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A caller to my radio talk show recently puffed, “Today’s public school kids need to buckle down and stop having fun in school.” I hear this complaint often. Could it be true? I replied, “So the fact that about 35 percent of the public school students drop out before graduation is because school is just too darn much fun?” There was a pause and he asked, “What do you mean?” “Well, I am just checking out your logic. So you think that one student in three is dropping out of public school before graduation because school is just too much fun?” Click, he hung up. In more than a century of educational research there has never been even one study suggesting the problem in education is that the students are having too much fun. In fact the data would suggest the opposite. A deeper question: do you believe you can have an effective learning community if the participants do not like what is happening? I don’t. If they do not like school, all is lost. I have two children within my extended family who are both now headed to first grade. One went to a traditional kinder program and the other to a “Newest Bad Fad” school. The traditional student can’t wait for school to begin in the fall. The “Bad Fad” student never ever ever wants to go back to school again. Can you imagine that by first grade one school has made a student hate school? Ridiculous. The “Bad Fad” kinder program did not have any singing or laughing. They buckled down and worked hard every day. The teacher insisted that they were quiet and spent a great bit of their time doing worksheets so that their progress could be more easily charted. What about the traditional kindergarten? Originally conceived as preparation for entry to first grade and group learning, traditional kindergarten was full of singing, coloring, cookie making and playing games. The idea is to have so much fun that those kids go home and announce, “School is lots of fun and I can’t wait to go back.” In the “Bad Fad” class the teacher handed out worksheet after worksheet. Kids sat quietly in rows doing their worksheets. The “Bad Fad” classroom is the darling of the administration since the kids seem more orderly and on task and provides all of those data points. Too bad the students never want to go to school again. Active fun learning is noisy, confused, messy and at times seems chaotic to the casual observer. An example: The “Bad Fad” teacher handed out a worksheet for rhyming words. There was also a worksheet for the five senses. The traditional teacher had a rhyming center where kids played rhyming games, sang rhyming songs, wrote rhyming stories and listened to rhyming books. One classroom was full of joy and noise while the other was quiet, orderly and deadly to the learning spirit. If an administrator visits both classrooms the orderly one is praised for time on task, quietness, plenty of data collected, etc. However, the noisy classroom is where all the learning is taking place. The “Bad Fad” classroom is good for everyone but the students. In one classroom that I observed this last year they were doing Marshmallow Math. Using colored marshmallows the walls reverberated with sound and the floor got covered with squished marshmallows and the kids ended the year really understand fractions. They talked about the lessons in fractions often since the marshmallows allowed them to understand concretely the concept. And they loved the fun of it. In the “Bad Fad” classroom, the worksheets are collected and collated and graphed and kept as evidence of learning or not learning fractions. Importantly, the students flee from one classroom and linger in the other. More so, at the recent end of the year I noticed some classrooms had a countdown to summer vacation on the wall. Not surprisingly the active classrooms did not since they were busy having fun learning. What do you want more than anything else? I believe the core goal of school is to have students want to be in school and want to be in a learning environment. Anything that takes away from them wanting to be in school is wrong. Students should go to school to have fun learning. There is not something wrong with having fun learning, rather, something is wrong with people who think school and learning should not be fun. © 2005 Michael Swickard, Ph.D. |
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