Two good articles in the NYT today
1. School Recess Improves Behavior
No big shock here. You can pick & choose the basic reasons why – all work & no play makes Jose a dull boy? Or perhaps that punishment doesn’t work? (see Alfie Kohn’s Punished by Rewards) Or, as many critics of homeschooling say, that kids need school to be ‘socialized’ – then perhaps they should be allowed to be social instead of cooped up in a classroom being trained for a cubefarm.
2. Too Many Online Friends? Time to Delete
I’ve never quite gotten the whole concept of ‘friending’ online. Peeps with thousands of friends? It’s some version of reality that I know nothing about. Peeps seem to agonize about over defriending/unfriending someone, in case someone is offended or if they themselves regret it. I’ve culled my list 3 times in the past 6 months, and gone are the people I haven’t seen or spoken to in the past couple of years. Or the high school peeps I added during my first couple of weeks on Facebook who I don’t even recall speaking to. I don’t know how people have hundreds of people as ‘friends’ as the status updates and this and that all become annoying, time-wasting noise.
I didn’t read the articles but I’ll comment anyway.
The recess thing – in my school, recess was an opportunity for bullies to do their thing and the playground attendants just let it all happen without intervening. I witnessed a lot of kids getting pyschologically damaged by bullies and brats. I never understood why the attendants didn’t seem to care at all, even when the bullied kids would go up to them and explain what was going on. Are they taught to let the kids “work it out” or something? Like that’s going to happen.
The facebook thing – I always found it silly how everyone wants to grow their list of friends by adding any Tom, Dick or Harry they ever spoke to for ten seconds at some point in their lives. Can you say ego trip? I really think that it’s some twisted competition, “Look I have 260 friends, I am special!” Just as I would have preferred a small intimate wedding with about 20 of my closest friends and family rather than the gigantic one we ended up having (my husband has a huge family and everyone on the entire tree and then some were invited), I also prefer to keep my circle of friends smaller and more intimate as well. My husband has a facebook account, I do not. I can barely navigate through it, and honestly, I can think of a lot of things I need to be doing rather than checking in on the goings-on of people I am not close enough to find that out any other way. I feel the same way about blogs. I just don’t have the time. I do stop by some (like yours) that I find interested, but I tried havihg my own and I made like two entries and then I just decided it wasn’t for me. I would like to try again only because I could use a creative outlet and I probably write too much on forums in response to others but it would be nice to just put your thoughts out there and see who bites.
I’m not down with the bullying, but it does illustrate why expecting kids to learn to be social from others who don’t have their social skills down is just plain stupid. It certainly is not a good reason to send a kid to school, as some philistines I know have said. (If they really think bullying is necessary, they shouldn’t leave it to chance and should hire kids to bully and denigrate their children.) Aside from that, recess is the one real time for kids to practice being social, but we could do the same thing at a playground or playgroup.
I’ve been generally aghast at people who have friend lists in the thousands. I just assume they’re completely shallow and am glad I’ll never meet them.
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