Going to Bat for Playground Time
Back in the 1970s, I spent part of every workday building cardiovascular fitness, honing negotiation skills, lifting my mood, exercising creativity and preparing my mind for new skills. I was at recess.
A recent New York Times article put the spotlight on a Queens elementary school where recess has been eliminated. When the kindergarten parents complained, the school added another gym period each week. Now, I grant you, I was always (ahem) “outfield material” when positions were being assigned by my kickball teammates, so I had plenty of time to daydream and goof off. Even so, an extra 40 minutes of gym each week isn’t the same as a week’s worth of recess.
Although I resist getting political here in the Understand My Mind forum, I can’t talk about this topic without taking a swipe at No Child Left Behind. NCLB is a lesson in the Law of Unintended Consequences that we Americans are learning belatedly. In tying budget and teacher career advancement to children’s performance on standardized test scores, NCLB inadvertently jeopardized any part of the school day not directly supporting skills tested with a No. 2 pencil. Music, art and now recess are all potential casualties.
Recess makes a tempting target if you are a school administrator looking for ways to boost those all-important standardized test scores. Most injuries in a school setting occur during recess. More fights occur during recess periods than during other, more structured times of day. And nobody is learning anything…at least, nothing that fills in those little bubbles sheets.
The Recess Curriculum
Except that we do learn from recess. A little couch potato before anyone used that term, I learned to skip rope like a champ and do flips on the jungle gym because my friends induced me to try—more exercise than I would get from the outfield during the gym period’s kickball game. Around me, older kids were teaching the little ones rules for games, and conflicts found resolution without adult intervention. Other kids were inspecting bugs and dandelions. Still more figured out how to collaborate in making complicated pictures with sidewalk chalk.
Kids still need recess for the same reasons. Presently, my own little girl is learning to tell the class bully (another girl) to leave her alone and to stick up for the inclusion of others—social skills that don’t emerge during structured class time. Because my daughter is an only child, recess is her best regular chance to learn how to deal with other children, the people with whom she is on an equal footing. She can’t negotiate with me or with her teachers, but she must learn to do it with her peers. At the tender age of five, she has already learned why it is important to share, to be fair and why we have rules by participating in “kid society” during group play. Recess is the crucible that ingrains those lessons better than any bedtime story I might read or homily I might recite.
Recess and Behavior
A 2009 study published in Pediatrics related teacher-reported behavior scores with the amount of recess provided to eight- and nine-year-old kids. The investigators, Barros, Silver and Stein of Albert Einstein College of Medicine, used data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study public-use data set, allowing them to examine data for more than 10,000 children. They were able to demonstrate statistically that some daily recess improves behavior in the classroom.
The data about attention span and recess have been around since the 1990s. In 1993, Pellegrini and Davis demonstrated experimentally what teachers have known intuitively forever: children become progressively inattentive and fidgety without recess. In this light, eliminating or significantly truncating periods of free play with the goal of improving test scores can only prove counterproductive
I’m an unlikely champion for my kid’s right to goof off. As a parent, I’m goal-directed to a fault, turning anything into a “teachable moment”. I’m also pretty strict and run a very structured weekday schedule for my kid. The truth is that if I were around for her kindergarten recess period, I would probably turn looking for shapes in the clouds into a science lesson about weather, and that would be a pity. That said, I can keep my eye on the ball enough to realize that the future adult in my charge now needs to relate to her coworkers someday, and that her job is unlikely to require an ability to fill in bubble sheets with a number two pencil. She needs the negotiation skills and creativity I developed at recess, a routine of blowing off a little steam between strenuous mental activities, and better cardiovascular fitness than she will get from that kickball game.
By Lisa Jancarik
Resources
http://www.pediatrics.org/cgi/content/full/123/2/431
http://www.ericdigests.org/2003-2/recess.html
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