“If it feels like your something is wrong with your son because he won’t sit still, maybe it’s because he knows he should be chasing frogs and playing outside. Little boys who are getting in trouble for being active in school are just naturally responding to a learning environment that completely opposes the way God so wonderfully wires little boys.” -@durendaleewilson
A child’s attention span, at BEST, is 2-3 times his age. The average 6 year old will learn BEST when he gets a break after every 12-18 minutes of learning. So why has the way of education become completely opposed to how a child learns best? So much to ask, so much to wonder, and so much hope for change to better honor the way kids are designed to learn.
When I used to teach 2nd grade, the protocol was to discipline – in one way or another – the 7-8 year olds in my class who were no longer properly “focusing” after hours of sitting inside of a building. Not only did this teach them that we hold physically impossible standards for them, but it taught them to shut down natural feelings and emotions that were developmentally appropriate and deem them as “trouble”. Although I did my best to give them as many mini-breaks as I could, I was not allowed as much time to as they deserved. Oh how I wish I could relive those days with my 2nd graders and flip every single way we were expected to teach on it’s head and teach those little ones to know that trusting their instincts and knowing their goodness was far more important than blindly obeying us authoritative strangers who encouraged them to endure an environment that, more often than not, went against every bone in their free-spirited body.
How can schools look differently to maximize efficient learning by honoring developmentally appropriate attention spans? It is done time and again in other countries that have higher academic rankings than us, and wonder how much longer we tolerate these ways…
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