The Circular File
Course documents & class notes for Mrs. Smart's English Classes
Cover Sheets for Quarter 1
Adding Header & Footer in Word 2007 or newer
For those of you with Word 2007 or newer, you'll find the menu for headers and footers under the Insert tab. Use the first default that pops up, "Blank."
Once selected, it will bring up an additional formatting menu, from which you can select "different first page." Then, type your first page header into the brackets provided.
Once you've set up your first page header, advance to your second page, type in your last name and insert the page number at the top of the page:
Last, but not least, return to the Home tab and align your header on the right.
Header? Done!
Czar Nicholas's Report Card
Senior guidance presentation
S--y First Drafts, by Anne Lamott
Acts 3, 4, & 5 questions
Hamlet test: study guide
Hamlet--Full Text
Need to read up on your Hamlet? Find a full text of the play at:
You may also find the following website helpful--it has hyperlinks to explanatory notes.
Is time static?
Why Does Time Fly By As You Get Older?
February 1, 2010
Yes, we all get older. But now, getting older has become a video fetish; all kinds of people take pictures of themselves every day for six, seven, eight years and then blend the images together into a ... well, if you've missed the Web craze, Homer Simpson's "Every Day" is a perfect catcher-upper.
'Every Day' With Homer Simpson
Homer Every Day from Noah K. on Vimeo.
Not only can you see Homer switching jobs (cavalryman, Indian, king, infantryman, fisherman, fireman), you watch his body grow, swell, swag. As with all things Simpson, the physical changes are dramatic.
But what these videos don't show are the psychological changes, and one of the most universal changes is that as humans age, they change the way they feel about time.
Faster And Faster And Faster
As people get older, "they just have this sense, this feeling that time is going faster than they are," says Warren Meck, a psychology professor at Duke University.
This seems to be true across cultures, across time, all over the world.
No one is sure where this feeling comes from.
Scientists have theories, of course, and one of them is that when you experience something for the very first time, more details, more information gets stored in your memory. Think about your first kiss.
Greg Ceo/Getty ImagesNeuroscientist David Eagleman of Baylor College of Medicine says that since the touch of the lips, the excitement, the taste, the smell %u2014 everything about this moment is novel %u2014 you aren't embroidering a bank of previous experiences, you are starting fresh.
Have you noticed, he says, that when you recall your first kisses, early birthdays, your earliest summer vacations, they seem to be in slow motion? "I know when I look back on a childhood summer, it seems to have lasted forever," he says.
That's because when it's the "first", there are so many things to remember. The list of encoded memories is so dense, reading them back gives you a feeling that they must have taken forever. But that's an illusion. "It's a construction of the brain," says Eagleman. "The more memory you have of something, you think, 'Wow, that really took a long time!'
"Of course, you can see this in everyday life," says Eagleman, "when you drive to your new workplace for the first time and it seems to take a really long time to get there. But when you drive back and forth to your work every day after that, it takes no time at all, because you're not really writing it down anymore. There's nothing novel about it."
That may be because the brain records new experiences %u2014 especially novel and exciting experiences %u2014 differently. This is even measurable. Eagleman's lab has found that brains use more energy to represent a memory when the memory is novel.
So, first memories are dense. The routines of later life are sketchy. The past wasn't really slower than the present. It just feels that way.
There are all kinds of arguments one could have with this theory, but before we poke it, we want you to feel it.
Here's a celebration of dense early memories from a very recently departed (not to heaven, just back to California) intern at NPR, Maggie Starbard. With a bunch of friends (Caitlin Fitch, Mark Turner and Mike Eckelkamp), Maggie decided to dwell on a lazy beach where kids are collecting dense memories by the truckload:
Now for the pokes. Who said that novel experiences belong exclusively to the young?
Older people have novel experiences %u2014 lots of them. Some of us have crazier middle ages than youths. We fall in love, out of love. Then our parenting years are filled with watching our babies' first thises, first thats. Retired people travel %u2014 if they can afford to %u2014 to duplicate some of those rushes of novel experiences.
Yes, it's true, the youngest years are chock full of novelty, but Duke's Warren Meck points out that when you hit your 60s and 70s, and time is beginning to run out, experiences get more precious and once again you remember all the details.
So take this "novelty" explanation for why time moves faster as you age and weigh it as you will.
Other theories may prove more satisfying.
Professors Meck and Eagleman explore a number of them on our All Things Considered broadcast. If you wish to hear the "Aging Brain" theory of why time goes faster, or the "How Long Have You Been Alive?" explanation, they await you at the top of this page, where the button says "Listen."
Special thanks to Dan Madorsky for sound design on the radio story. Warren Meck's work has been featured on the BBC documentaries The Body Clock (1999) and Time (2006). Jay Ingram's essay "Time Passes Faster" (which helped me think through the radio story) is included in a collection called The Velocity of Honey published in 2003. David Eagleman directs the Laboratory for Perception and Action at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. His new novel, Sum, has been featured on NPR/WNYC's Radiolab.
Related NPR Stories
The Doors Of Time Perception Jan. 31, 2010Make Time Fly And You'll Have More Fun Dec. 22, 2009Brain Study Indicates Why Some Memories Persist Jan. 29, 2009Comments
Discussions for this story are now closed. Please see the Community FAQ for more information.
kirk search (Kirksearch) wrote:
Alvin Toffler explained this well in his 1970 book Future Shock. When you are 5 y.o. a year is 20% of your life. When you are 50 years old a year is a 1/50 of your life. That's why summers when we were children seemed to go on forever.
Friday, February 05, 2010 2:53:31 PM
Martin Irving (Irv_) wrote:
Greg Connor wrote: Routine also disengages you from the present moment and blinds you to the little things that make time slow down (the old saying "stop to smell the roses" applies here)."
This could be a good argument for not routinely talking on a cell phone, or texting, while driving. It disengages you from the present moment and events blur together and blinds you to the little things that make time slow down - an impending accident for example.
It seems we are dealing with 2 elements of time. Brief increments - a few seconds, hours, days, or weeks, versus longer increments - a year, 5 years, a decade etc.. The longer increments are of little to no relevance to younger people. The shorter encrements become less and less relevant to older people.
I think it is mental focus that makes brief time periods slow down. We can be mentally focussed for an emergency, a memorable moment, a test or challenge and this can occur at any age. But I am skeptical of an argument that young people are more mentally focussed while old people aren't and this accounts for the relative difference in the perception of large increments of time.Thursday, February 04, 2010 11:06:15 AM
Greg Connor (Greg_C) wrote:
I don't buy into the argument that time flies as you get older because the same time period represents a smaller proportion of your life. I think the answer lies in routine. Routine prevents you from recognizing distinct milestones in your life and events start to blur together. Routine also disengages you from the present moment and blinds you to the little things that make time slow down (the old saying "stop to smell the roses" applies here). As one commenter pointed out, moving to a new country forces a person to notice and engage with their surroundings far more than normal. Perhaps young children are like this as well, "learning" while simply "being" slows down time for them.
Wednesday, February 03, 2010 8:02:31 PM
Barbara Winter (bmw222) wrote:
I've always thought its because when we are younger, we tend to be much more in the moment- really absorbing what is going on around us. As we age, we sometimes tend to lose this, always thinking of yesterday or tomorrow, multitasking, and generally not really paying attention.
Wednesday, February 03, 2010 7:37:23 PM
Charles Gillard (shylove) wrote:
Because it is trying to slip away from us.
Wednesday, February 03, 2010 7:15:32 PM
TOM WILLIAMS (COMMANDANT) wrote:
It's correct to say that time passes faster when you age because increasingly, a year, hour, or minute is less of your life than before.
One year in my life is only 1/60th of my life, whereas when I was 20, it was 1/20th.
Everyone carries their own time with them. What is an hour to me is not an hour to someone else, even if we are the same age.
That's why we have clocks. Timepieces don't tell the time; instead they merely get us sychronized in our activities.
In 19th century America, the railroad station used to have a "regulator" clock that all the town went by.
In American Indian lore, we are all the "center of the universe", meaning we are the centers of our own space and time.
Now all we have to do is figure out what time is.Wednesday, February 03, 2010 11:56:36 AM
Martin Irving (Irv_) wrote:
Well Maryann Hensley, I guess you said it far better than I did.
Wednesday, February 03, 2010 10:31:53 AM
Frank Patrick (fpatrick) wrote:
Another example of the possibility of the "having to write new info to the brain" theory. It often feels like it takes longer to travel to a new destination than it does coming home. The brain could be absorbing the new directions on the way, and referencing them on the way back.
Wednesday, February 03, 2010 9:46:54 AM
Mark S. (Ganymede) wrote:
I think people become more adept at passing time as they grow older. Habits and routine, developed over time, can make ones life a hazy blur.
Think about it. Ever drive to work and not really even remember doing the driving? It's lost time. No reason to remember it because you have done it a thousand times.
It seems like the unique experiences stick out but how many of those do you really have in a month? So if you add up only those unique experiences and disregard all those things you do everyday, day in and day out, it is really just a patchwork of the unique experiences. Which may be why a year seems to go by in what seems like a few months.
Wednesday, February 03, 2010 6:38:42 AM
Smee Smoo (Wody) wrote:
Maryann
"Time is passing faster because each unit is shrinking in its duration as a percentage of one's life."But memories are made in the moment, while the event is being experienced, with no regard to how old you are.
Wednesday, February 03, 2010 5:00:43 AM
via npr.org
Reading this got me thinking about lots of things--the twins paradox, for instance, but also wondering, What if time weren't static for everyone?
I also got to thinking about some of my vivid childhood memories. Perhaps one of your "dense memories" also came to mind?
