Be sure kids exercise their brains
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Updated: June 25, 2009 2:04 PM
I know, I know, the students have worked hard all year long and need to rest during the summer, but there are some issues to consider before that can truly be justified.
Not all students learn at the same rate. Thus, during a school year, some students are bored because they learn immediately and have to wait for others, some students learn at the same pace they are taught and some students fall behind.
For those who have fallen behind, the summer is the perfect time to do a little catch up. Without it, those students will be even further behind in September.
There is also the matter of what exercises the brain is doing all summer versus what skills will be needed when school begins again. We learn what we do and the brain drops the pathways to things we don’t do.
If a student spends the vast majority of the summer in activities that develop the short-term memory skills related to texting, tweetering, Facebooking, gaming and television viewing, the long-term memory skills needed to process information and retain it for future use will not get much exercise.
The final department meetings in my school were a cacophony of concerns over students who are not reading, even if they can, whose writing skills are deteriorating rapidly as if academic papers were nothing more than an inconvenient “tweet”, and whose ability to retain mathematical and scientific facts are rapidly diminishing as technology storage and retrieval replaced brain storage and retrieval.
Add to that the continuous progression of superficial thinking and the belief that Wikipedia is the only source of valid information from which one can plagiarize and you have some grumpy old teachers at these meetings.
We may be in a dramatic period of intellectual change. Seriously, research is showing the brains of youths truly are developing differently than their parents’ did. Perhaps the interactions of humans will fundamentally change and the need for long-term retention and critical thinking will diminish, but I’m not sure that’s a good thing and I’m not convinced we’re not letting our children be part of a very rushed experiment in evolutionary progress.
I will make my summer brain development suggestions simple: be sure your children, regardless of their ages, spend a few hours a day without anything that requires electricity so that they are forced to process information with the electrical connections in their own brain – reading a book; writing a journal; playing some board games; playing outside; talking to adults; building with blocks.
You get the idea.
By exercising their brain in a lot of different ways, they will continue to develop the many facets of it, not just a few.
Then, when they return to school, where a wide range of activities and skills are necessary, they will have the intellectual fitness to get up and running quickly.
Although I know some parents will take this suggestion to heart, many will not, or will not feel they have the capability to stop their children, particularly teens, from engaging in the preoccupation with all things electrical.
There is a way, of course, to force the issue. There’s nothing like a camp trip in the middle of nowhere, and out of cell phone range, to get back to the simple life.
It might be a great intellectual and family bonding exercise.
Graham Hookey is an educator and writer (ghookey@yahoo.com).
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