"Summer Bummer"
July 2, 2006
With summer here and school out, I hope every kid in town gets to
indulge in what I call "drool time," also known as flop-on-the-couch-and-
do-nothing time. I hope children get to read what interests them, ride
bikes with abandon, play made-up games, daydream and swim.
That's what my summers were like, growing up, and my daughters'
as well--lots of lollygagging around on hot hazy days that had their
own languid rhythm.
Dream on.
Summer, apparently, has become an academic booster season, according
to Sara Bennett and Nancy Kalish, authors of the forthcoming book, "The
Case Against Homework: How Homework Is Hurting Our Children and What
We Can Do About It."
This year, many schools around the country doled out massive "vacation
homework" assignments -- including multiple reports to write, books to
read, math packets to complete. In some communities high schoolers must
read scientific treatises, prepare PowerPoint presentations, write essays
and take long exams.
I remember a summer when my girls were in elementary school and we
were vacationing in Rhode Island. With us was our friend Shaneil, a girl we
met through New York City's Fresh Air Fund. She spent several weeks of each summer with us.
When Shaneil unpacked her suitcase that July after fourth grade, she handed me a thick folder and a large workbook. "She has to do this work over the summer," Shaneil's mother had warned me, "because the teacher said so. Will you help her?"
I was dumbfounded that Shaneil's school in Queens had dumped these
dreary, dry materials on her and these expectations on her mother, a
single parent who worked a double shift as a toll taker at the Lincoln
Tunnel in New York City.
Rather than thrive as she had other years -- busily reading, writing
stories and creating outfits for the annual plays the girls put on --
Shaneil lost ground that summer. She didn't want to go to the library,
even though she knew and liked all the local librarians and loved their
reading suggestions.
Whenever we went to the beach, Shaneil frolicked for a few minutes in
the surf and then said, "We've got to go home now and study." I helped
her with her workbook and coaxed her to read the drab materials. By
the end of herstay, Shaneil let it be known she never wanted to read
another word--ever.
Great, I thought. That was a brainy scheme. Crushed by curriculum ... on
summer vacation.
Clearly, the kid needed a respite, not more school work. As Bennett and
Kalish write in a recent New York Times article, "As adults know, a break
from work is a necessary antidote for stress. We need what psychologists
call 'consolidation,' the time away from a problem when newly learned
material is absorbed ... too many of our children today are denied that
consolidation time. And when parents are told that their children's skills
will slip without summer homework, we have to wonder: If those skills are
so fragile, what kind of education are they really getting?"
My kids would have loathed summer schooling. They read books from their
teachers' suggested summer reading lists, but if somebody had required this
of them, they would have balked. Reading would have become another odious chore for them, like cleaning the cat box.
Shaneil never brought summer homework again, thank goodness. She said
she didn't have any and I didn't probe. We both knew what she needed --
good old-fashioned fun with no agenda. Summer vacation.
What's with America? We rank number one in the world for not taking
vacations, says Po Bronson in Time magazine. "Bottom line," he writes,
"it's simply become too stressful to relax."
Pardon me while I go collapse on my couch and consolidate
