ABSTRACT
This chapter suggested, commenting on a lesson about the Anglo Saxon village, that 'closure' has a temporal aspect, in that the teacher's view of what happened is shaped by considerations relating explicitly to time. There is, arguably, a time scheme or temporal structure intrinsic to the task itself; 'this is taking too long' can be a recognition that the time needed by particular children for a particular task is being squandered. The digression from routine 'science' to discover what caused the coating is atypical in that no planned association exists initially to make a later causal connection readily identifiable. It may be that if the hypothetical digressive experiment had been constructed it would have led sideways again to another off-course investigation, and the time scale for first-year science would have been disrupted. The teacher's drawing-back from following up the 'black coating' digression might be seen in either light, or both.
