Quit Looking at Those Chicks!
While picking up a pair of kindergarteners and a first grader their second day of school last fall, I yelled across the playground to them, “Hurry up! I want to get home so we can eat snack and go outside and play.” They all three looked out of the corner of their eyes at the nearby teacher and one child yelled back, “WAIT, we can’t run on the playground!”
Let me repeat her words in case you missed them: “we can’t run on the playground!”
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A few days later I’m picking up another kindergartener at a different school. Waiting outside his classroom, a first grade class passes by on their way to the lunchroom. They have stoic faces and their hands clasped behind their backs. “Get back in line right now and keep your eyes to the front,” the teacher admonishes a child who momentarily sways out of the perfectly straight line to peak out a window.
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The first grader at the school where they are not allowed to run on the playground has had repeated trouble at school because he can not keep his hands to himself, he has trouble focusing, he “bounces off the walls”, and he doesn’t stay in his seat.
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Not too long ago I stood in another kindergarten classroom waiting for yet another child. I was busy peaking into a cardboard box full freshly hatched chirping chicks when I heard the teacher say, “Now Kindergarteners, tomorrow we cannot be jumping out of our seats to look at the chicks whenever we want. I know they are fascinating, but we have important seatwork to do. We have lots of science, math, and reading skills to learn before the end of the year!”
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School ended for the summer the other day. We’ve had to remind the children that they can run in our yard and that they can get dirty when they play. Over the last nine months or so they seem to have forgotten how to play. Their attention spans and curiosity have diminished. They are having a hard time initiating activities on their own; instead they wait to be told what to do. They have grown more aggressive and care a lot about being first and winning. We will spend the next three months re-teaching them to be self-motivated, curious, thoughtful, kind, and focused.
Then school will start.
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It’s a wonder my head has not imploded after nearly 20 years of sending kids off to school and having to reprogram them when summer comes. I know a lot of child care professionals feel the same way.
I understand that all kinds of great teaching and learning are going on in some of our nation’s classrooms. I understand that, among other problems, school systems across the country are dealing with large class sizes, language and social barriers, tight budgets, fear of lawsuits, and a shortage of qualified and competent teachers. I understand that teaching elementary school is tough and often thankless work. I understand that teachers often have their hands tied by administrators and that those administrators in turn have policy dictated to them by school boards and government. I also understand at the core of my being that working with five to eight year old children can be exhausting, difficult, and is always challenging.
Another thing I understand is that those obstacles are not excusable reasons for expecting young children to conduct themselves like anything other than young children. We are doing our kindergartners and first graders (and second through twelfth graders for that matter) a huge disservice when we do not allow them to run on their school’s playgrounds, make them march through the halls like prisoners, hatch eggs and fail to tie the whole curriculum to that activity, and squeeze the creativity and passion for learning out of them with rigid schedules that do not allow ample time for exploration that builds understanding and knowledge. Standardized curriculums, tests, rules, and regulations turn children into automatons and suck the joy of learning right out of their little heads; we’re leaving so much behind in our efforts to make sure no child gets left behind.
It kind of bugs me that I don’t have a Macro solution that will bring the nation’s school systems around to letting children be children, but the fact is I don’t have time to change the world. I do, however, have a Micro solution; I know what I’m going to do in my little corner of the world. For the next few months we are going to spend large hunks of time climbing apple trees, getting muddy, hunting for bugs, running, falling, skinning our knees, and just being kids. We are going to observe birds and bugs and bunnies in all their birdie-ness, buggy-ness, and bunny-ness--and learn a ton while doing so. We are also going to learn social skills, science, language, problem solving, math, logical thinking, and healthy living while we are at it (without even knowing we are learning!). Summer’s here and it is time to learn the way early learning is supposed to happen: by playing.
