"I Just Want to Go Outside and Play"

Just about this time last year, when the first exciting days of school had past, the notebooks weren’t looking quite so crisp and white, and the school clothes were looking a lot more rumpled and stained, I was sitting in an after-school meeting with a group of my school colleagues, both teachers and administrators. Every one of us had squeezed this meeting in between other, conflicting demands. We each had a never-ending to-do list and fast approaching deadlines to grade papers, write midterms, schedule parent conferences...I could go on and on. Our phenomenal sixth grade teacher told a story about giving extra help to a struggling student during lunchtime that day. The demands of sixth grade had begun to act on this boy like an avalanche, and as so many kids do when things start to look hopeless, he had just stopped digging. My colleague was trying to give him a pep talk and get him back on track. She told us he looked up at her with a very serious expression and said, “I just want to go outside and play.”

Every one of us in the room took a deep breath and a few snuck glances out the window at the campus in all her fall glory. Someone said, “Me too!” and to a person we all confessed. Me too! What are we doing in here? It’s beautiful outside! I just want to go outside and play!

I’m afraid sometimes we take our jobs so seriously as teachers and parents (and let’s face it, they are serious jobs) that we lose sight of some pretty basic facts. We wonder why a kid isn’t motivated to be 100% on all day in school, and then happy to go home to the “second shift” of homework all evening. Why do the kids talk to each other about stuff they like more than history every time I put them in cooperative groups? How come my son would rather play video games than work on math problems? Is there something wrong with him?

Hello?! Wake up and look around! If we’re doing things right, as parents, then our kids’ lives are wonderful and joyful. Their world is filled with hundreds of great activities that are a lot more fun than math problems. Even if your kid is really good at math, given a choice he’s probably going to want to do one of those other things. And if math is a struggle for your kid? If he’s never quite understood it and thinks he sucks at it and that it’s a disappointment to you and to his teacher? He’d have to be crazy to be really motivated to spend all his free time doing math. There would really have to be something wrong with him!

I’m not trying to say we should just let our kids do whatever they want all the time, even if it means they spend all their time on their skateboard going around and around your cul-de-sac. But let’s make sure we aren’t giving kids the message that there’s something wrong with them if that’s what they’d rather be doing than building a scale model of an Apache village in a shoe box. And as teachers, it really is our responsibility to make it fun. Because we all, grownups and kids alike, just want to go outside and play, and you know what? There’s nothing wrong with that.