Kids need time to take risks outside the eyes of ever-vigilant adults. Kids who don’t take risks when they are younger tend to be too anxious to do so as adults. It creates a society in which people are too afraid to live their lives! At least, that’s what the research seems to be saying. As Haidt also mentions, in today’s world, it can be hard to imagine loosening the reigns at all with safety being paramount, and yet, it’s easy to see how, as the old saying goes, good kids make bad grown-ups. Those who never take small risks when they are young certainly aren’t going to take big ones as they get older.
Recess: The Undisputed Favorite Part of a School Day
New Paragraph
August 26, 2024
By Monica Van Aken Ed.D and Zack Weil
In what has quickly become one of the most talked-about books of the year within educational circles, The Anxious Generation, author Jonathan Haidt dedicates considerable attention to the crucial topic of recess. Since the 1980s, our country has had a certain attitude about education, needing to focus heavily on reading and math at the cost of everything else. Art, music, and even aspects of science, the stuff most kids find fun, have found themselves on the chopping block when it comes to school budgets. However, more than anything else, recess has found itself excised to an almost negligible amount in America’s schools.
At
MMS,
we’ve taken a different approach. We believe that recess, along with studio art and art history, music, and athletics are essential to creating a high quality of life experience in school for all children. In a series of loosey-goosey student interviews, nine out of ten children will rank “recess,” as their favorite part of the day (that one kid who doesn’t say recess usually says “lunch.”)
Recess is when kids finally get to run around and enter into their own worlds, which includes playing games without adults telling them what to do. To children, recess is so essential that it’s shocking that it would ever be excluded. What’s more, as Haidt argues in his book, it should be a time for kids to be with kids with limited adult intervention. Why?
Sometimes parents imagine that recess is a cheerful, bucolic enterprise, and it usually is, but in fact, it never seems entirely peaceful. The moment they start their games, kids take control. They form a hierarchy; the older ones call the shots. They make rules and often spend inordinate amounts of time arguing about those rules.
Many times children will complain about “unfair rules,” and others will then demand that if the rules are deemed unfair the disgruntled group can calve off and form their own wayward rule following game, but boycotts and full-on four-square walk-offs are rare. People settle down, and compromise, and the game goes on until someone challenges yet another rule. To the adult onlooker, recess is a combination of OSHA regulations, union negotiations, and binding agreements that last for five minutes at a time. But all this is essential to making games work, learning how to accept limits from others, forging relationships, and after a decade or so, evolving into an adult who can handle risk, tolerate ambiguity, and of course, negotiate. "Alright, let me explain the rules."
The important thing to remember as an adult is that recess is an integral part of becoming a well-educated person. While classrooms can teach the rules of grammar and math, playgrounds are where children learn the rules of life in a society. Recess is not a break in the education of a child, it is absolutely vital to the growth of children. To onlookers, it may look just like fun and games, but the truth is the majority of what we all have learned in life was actually learned on the playground.
According to their most recent test scores, every MMS 8th grader will graduate as an advanced reader, well above grade level some at the High School level, others at a college level and yes, a handful are reading as graduate students. This statistic is, to put it mildly, absurdly excellent. But nationally, a different trend is emerging, one of a discouraging decline in reading scores. According to the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (NEAP), only 30% of 8th graders in the United States read at or above a proficient level. In Wisconsin where scores are continuing to slip, only 31% of 4th and 8th graders are able to meet proficiency standards in reading. So why are middle schoolers across the country struggling with comprehension on standardized tests? A growing body of research points to an overlooked culprit: multisyllabic decoding . Many students can read simple words, but they stumble when faced with complex academic vocabulary. In other words, students can read “photograph” but struggle when confronted with the pronunciation of “photosynthesis.” If decoding skills aren’t automatic, comprehension suffers and it’s a bottleneck that is halting growth for 70% of American students by middle school. But not at MMS. The prevailing thought in most schools is that once students are taught to read, they can read to learn, but we know at MMS that this is fundamentally untrue. In our Children’s House, our 3-6 year old students learn fundamental decoding skills. In Lower Elementary, our students in grades 1-3 learn the Dolch Sight Words: these are the thousand most commonly used words in the English language. We continue to build and reinforce sophisticated decoding skills by asking students to read non-fiction books and complete book reports about them. We also ask parents to read aloud with their children every single night to develop reading fluency and listen as their children decode the ever-more complex words in their non-fiction books. Finally, students in Lower Elementary use a program called Lexia that focuses on decoding skills that will apply through middle school texts. In 4th grade, when many American students seem to hit a wall in their reading progress, MMS students are decoding more complex words using Reading Plus and IXL. These are both reading tools that measure reading speed, decoding capacity, and comprehension. In addition, our students in 4th, 5th, and 6th grade read 27 novels a year, far surpassing the average of public schools that relegate reading to textbooks and short passages. MMS Junior High students read a whopping 53 books per year in both 7th and 8th grade, and our reading list is formidable. Titles include Antigone , Macbeth , The Great Gatsby , and Animal Farm . Large portions of these works are read aloud in class, introducing students to difficult new vocabulary while explaining its pronunciation and meaning. This is the perfect instructional strategy for improving multisyllabic decoding. They continue to work through the entire Reading Plus program until they test out at the 12th-grade level. The result? While the national trend shows students stalling out, MMS students are accelerating. According to the latest NAEP assessments, only 4% of American students read at the advanced level. In contrast, 100% of MMS 8th graders scored in the advanced range on this year’s winter assessments. That’s no accident. We’re using a time-tested program that builds and sharpens the key skills essential for long-term success. Monica Van Aken, Ed.D
Last year, when we ordered Jonathon Haidt’s then-new book, The Anxious Generation, we knew it would be a seminal book based on its topic, and it also confirmed that our instincts about technology use among children have been spot on. Haidt proposes four norms that can help restore children to a healthy childhood despite the creep of technology into every area of their lives. At MMS, we had already adopted those norms by 2008, when we became among the very first paperless elementary and middle schools in the nation, earning us recognition as one of six “Schools of the Future,” by the National Association of Independent Schools. Through foresight and implementing these norms over the last fifteen years, we have been able to hold back the tide of problems other schools have had to address. While we are a high-tech school, it should be clear that our version of tech training doesn’t include ‘passive screen time.’ At Milwaukee Montessori, technology is not a distraction, but a sophisticated tool for intellectual development, creativity, and academic excellence.
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At MMS , students are avid readers. They begin reading simple Mac and Tab books, then carry a homework folder back and forth for five years and read to their parents to improve oral reading and reading mechanics. Once in upper elementary, our students read one novel , historical fiction, non-fiction, or fiction every other week, and many read more. But why is reading so important for students, and why is reading a full novel (and not the abridged textbook version) so important? Books, more than anything else, teach students about empathy. Maybe not always explicitly, but even the most horrible and villainous characters ever created have some trace of humanity within them. We learn through the mistakes our protagonists make and experience the triumph of their successes when they finally (usually) defeat the evils that plague them. This ability to experience stories through the safety of the page means that we as readers can live through all the horrors of war, the ecstasy of solving a crime, or beating a rival in a championship clinch moment without having to change our lives to do so.
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