Week 5 Nap Lab: Reading the factory clock

A document Nap Lab — factory rules, shift timetables and a modern staff handbook, read for what each one assumes about rest

22 March 2027

No measurement this week, and no napping. This is the lab where the course changes instrument: for one session the evidence is documents, and the skill being taught is reading a rule for what it takes for granted.

Before the lab#

• Bring the rule or timetable you were asked to find. A screenshot is fine. A staff handbook, a school bell schedule, a gym’s opening hours, a shift roster — anything that tells people when they may stop.
• No preparatory reading. The documents are supplied and the point is to meet them cold.

In the lab#

Three documents, in small groups. A set of nineteenth-century factory rules, a twentieth-century shift timetable, and a current corporate staff handbook. You get all three and forty minutes.

One question for each. Not “what does this permit?” but “what does this assume a body is?” The factory rules are the easy case — they are explicit about fines and about attention. The handbook is the hard one, because it is written in a friendly register and its assumptions are the same. Finding them is the exercise.

Where your own document fits, twenty minutes. Each group brings one member’s found document to the room and argues for where it sits on the line between the three. Disagreements here are usually productive: a “flexible working” policy can be read as a loosening or as the factory clock following you home, and both readings can be supported from the same sentences.

Case study selection, fifteen minutes. You leave having chosen the culture your Cultural Case Study will cover, and having said it out loud to someone. Next week supplies three worked examples; choosing before you see them means you choose something you are actually curious about rather than whichever of the three was explained best.

Afterwards#

Nothing is submitted this week. Two things leave with you: a chosen case study subject, and the habit of asking what a schedule assumes.

Your Nap Log recording period is nearly over. Next week it is due, and the analysis is the part people leave too late — the entries are only the evidence, and evidence with nothing said about it does not answer the question.