On Time and Tea Bags: Chronos, Kairos, and Teaching for Humanistic Practice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In these days of overwhelming clinical work, decreased resources, and increased educational demands, time has become a priceless commodity. Competency-based medical education attempts to address this challenge by increasing educational efficiency and decreasing the "steeping" of learners in clinical activities for set durations of time. However, in this environment, how does one teach for compassionate, humanistic practice? The answer arguably lies in clinician-teachers' recognition and engagement in a different type of time, that of kairos. Ancient Greek thought held that there were 2 interrelated types of time: chronological, linear, quantitative time-chronos-and qualitative, opportune time-kairos. Unlike chronos, kairos involves a sense of the "right time," the "critical moment," the proportionate amount. Developing a sense of kairos involves learning to apply general principles to unique situations lacking certainty and acting proportionally to need and context. Educationally, it implies intervening at the critical moment-the moment in which a thoughtful question, comment, or personal expression of perplexity, awe, or wonder can trigger reflection, dialogue, and an opening up of perspectives on the human dimensions of illness and medical care. A sensibility to kairos involves an awareness of what makes a moment "teachable," an understanding of chance, opportunity, and potential for transformation. Above all, inviting kairos means grasping an opportunity to immerse oneself and one's learners-even momentarily-into an exploration of patients and their stories, perspectives, challenges, and lives.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.063 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.024 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".