Research and kids agree: the best summers are full of free play. Lose the schedule this year.
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I taught summer school once. Well, not exactly summer school. In Texas, 8th graders had to pass the English and Math state tests (back then known as TAKS) in order to graduate from middle school. And while several opportunities were provided every spring, and a veritable bonanza of extra help dumped upon the few teens unlucky enough to fail the first test, there was inevitably still a handful of students who would fall short on all of them.
Those dozen or so kids were the ones I met with, three days a week, in a month-long session of half-day TAKS tutoring.
They were not enthused, naturally. Naught but the humiliating specter of being held back a year would have compelled their attendance. As for my own volunteering, it had nothing to do with magnanimity or a special calling.
I was in my mid-twenties and broke just about all the time. I wanted that extra stipend.
Of course, I also wanted them to pass. Here they sat, nice kids, mostly, just wanting to go on to high school. So I endeavored to make the ambience welcoming, and made use of the tremendous pile of resources provided by the district (it was emphatically in their interest too, that every single 8th grader “meet expectations.” The extra support provided me to ensure this outcome was generous).
The irony in all this is that the teenagers were, almost by definition, not school lovers. They were the type of student who most looks forward to summer, and that blessed break from mandated class structure.
And yet, because of their aversion to traditional academics, they were stuck doing more… traditional academics.
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I wonder about this American tradition of twelve-week summer breaks. There are certainly drawbacks, most obvious among them, the question for working parents: what now? Twelve weeks of summer camp, special school, temp nanny?
There are also documented classroom problems with three months of school-free living. “Summer Brain Drain” is real. Students will spend the first month or two of each progressive school year re-learning what they’ve forgotten since the previous June.
Regardless of these data points, there is a kind of magic in the lazy days of summer lounging that I would rather hate for students to lose.
And it turns out the “free play” of summer break may be exactly what young people need to succeed academically.
Several studies have demonstrated that children who are given opportunities to create and manage their own play develop better self-regulation, and a little skill known in the Education world as “executive function.”
I’ll never forget the first time I heard that phrase. I was sitting in a meeting with a student and his Tracking Teacher, another fun term from the K12 world, one that denotes the Special Ed person in charge of managing an assigned student’s paperwork and academic progress.
Also at the meeting were the student’s parents, and we were talking about his ability to stay on task. The tracking teacher (this phrase gets more creepy each time I type it) said something to the effect of the student “struggling with executive function.”
Voila! I thought. Where has this concept been all my life?
Because this idea goes miles in explaining the struggles of many middle school students. They know what they need to do; they lack the skill set to just go ahead and do it.
Here is where summer strides in, offering up its indispensable worth. Summer months give students long spans of time in which they must occupy themselves. Use their imagination. Create activities and goals, whether in projects or games, and then figure out how to get those things accomplished. All in a way that is fun, in a mode that holds their interest.
This is thinking and executive function fused, working together at a pretty sophisticated level.
So my advice to parents, as summer approaches, would be to, yes, turn off the TV and limit the video games.
But please don’t over-schedule or over-structure your child’s time. There is no workbook or math lab that will help him or her as much as a couple daily hours of total freedom.
Photo:Flickr/Justin Jensen