I have been teaching in elementary schools for the last two years as both a sub and a special ed aide. Almost across the board, when kids are asked to share something about their day they focus on recess. It could have been the best or the worst part of their day, but it made an impression..

Why is that? And what can we learn from that for our own lives?

Adults don’t have recess, or snack time, or structured play (PE). But the things that make those moments glorious in a kids’ day don’t change for adults. The chance at recess to choose what you want to do, and with whom. The chance at snack time to choose who you want to sit with and what you want to talk about. And the chance in PE to play hard, learn how to do something you want to be good at, and do it with your friends.

I have very smart friends. One of them was telling me that she had recently taught a class (she’s a university business professor abroad) she wasn’t happy about. Because she is both smart and an avid learner she asked three of her top students what they didn’t like about the class. (I’m going to stop there and let you think about how extraordinary that was.)

One of the students told her that she wished my friend would just give them the problem, just throw it at them, and let them try to figure it out. Then, they would be more interested in learning how they could solve it. My friend knew she had just cracked the code, and is going redesign that course.

It reminded me of a young student I was working with on reading. He was new to English and we were working on the alphabet. SO! Boring. Finally, I started naming things in the room that started with the letter we were on. Then, I started writing things down that we could do with the letter e.g., jump when we got to “j”. Still kind of boring, so I asked him if he could think of a word that started with such and such a letter. Whatever he said I wrote down. He had very few English words, but he had some and we “jumped”, or drew, or made songs up for each one. It still makes me smile to think of it.

He got to choose and to be part of his learning, not just the receptacle for my teaching.

It also changed how he felt about learning English; it went from scary and dull, to fun and challenging. It’s what authors like Steven Pink with the book DRIVE and Malcolm Gladwell with Outliers have been telling us for years: Motivation has to come from within to be lasting and transformative. It also helps if it serves a higher purpose (thank you David Brooks, oh, and almost every religious thinker who ever lived). It also helps if we do it with people we like.

I once took a seminar from a brilliant educator, Jay McTighe of Understanding by Design fame. He started right out by having us turn to the people at our table and tell them about a time in our lives when we had learned something, something we still remembered and cared deeply about. I was shocked to realize that no one mentioned the classroom, or even a classroom teacher. And they were all K-12 teachers except for me. To be fair, no one mentioned a college professor either. What they mentioned were powerful life experiences, friends, coaches, the arts, and family members.

So, when I hear that recess tops the chart for almost every kid, almost every day, I’m not surprised. Even though when it is my turn to be outside with my students at recess, I can hardly believe that this chaos can be so valuable. But it is. I have to remind myself not to be like the adults or “grandes personnes” in Antoine de St. Exupery’s classic, The Little Prince, who "understand nothing on their own." The little prince goes on to say that it is "very tiring for children to always be explaining things to grown ups."

So, I don’t ask, I just observe. And maybe that’s the best way to learn, anyway.