This article examines students' perceptions and usage of time, their sense of optimism or lack of it, especially related to schooling. Positionality, or perceptions about life and projections of the future, has great impact on students' success in school. How they interpret the past, live in the present and foresee the future is significantly influenced by their intellectual locality and life perceptions. In the same way, how educators see their position in the world and their classroom "roles" determines their "operandum vivendi." Educators' influence on students also shapes their ontological foundation and self determination. This study explores hegemonic time construction, which can be alienating to disenfranchised students. The practices within the process of schooling tend to construct and limit students' consciousness. As social institutions, schools mediate, through the distribution of curricular and extra-curricular activities, the construction of dominant time concepts into students' temporal subjectivities. For example, students in many affluent U.S. schools spend more time at creative activities than do students in poor schools. This temporal notion means that students in poor schools will more likely learn to use their time for repetitive tasks instead of creativity, knowledge production, or critical thinking. As these temporal practices and subjectivities are not forgotten upon leaving school, they undermine poor students' success in a competitive world. Many scholars compare and contrast pessimistic and optimistic conceptualizations. Yet this research suggests that many students foresee relatively few optimistic possibilities in their lives and schooling but have by no means adopted pessimistic outlooks. Interestingly, both quantitative and qualitative methods used in this study support these findings, leading one to believe that comparative studies that scale pessimism versus optimism need to be revised and/or closely examined. (Contains 1 note.)