When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing(21)

Schools are getting tough. Especially in the United States, they are embracing high-stakes testing, strict evaluations of teachers, and a tough-minded approach to accountability. Some of these measures make sense, but the war on weakness has produced a major casualty: recess.

Some 40 percent of U.S. schools (particularly schools with large numbers of low-income students of color) have eliminated recess or combined it with lunch.10 With futures on the line, the thinking goes, schools can’t afford the frivolity of playtime. For example, in 2016 the New Jersey legislature passed a bipartisan bill requiring merely twenty minutes of recess each day for grades kindergarten to 5 in the state’s schools. But Governor Chris Christie vetoed it, explaining in language reminiscent of a schoolyard, “That was a stupid bill.”11

All this supposed toughness is wrongheaded. Breaks and recess are not deviations from learning. They are part of learning.

Years of research show that recess benefits schoolchildren in just about every realm of their young lives. Kids who have recess work harder, fidget less, and focus more intently.12 They often earn better grades than those with fewer recesses.13 They develop better social skills, show greater empathy, and cause fewer disruptions.14 They even eat healthier food.15 In short, if you want kids to flourish, let them leave the classroom.

What can schools do to take advantage of recess? Here are six pieces of guidance:

1. Schedule recess before lunch. A fifteen-minute break suffices, and it’s the most helpful time for kids’ concentration. It also makes them hungrier, so they eat better at lunch.

2. Go minimalist. Recess doesn’t have to be tightly structured, nor does it need specialized equipment. Kids derive benefits from negotiating their own rules.

3. Don’t skimp. In Finland, a nation with one of the world’s highest-performing school systems, students get a fifteen-minute break every hour. Some U.S. schools—for instance, Eagle Mountain Elementary School in Fort Worth, Texas—have followed the Finnish lead and increased learning by offering four recesses each day for younger students.16

4. Give teachers a break. Schedule recesses in shifts so teachers can alternate monitoring duties with breaks for themselves.

5. Don’t replace physical education. Structured PE is a separate part of learning, not a substitute for recess.

6. Every kid, every day. Avoid using the denial of recess as a punishment. It’s essential to every kid’s success, even those who slip up. Ensure that every student gets recess every school day.





3.


BEGINNINGS

Starting Right, Starting Again, and Starting Together

Todo es comenzar á ser venturoso.

(To be lucky at the beginning is everything.)

—MIGUEL DE CERVANTES, Don Quixote





Every Friday, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the government agency charged with protecting American citizens from health threats, issues a publication called the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Although the MMWR is written in the etherized prose of many government documents, its contents can be as terrifying as a Stephen King novel. Each edition offers a fresh menu of menaces—not just marquee diseases such as Ebola, hepatitis, and West Nile virus but also lesser-known dangers such as human pneumonic plague, rabies in dogs imported from Egypt, and elevated carbon monoxide levels in indoor skating rinks.

The full contents of the MMWR for the first week of August 2015 were no more alarming than usual. But for American parents, the five-page lead article was chilling. The CDC had identified a disease endangering roughly 26 million American teenagers. This threat, the report showed, was pelting young people with a hailstorm of dangers:

? Weight gain and a greater likelihood of being overweight

? Symptoms of clinical depression

? Lower academic performance

? A higher propensity “to engage in unhealthy risk behaviors such as drinking, smoking tobacco, and using illicit drugs”1

Meanwhile, researchers at Yale University were busy identifying a threat to some of these beleaguered teenagers’ older brothers and sisters. This hazard wasn’t imperiling their physical or emotional health—at least not yet—but it was gnawing at their livelihoods. These men and women in their mid to late twenties were stalled. Even though they had graduated from college, they were earning less than they had expected with a bachelor’s degree and significantly less than people who’d graduated just a few years earlier. And this was no short-term problem. They would suffer from reduced wages for a decade, maybe longer. Nor was this cluster of twenty-somethings alone. Some of their parents, who had graduated college in the early 1980s, had suffered from the same malady and were still trying to shake off its residue.

What had gone so wrong for so many?

The full answer is a complex blend of biology, psychology, and public policy. But the core explanation is simple: These people were suffering because they had gotten off to a bad start.

In the case of those teenagers, they were starting the school day far too early—and that was jeopardizing their ability to learn. In the case of those twenty-somethings, and even some of their mothers and fathers, they had begun their careers, through no fault of their own, during a recession—and that was depressing their earnings years and years beyond their first job.

Faced with problems as vexing as underperforming teenagers or flattened wages, we often search for solutions in the realm of what. What are people doing wrong? What can they do better? What can others do to help? But, more frequently than we realize, the most potent answers lurk in the realm of when. In particular, when we begin—the school day, a career—can play an outsize role in our personal and collective fortunes. For teenagers, beginning the school day before 8:30 a.m. can impair their health and hobble their grades, which, in turn, can limit their options and alter the trajectory of their lives. For somewhat older people, beginning a career in a weak economy can restrict opportunities and reduce earning power well into adulthood. Beginnings have a far greater impact than most of us understand. Beginnings, in fact, can matter to the end.