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New Zealand Schools Find Less Structure Improves Children's Behavior
First time accepted submitter geminidomino writes "A research project involving eight schools in Dunedin and Auckland report that loosening rules on the playground may lead to fewer incidents of bullying, vandalism, and injury. One principal opines, 'The kids were motivated, busy and engaged. In my experience, the time children get into trouble is when they are not busy, motivated and engaged. It's during that time they bully other kids, graffiti or wreck things around the school.' As one might expect, the article states that there was a lot of resistance to the project, and I'm kind of surprised they got as many administrators to sign on as they did. The story may be premature, as the article states that 'the results of the study will be collated this year,' but it may be interesting to see how the numbers shake out."
Teaching is a profession dominated by meticulous organizers, you know ENFJ types, because they're pretty much the only ones that can cope with the amount of personal planning it takes. So that mentality ends up being projected onto students too, who don't do as well that way.
(I just looked up ENFJ, it's apparently called the "teacher" personality type, funny)
Yes. Now imagine how bad their toys must have been before, if tires are an improvement.
What a failure of imagination. I feel sorry for you. Tires can be amazing toys -- they roll, they bounce, you can climb through them, you can line them up and run through them in a funny way, they do all sorts of wobbly funny things if you don't just roll them... add water and/or sand/mud, and I can think of a lot more fun activities.
It seems like you've never been around a small child who found a large box to be the best toy he got for Christmas. He doesn't care about the fancy toy inside of it -- the box is more entertainment by itself.
Witness that a few times, and you'll understand why the new toys in the story were probably an improvement over some sort of static fancy approved "equipment" that probably was what was there before.