Will your child do better in school if they have more recess? That’s the question posed by a segment on The Today Show this past Monday.I didn’t see the segment, but a similar story appears to have aired on the same program ten days earlier. It focuses on an elementary school in Texas where, beginning this year, students have four 15-minute recesses per day. They used to have one 15-minute recess per day.Some teachers and parents at the school claim that more recess has made the kids more focused, better listeners, less restless, and better able to follow directions.It seems a little presumptive to say that those changes are due to extra recess after just a few months, and it’s obviously counterintuitive to think that more recess would lead to more learning instead of less learning, but in general, I come down on the more recess side of the argument.Maybe Texas is on to something. (I can’t believe I just wrote those words. I always assumed that Texas liked being its own country so much back in the 1840s that they’d decided not to progress since then. They’re on the verge of proving me wrong! What’s next for the Lonestar State, science?)Much has been made of the need for testing, and standards, and new teaching theories, and blah, blah, blah in the past couple of decades. We think that our kids are getting dumber—or at least not as smart as when we were kids, or not as smart as the rest of the world—so the easy answer is to stick those kids in a classroom for as long as possible and make sure that a good teacher is teaching them things.And if our kids are spending all of this time in school and we’re holding teachers accountable, and we’ve got a bunch of new, better ways of teaching, and every kid has an iPad, then surely our kids are getting smarter, right?Well, I don’t know. My kids are smart. And I’m sure your kids are smart, right? It’s all of those other kids—not mine and yours—that we have to worry about. They’re not learning enough. They’re not meeting expectations. Their test scores aren’t fabulous.So what do we do about that? We maximize the time they’re in school and we get rid of stupid things like recess. That’s a good idea, right?
Again, I don’t know. Not to sound like an old man, or some cynic who thinks things will never be as good as they once were, but until fourth grade I attended an elementary school in Springfield, Illinois, at which we had a short recess before the school day even started, then got a mid-morning (10:30ish) recess, a lunch (12:15ish) recess, and an afternoon (2:00ish) recess, before ending the day at 3:00. (At least this is the way that I remember it. I could be wrong. Romanticism and stuff.)That’s a whole lotta recess. Yet I learned a thing or two. (For one, I learned that lotta isn’t a word. But then at some point I also learned that as soon as you learn the rules of writing and grammar, you can begin breaking them!)I’m not arguing that I’m smart because I had so much recess. I think there are so many other factors that affect a student’s education that whether a student has 15 minutes or 45 minutes of recess every day probably isn’t going to make much of a difference. When factored over the course of a school year, that’s an extra 13 days of school spent at recess, which sounds like a lot.However, after a kid leaves school for the day, he’s probably got about five hours before he goes to bed. And factored out over a school year, that works out to 129 days.My point is that—like with so many other things related to kids—what happens at home is more likely to make or break a student than an extra 30 minutes of recess.So before you complain about schools giving so much recess, ask yourself if you’re doing everything you can to help your child succeed at school. Because if you’re not, those extra 13 days a year aren’t going to help anyway.A good school is nice. A good teacher is fantastic. But only rarely can either one help a child overcome bad parents.Want an e-mail every time I write something new? Type your email address in the box and click the "create subscription" button. I'm not going to send you a bunch of junk, and you can ditch me any time you want.
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