EMPOWER Your Students. Lauren Porosoff
to devote forty-six hours a week to playing tennis but can’t fit that into your schedule, are there any small changes you can make to get a little closer? (Supports students as they fill out their schedules, such as by pointing out that a particular activity can do double or triple duty. For example, a yoga class might be part of athletic training, self-care, socializing, and connecting to a higher power.)
Who found this activity difficult? Are any of us alone in wanting to arrange our time a little differently? Do you think your family members arrange their time exactly the way they want to? Your teachers? Your friends? How might some of them spend their time if they could? How can you help them? If that’s what you could do to be kind to them, what could you do to be kind to yourself?
Follow-Up
In future weeks, you can ask students to revisit their schedules and discuss, as a class or in writing, the extent to which they’re allocating their time according to their values. They might have obligations that limit them, but they might be able to tweak their schedules so they can serve their values more fully (such as, “I’ll spend an hour playing with my little brother every Saturday” or, “When wrestling season ends, I’ll see my friends after school on Thursdays”). Whether they change their schedules or not, you can continually help your students gain greater awareness of the demands on their time, make informed decisions about how they use time, and take care of themselves in the face of mixed messages and conflicting interests.
Since the schedules will show you what your students do outside school, you can also help them think about school in the same way they think about their interests. Say a student loves baseball and spends hours practicing. If he struggles with writing, you can talk to him about how it feels to practice his batting stance and how it feels when he finally masters it. From there, you can ask whether he’d be willing to spend a little more time practicing writing, which might feel frustrating and tiring while he’s doing it but might lead to feelings of satisfaction. Students’ areas of interest will be the arenas in which they enact their values.
Variations
In a history or English class, students could imagine how a character or key figure would want them to arrange their beans: “If you were going to spend your time how Gandhi would want you to, where would your time go?” In a geography or language class, students could assess how their cultures inform the ways people spend time: “How is my bean arrangement a product of my culture? If I lived in the place I’m studying, how would I arrange my beans?”
Instead of beans, you could use any small manipulative of uniform size, such as paper clips or beads. If your school food policy allows it, you could use edibles like cereal or raisins and have the students eat them at the end of the activity.
Instead of writing their observations after arranging the beans, the students could share their observations in pairs or as a class, or they could simply observe without recording. They could also walk around and look at each other’s final bean layouts and notice similarities and differences among them all.
Challenges
Any time students use phrases like I should, I have to, and I can’t to describe the ways they spend time, you can gently ask, “Whose voice is telling you that? A parent’s? A friend’s?” Feeling a sense of obligation isn’t bad; it can indicate a healthy sense of respect for other people and for their own commitments. But a lot of shoulds can also indicate rigidity and missed opportunities to serve values in other areas of life. Dilemmas like these have no right answers, so a good discussion will consist of more questions: How does the time you spend on homework affect you in the long term? What would happen if you spent more time making art? How would your life be different if you spent more time with your sister? What do you miss when you choose to spend three hours a day watching videos?
Also, focusing on different areas of life in which students can enact their values is a little misleading: a human can survive spending absolutely no time studying, but if we don’t take care of our physical bodies, we die. It’s possible to pursue values in any domain even if basic needs for food, water, and shelter go unmet. Slaves held religious ceremonies, concentration camp inmates made art, and prisoners write poetry. But just because individuals in a state of deprivation can enact their values does not mean someone with access to nutritious food, comfortable sleeping accommodations, leisure time, and medical care should ignore them all in the name of achievement.
Do you know any students who have at some point ignored their physical needs in pursuit of some academic, social, or other goal? For example, are students sleeping enough? If lack of sleep comes up, you could make it part of the discussion: “What are you gaining and losing when you don’t sleep? If you don’t sleep enough, what parts of your life suffer?” This activity can be an opportunity to start conversations about self-care routines and a way to encourage your students to not ignore their bodies when they set goals and make commitments in other domains.
Typical Tuesdays
Students consider how their day-to-day lives have already changed and will continue to change. They think about the ways they spend their time at different points in their lives, and how they can serve their values even if they don’t have control over where they have to go or what they have to do.
Materials for Each Student
For this activity, each student will need a pen, paper, and the “Typical Tuesdays Throughout My Life” handout (figure 1.4, page 26).
Figure 1.4: “Typical Tuesdays Throughout My Life” handout.
Visit go.SolutionTree.com/instruction for a free reproducible version of this figure.
Sample Script
The following sample script gives an idea of how this activity might work in your classroom.
Today we’re going to think about how we used to spend our time when we were little, how we spend time now, and how we might spend it in the future. I’m going to ask you to think back to when you were in kindergarten. Let’s say it was a regular Tuesday in your life as a kindergartener. Close your eyes if that helps you remember what it was like to be kindergarten you. How did you begin a typical Tuesday? What was your morning routine? When you went to school, what did you actually do there? What kinds of work and play did you do? What did you do after school? What did you eat for dinner? What was your evening like? What was your bedtime routine? (Pauses between questions so students have time to think and remember.)
Anyone want to share some memories of a typical Tuesday in kindergarten?
Let’s think about a typical Tuesday in your life now. Not a special day—just an ordinary one. How do you ordinarily begin a Tuesday? What’s your morning routine like? When you go to school, what kinds of work and play do you do? How do you socialize? What happens after school? Do you do anything to relax or have fun? What do you eat for dinner? What’s your evening like on a typical Tuesday? What’s your bedtime routine now?
How do your Tuesdays now compare to your Tuesdays back in kindergarten? What’s better? What’s worse? What’s just different? What’s the same?
Since we’ve thought about Tuesdays in the past and Tuesdays in the present, we’re going to complete the picture by thinking about Tuesdays in the future. (Distributes the “Typical Tuesdays Throughout My Life” handout [figure 1.4].) First fill out the Kindergarten Me and Me Today columns with what you do on a typical Tuesday. Be specific. Instead of just writing school for kindergarten and now, list what you actually did or do—like maybe block corner and reading groups for kindergarten and physics class and drama club for now.
Then, imagine what