This Scholarship of Teaching and Learning project discusses the effectiveness of using distance metaphor-building activities along with a case study exam to help undergraduate nonscience majors understand and apply geologic time. Using action research, we describe how a scholarly teacher integrated previously published and often-used teaching practices in order to address a bottleneck in student learning. By using the decoding the disciplines model, educative assessment, and the case-study method, we suggest an integrated way to scaffold learning for students with little science background. None of the individual methods we adopted are new, but we suggest that integrating these three methods with all the other typical opportunities students have to address the learning of geologic time over the semester is noteworthy. Evidence of student learning was triangulated from three different class assessments. These assessments indicate students' self-reported confidence in using the geologic time scale improved over the course of the semester, although the final exam analysis showed somewhat mixed results in their actual ability to do so. (Contains 4 figures.)