Putting recess before lunch (How did we manage to do this backward for so long?)

Most of us grew up with the following daily routine in elementary school: classes, lunch, recess, more classes, dismissal. But did it ever seem strange that we were eating before running around outside? After all, our parents and teachers probably weren’t in the habit of eating a major meal before exercising, and we were always told not to swim for 45 minutes after we ate so we wouldn’t cramp up. Yet this model of eating then exercising has been followed for decades, pretty much without question, in our nation’s schools.

Thankfully, some around the country are challenging the status quo and seeing good results. Tara Parker-Pope’s article in the New York Times last week showed how schools in New Jersey, Arizona, and Montana have moved recess in front of lunch successfully. According to a New Jersey principal whose school has instituted the switch,

Kids are calmer after they’ve had recess first. They feel like they have more time to eat and they don’t have to rush.”

And in Arizona, one school

conducted a pilot study, tracking food waste and visits to the nurse along with anecdotal reports on student behavior. By the end of the year, nurse visits had dropped 40 percent, with fewer headaches and stomachaches. One child told school workers that he was happy he didn’t throw up anymore at recess…. And to the surprise of school officials, moving recess before lunch ended up adding about 15 minutes of classroom instruction.

Similarly, the state of Montana

conducted a four-school pilot study of ‘recess before lunch’ in 2002. According to a report from the Montana Team Nutrition program, children who played before lunch wasted less food, drank more milk and asked for more water. And as in Arizona, students were calmer when they returned to classrooms, resulting in about 10 minutes of extra teaching time…. Today, about one-third of Montana schools have adopted ‘recess before lunch,’ and state officials say more schools are being encouraged.

The schools above offer a good lesson to educators, one that has nothing to do with recess. That lesson is to identify assumptions and challenge the status quo in even those aspects of schooling that are seen as working just fine. Generally, when a school or school district wants to change, it brings in an outsider–someone who has not worked there (or perhaps has never worked in education) and will see things with a fresh set of eyes. But this method doesn’t always work, because all of us have gone to school and thus have ideas about how school is “supposed” to work. In this case, most people grew up with recess after lunch, no matter what kind of school they attended as children. And when nearly everyone has the same experience with something for years and years, it is less likely that someone will think to change it.

(In case you’re curious, school recess has been around for about 125 years. W. T. Harris, a philosopher and educator who served as superintendent of schools in St. Louis and as U.S. Commissioner of Education, introduced the idea in an 1884 paper he presented to the Department of Superintendents of the National Educational Association.)