that only increased pressure to do something, figure things out, and make it quick. One day I pulled each of the boys out in the hallway for a pep talk about classroom behavior. Another day, I sent a single student out in the hallway, the person I determined to be the main culprit of the day’s disengagement, and it ended badly, concluding, before the end of the school day, with an angry email from a parent after I’d threatened to recommend the student lose football playing time. Everything I tried seemed off, went badly; my rhythm and timing were always wrong. The class was not working.

My timing challenges cannot be underemphasized. As a college professor, I typically taught two or three, occasionally four, 50-minute or 75-minute classes a day, two or three days a week. Classes were spaced out with generous pockets of time between for office hours, planning and grading, and committee meetings. I was busy all day and had frequent at-home grading and planning work during the evenings and weekends, but on a day-to-day basis I had enough flexibility to exercise a great deal of control over how I used my time. 

Nothing about the secondary teaching schedule allows this kind of leisure. My teaching schedule includes four to six classes a day for 45-59 minutes per class, depending on whether it is a four-class, five-class, or six-class day. Class periods are punctuated by four-minute passing periods between. During the early weeks of my new gig, timing a restroom break was super stressful, especially on Tuesdays, when I taught five back-to-back 59-minute classes and my planning period did not come until almost 2:00 p.m. The sequence of my classes squeezed time further. My first three classes of the day were each different, beginning with senior composition, followed by public speaking, followed by third-hour junior English, my class of mostly boys. My classroom’s double horseshoe desk configuration that worked perfectly well for composition and public speaking was mostly a bust in third-hour English. During the weeks I was regrouping desks for third hour in response to failures of the previous day, the four minutes between second and third hour were filled with flat-out Olympic-level strength and speed in desk shoving. More accurately, I had one minute before students began arriving. Conscripting student assistance did not help me meet the deadline. They were confused about the instructions; they were unskilled workers; they were contrarians. None of these traits were helpful.

“Why are we moving my desk over there? I like sitting here. Oh, it’s no longer my desk? Why not?” Meanwhile students kept dribbling in, each newly astonished by the disarray.

“What’s going on here? What are we doing?”

“You mean I have to sit by myself again?”

“Why do we keep moving desks in this class?”

Two days after Zach’s question about whether the class could listen to “Perfect Timing”, we did a collaborative drawing and story-writing activity while listening to music the students had requested in advance. This activity, occurring over a month into the semester, was the first I can honestly describe as successful in keeping students engaged and focused from beginning to end of the class period. The creatures they drew in three parts as a three-person team, and the stories they wrote about them, were genuinely inventive and funny. The songs they selected provided the sonic texture. Three students chose Shedeur’s two-minute “Perfect Timing.” The next day they wanted to draw and listen to music again.

“Can we just do the drawing game with music every day?” 

“No, we cannot do the drawing and listening game every day.” 

However, moving forward, we did listen to “Perfect Timing” periodically. Not every time it was requested, but sometimes. If you listen without paying attention to the lyrics, my initial approach, Shedeur’s single “Perfect Timing” comes across as ballad-like in tenor and speed, its tone gentle. Like rap, though, the lyrics do tell a personal story marked by confidence and swagger—in this case, Shedeur’s skills as a quarterback for the Colorado Buffalos and his 30-carat diamond watch, which he displayed after moments of achievement, his hand flexed in a fist, watch facing outward. 

In third hour, Shedeur’s chorus came to serve as the framework through which everything we studied was analyzed. During the early weeks of the semester students studied narratives about the emerging identity of the United States. Each day third hour gathered at the whiteboard when it was time to add the latest reading and date to our ongoing timeline—the boys crowding and jostling one another, assessing the timing of historical events as revealed by the narratives. Ben Franklin’s street-cleaning initiative as described in his autobiography? Perfect timing. Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s call for women’s voting rights and increased employment opportunities and pay? Perfect timing. Frederick Douglass’s speech “What to the Slave is the 4th of July?” Perfect timing. 

By late October we’d moved into American gothic literature, and for William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily”, I again assigned a timeline, though for this one, students were to place Faulkner’s nonlinear story in chronological order. It was a challenging task that required close rereading, tracing story time alongside historical time. Students in my other two sections struggled and complained. My third hour students, however, were ready. They’d been preparing for weeks to engage with the ways timing worked in a plot. Zach, Mason, and Caleb ended up in the same group and took the liberty of creating an imaginative metaverse, inserting Homer Simpson into the story, replacing Homer Barron, who escaped with his life and love. Homer Simpson’s fleshy body, sketched freehand on the whiteboard, was the corpse decomposing in the room with the door that would have to be forced. Homer Barron and Emily Grierson went on to live in the perfect timing of happily ever after. 

Meanwhile, on my end, every school day was a Hail Mary. Beyond the tight hourly schedule, I struggled to meet the daily and weekly deadlines: generating all new preps, repurposing my previous teaching practices for different circumstances. Furthermore, because I didn’t have a teaching license (I had a Ph.D. in English but no Education degree or licensure), my weekends were consumed with online Education classes. Each Friday I felt like the guy who ran the first marathon and died at the finish line. Whenever I had time to think about it, which I didn’t have but winched in, I chastised myself for foolhardy timing. I was too old for this professional change. I’d been reckless.

Even after the college football season ended, Shedeur remained with us, his presence visceral. In early February, Zach confessed, mournfully, we’d missed Shedeur’s birthday. We recovered the fumble, though, celebrating a few days late, with heart-shaped cookies and Little Debbie cinnamon rolls. It was a birthday-Valentine’s merger, a perfectly-in-between-holiday of love and admiration. However, a bigger worry arose in the NFL draft rumors: Shedeur might not be picked in the first round as initially predicted. He was too much of a showboat, not enough of a team player. In response to the worries, I offered an impromptu mini-lesson on “social capital” and how it illustrates methods for building resources and support for ourselves in ways other than through material riches. But the lesson seemed lost on the students, who kept referring to Shedaddy’s airtime, fame, and number of Perfect Timing replays as his social capital. 

“No, you’re misunderstanding my point here. Maybe Shedaddy needs to do a better job of broadening his friend base, of showing a capacity for reciprocity.” They looked skeptical, but Ian, a mostly quiet student who openly admitted nothing about school had ever interested him, inexplicably got up, gathered student folders from the storage slot, and handed them out to each classmate. Martin pulled me aside during work time and asked if he could share his extra Easter treats—his girlfriend gave him way too much, he explained—with our class. Yes, of course, I said, absolutely. Maybe the social capital lesson gained some traction after all; maybe I’d timed that lesson right.

Zach was visibly nervous Thursday, April 24th; first draft round announcements would start that evening at 7 p.m. I tried to cheer him up, remind him of all the timing serendipities we’d encountered in our recent readings, the way plot turns surprised us in just the right ways, and then became the story itself. 

“Think of this as a good story,” I told him. He was not reassured. Late that evening Zach posted in the Google Classroom stream:

“It is with deep sadness I must tell all of you, Shedaddy was not drafted in the first round. This night was not Perfect Timing. I am thinking of suing the NFL and all 32 NFL teams for not taking Shedaddy in the 1st round, so does anybody know some good lawyers?”

Nobody knew any good lawyers. I encouraged Zach to view the event as a means of showing possible professional directions for his future. Maybe the universe was prompting him to be a civil rights lawyer, a fighter of unjust systems. On Saturday afternoon, Zach posted again.

“A true travesty has fallen upon us. Shedaddy has once again gone undrafted through 3 rounds. 5 QB’s have been taken, yet still no Shedaddy 😢. I’m truly distraught. But we’ve kept receipts, the world is about to learn what they missed out on. BTW, would anybody want to start a therapy group to cope with Shedaddy not being drafted in the first 3 rounds?”

I offered to contact the school counselor about the therapy group. Zach responded he thought he’d be okay. More surprising and significant was an upswelling of support and comfort that came from the class in the form of AI-generated solidarity poems. It was late April, National Poetry Month, and we’d been reading poems and studying some key poetic elements. Entirely of their own accord and agency, third-hour students turned to ChatGPT to find the right words for condolences. 

Kyle posted first: “They talked on Shedaddy, ran up the lies,/ Clipped up the moments, fed to the skies./ Socials went wild, turned good into bad,/ Painted a villain, when none was had.”

Martin followed: “Son of a legend, but he carves his name,/ With swagger, smarts, and ruthless game./ Reads the D like a storybook,/ Then zips a dart — go take a look./ Perfect timing his stride,/ Moves like destiny’s on his side.” 

Mason’s was perhaps the best in its poetic soundplay: “A king in cleats, cool as ice,/ He diced up fields, he paid the price./ Stats that shine, a leader bold,/ But still, the league left him on hold./ "Perfect Timing" in his ear,/ His own voice echoing clear,/ That first-round snub? Just fuel, just flame—/He’ll torch the league and run the game.”

When we were back together in class, I started with the poems. 

“I had no idea ChatGPT could write such detailed and moving poetry about Shedaddy specifically. I’m impressed.”

“We started with ChatGPT, but made changes. The poems are basically ours,” Kyle corrected me.

“Yeah, we customized what it wrote, made the poems better,” Martin explained.

“Well, this is sweet, you all. Truly. And the timing is perfect.”

“Perfect timing.”

“You took the poetry lessons and did something I didn’t expect.”

“We just wanted to make Zach feel better.”

“When did you write these? The time stamp shows they posted almost simultaneously, like you were together.”

“We were in math class.”

“Did Mrs. Myers know you were generating poems in her class?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Would she have minded if she’d known?”

“Maybe. But Zach needed to hear from us. We couldn’t wait. Perfect timing, you know.”

I’d like to say that when the semester ended a few weeks later, the timing came together. The truth is, I ran out of time to finish with closure. End-of-the-year extracurricular activities and school events interrupted all my classes, but especially the junior classes. I kept shaving off requirements to get through the last unit of material. The final class day, students shared presentations over self-selected independent book reading. In third hour, we ran short. I hadn’t given a firm enough time limit for presentations, and the boys were rambly. They just kept going on about Michael Crichton’s dinosaurs or qualities of GOATness as conveyed in sports biography. Amelia had barely started describing Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter when the bell rang. I invited her to join a later section, sixth hour, a group of students who were courteous audience members, but who had no comments or questions about the significance of timing in the novella’s big reveal. She seemed disappointed.

If I could give third hour a proper goodbye, I’d explain that in responding to their daily energy, I found a source for mine. While perfect timing in my teaching life, as all of life, mostly leans aspirational—functioning as it does within uncertainty, the individual and the collective, the practiced and the developing—by the end of the first year teaching high school, I no longer question the timing of my job change. Third hour’s year-long remix of Shedeur’s “Perfect Timing” illustrated the way good timing includes giving something time—time to pay attention, look for what’s needed, get to know one another well enough to know what’s required. The right timing requires allowing space for the story to unfold, and for it to be claimed. Maybe recognition of that is itself enough—perfect, even.

*All student names in this narrative have been changed.

Shedeur Sanders, Perfect Timing, official video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OS_UQ83R5gA

Kristin Van Tassel lives and teaches in rural Central Kansas. She writes essays and poetry about place, travel, and teaching. Since the writing and submission of “Perfect Timing”, KVT (the name her students call her) has been inducted into the lively “Shedaddy Lovers” Instagram group, and she’s been gifted a Sanders Colorado jersey. Most days it functions as a seat cover for KVT’s desk chair, though the day after Shedeur became the first Cleveland Browns rookie QB1 to win a starting game since 1995, she wore it for the teaching day.