Teaching on an island off the Maine coast, John Sylvester Lofty encountered students whose resistance to writing was grounded in the tension between time values derived from the changing movements of sun, season, and tide, and the time values of school regulated by the measures of clock and schedule. In this graceful account of his experiences, Lofty uses the voices and writings of students in grades one, two, six, and twelve to dramatize students' encounters with the school-based cultures of time and literacy. Against the world of the clock and bell, he places the world of the lobster fisher, the clam digger, the farmer, the cook, the scientist, and the writer--people for whom the time to do things evolves from the nature of the task. Drawing on scholarship in language education, social anthropology, and the philosophy of time, Lofty challenges our industrialized models of schooling and critiques the time order of process oriented writing instruction.