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I thought I'd start this topic because it's at the tail end of another thread and some people may miss it.

So, what do you think of all the activities kids do? What do you think is gained by rock climbing for instance, since it's not outdoors and can even injure your students hands? I don't see the appeal.

I have a student in dressage and she has amazing posture, which I attribute to this, as well as a good sense of the beat.

I have a student in ballet who might put in a few nights a week. In this case, I don't think she puts enough in to take it to a serious level, even though she wants to be a ballet dancer. At the same time, it's too many hours to allow for a balanced life.

Some students play soccer very often. Although I think it's great to get exercise, I wonder if playing soccer more than one hour per night is really that essential. What do they learn after months of soccer practice?

Do you think fewer activities would help students reflect more, and be more creative? Or do you think a lack of creativity is related to too much time playing on the computer or playing video games?

In my opinion, the overly tidy homes lead to lack of creativity. What is there to play with in those suburban homes where Mom puts away every magazine?

Comments?

That's a really hard topic! Life is constantly changing isn't it. I think as a child, free time to lend itself to creativity, because we had to think of things to do, whether creating stories for my dolls, or coming up with cool crafts with the supplies we had on hand. But I also agree that computer games, at least the addictive repetitive ones, do seem to have a numbing effect, at least on me, as an adult! But you can also use a computer to be creative too, if one gets into graphic design, which I did at a young age.

You are posing many, wide ranged questions from student hobbbies to outdoor activities to creativity. Maybe you should ask a more focused question

And why do you focus on kids? Adults also have other hobbies besides piano playing and can also be creative

>What do you think is gained by rock climbing for instance, since it's not outdoors and can even injure your students hands? I don't see the appeal.

I do not quite understand your point. Are you saying students only should have hobbies if they help piano playing?

>What do they learn after months of soccer practice?

You can also turn that around, what do you learn after months of piano practice? (not much, some argue it takes 10000hours to become a decent pianist?)

It's feast or famine. I live in a co-op where one raison d'etre is ideals of community, and the other is the reality of poverty, so we get mixed economics, but more on the "not-rich" side. Right away you get those who can't afford anything, with both parents (if there are two) working long hours for low pay - those kids don't have a surplus of activities: they have no activities. I think I told the story of the young man who looked me in the eye one day and said "I play music too." and I answered "Yes, I heard you - you're good." He practised drumming diligently on the garbage cans outside, and he was pretty good. You got the kids who come home to a parentless (still out working) overcrowded home with the many siblings, with nothing to do, no place to do it, and nothing to do it with (except garbage can lids) --- and then you have the over-extended rich kids. Guess which ones will show up in your studio?

I tutored a young man from your kind of camp, living in another part of town, for a year. The kid was exhausted. I was one of a long line-up of tutors and programs. It's like our world has two extremes and no middle point of sanity.

I like the idea of opportunities to learn than more thing, be able to follow one's interests, and have something more than your own instincts to draw on. But kids also need "down time", "me time", a chance to reflect and be. It seems that the art of parenting is as elusive as the art of teaching, and only some people get it a little bit right.

I think it's great for kids to have the opportunity to try a variety of things, to see what they really enjoy and to give them some ownership in their choice of hobbies.
Some of what they do will stick (hopefully).
I don't force my children to stick with an activity they don't enjoy (except swimming, everyone has to learn to swim )

I also think having unscheduled time to play is important. A bit of boredom is healthy, and I expect my children to entertain themselves a fair bit.



I'll rise to the bait here

I love rockclimbing! It's a superb whole body exercise, it develops great body awareness, there's a big problem solving aspect to it, you need to be really focused and mindful, it forces you to do things that feel scary and learn that actually you can do them, or sometimes maybe you can't (yet) - you fail and you learn that that's ok, the world didn't end. You have to be responsible for your partner when you are belaying, etc etc

It's curious to me that you see it as only an indoor sport. To me you might as well ask what I think of running, seeing as "it's not outdoors". Running machines and indoor climbing centres are popular, sure, but both are at heart outdoor activities
(It depends where you live, of course, I get that where you are there may not be much in the way of outdoor rockclimbing)

I think we all need to be aware of the fact that there are some rather arbitrary lines being drawn here between what is "worth doing", and what isn't.

Candywoman, I'd be interested in your answer to Tim's question: what do students learn after months of piano practice? And I'll add my own: if people learn anything from playing the piano for more than an hour every day, as I'm sure you did (and do?), then why would that be inherently more valuable than what they would have learned playing soccer for the same amount of time?

I would also like to posit that the disdain some people today exhibit for video games is the same disdain that people used to have for card and board games, which I would say are now more widely seen as an acceptable pastime, not because they are inherently more 'wholesome' than video games, but because they are what today's "fully grown" adults grew up with, and want to (occasionally) keep doing.

There was a time when philosophers rallied against the idea of writing things down, you know. They were afraid it would lead to a generation of adults who couldn't remember anything without the aid of written records. While they may have been right that the ability to write things down made memorizing less essential, and therefore decreased the capacity many people had for it, I think it's safe to say that we came out ahead in the end. Draw your own parallels to the digital age (or not) as you see fit. Just because you personally don't see the appeal in something, doesn't mean there is none.

To keystring: I think there is a middle ground, but many people are struggling to find it for reasons that may not be in their control. As you said in the other thread, sending children to school is (among many other things) a form of childcare. Parents who work until 5PM every day (as many adults I know do, and they're the lucky ones) cannot pick their children up and take them home immediately after school. That's just a fact. These people are not "rich" by any reasonable definition of that term. They also aren't (necessarily) bad parents. They don't want their children to be entirely without supervision after school, but they need an income, and for that they need to be at work when their boss expects them to be at work. So they sign the children up for extracurriculars, as a form of childcare which they have reason to believe will provide more than 'just' childcare. If these parents didn't work until five every day, they might not *have* to sign the kids up for five activities a week, but then they also wouldn't be *able* to sign them up for the one or two things each of them really want, because there wouldn't be enough money.

And then of course, there are those parents who have somehow struck a sustainable balance between working too much and earning too little, and who could in fact be there for their kids after school, except that they're driving Sally to ballet on Tuesdays and Fridays, Peter to soccer on Wednesdays and Sundays, and Paul to piano lessons on Thursdays. You could say that parents who work for pay and have more than two kids should just drop the idea of hobbies for their offspring. As you've indicated yourself, that's usually what ends up happening among those who work too much and still earn too little. Not because of any conscious decision on their part, but because they don't have the time or the resources for a different way of life. But is that really the right answer?

I think each distinct clientele has its own set of problems in regards to homework and extracurricular activities.

I teach predominantly in two school districts here that give a TON of homework and projects, most of which are aimed at making the teachers "look good." A lot of time is wasted doing pointless tasks. Having been a school teacher myself, I know exactly what these teachers are doing.

Thus, increasingly, the online schools, private schools, and homeschool programs are looking more and more attractive to students who have a genuine pursuit of interest, such as piano, ice skating, tennis, gymnastics, or whatever extracurricular activity that may take up a lot of practice time. And I don't blame their parents! If you know how much time is wasted per day in public schools, then you'll know that the most efficient model of education will avoid all those pointless projects and endless homework (mostly busywork) that don't really have any intrinsic educational value other than to keep the kids busy.

Responding because something I wrote elsewhere was placed here out of context without being understood.

What I responded to started with a discussion of homework and the reasons for it. I related a discussion with fellow teachers some 25 years ago when my first child became school age and I visited the school. The school hours had recently been lengthened, supposedly to help with learning. The gr. 1 & 2 teachers told me that the kids could not stay alert that long, and they filled in the last hour with things like art just to fill the time. The purported reason was bogus. Also, there was nothing about "extracurricular". Nor did parents have any choice.

There is a community center nearby that has some after-school programs as well as just a program to keep the kids occupied until their parents can pick them up, for a low fee. I see it when I go to the gym. Here the parents do have a choice.

In terms of extra-curricular activities, these choices were severely cut down at the time of the "educational reform" which in my mind was mostly a money saving venture. It was already a stretch writing in the other thread about the US situation from Canada, but Belgium would be much more different I'm sure.

Yes.
The thing with homework is that it should be designed to reinforce learning or create new learning. What is given out as homework often isn't that, and from what I understand is going on nowadays, isn't even in the teachers' hands. I don't live in the US so I can only get arms length impressions.

What about people like me who play card-games on their cell phones?

It's all about balance. Finding the right activities, and the right amount of activities, for that kid.

Fair enough. I shouldn't have drawn what you said on the other thread into it. But even if we discount that, I think my point still stands. It's not (necessarily) 'feast or famine'. A middle ground exists. It is just difficult for many people to find that middle ground, given the realities of their lives. Most people with children would be homeless within a year, at best, if they stopped working. Cutting their hours may be an option, but that's not an option open to everyone.

This whole discussion (about kids and their many activities) was initially sparked by something Morodiene said: that if logistics are a primary concern in deciding when and where to send your kids to piano lessons, then maybe your kids are doing too much. I'm arguing that for many, logistics *have* to be a primary concern, or their kids wouldn't get to do much of anything.

Hey ... don't go confusing my stereotypes ... :P

I was fully engaged in the whole computer movement decades before most.

Yes, there are absolutely mindless video games, but there are mindless books too.

Which, as it happens, was exactly my point.

The op seems to think children have too many things to do to play piano. Too many other interest if you will. That is probably right for families who can afford other things for their children to do. I can not speak for them because as a child I was born into total poverty.

As a poverty child you have nothing to do constructively except as one poster said, beat on garbage can lids all day. I got free music lesson one day a week for one hour in grade school, grade 4. I was 10 years old and started on clarinet. That lasted for about two years until I drifted away from going to school and hung out on the streets all day. Lack of parental guidance because mom was always working to feed us and pop was always drunk or at the race track. Great life. . . and for sure I and many of my friends wanted to play music. We mostly wanted piano until guitar (electric guitar) came on scene and most of my friends when that way. However, most of us could never afford any kind of music lessons.

So today, in this modern world, that is suppose to be so great, it is really no different for most people than it was for me as a child. Most people today, in the whole world are still poor. So most children in this world will never experience even the limited musical experiences I had has a child. Sad but true.

Note: I am an American who grew up in America. I do not know about other countries back then.

I totally agree. By giving one extreme to oppose the extreme that this thread started with, I tried to draw attention to that reality. Those who pay for music lessons are most often those who can afford to pay for music lessons, and since there are trends within certain socio-economic groups, you can have an invisible socio-economic phenomenon. Some or many teachers may get mostly students whose parents enroll them in a gazillion activities in order to compete with their neighbours or do the posh thing, etc. Since children at the opposite socio-economic spectrum don't ever set foot into the studio, that side never becomes a reality. Therefore I countered one extreme with the opposite extreme, just to highlight its existence. OF COURSE a middle ground is best.

Well..............but I had another thought.

Those who become really successful at anything - piano, Olympic sports, chess, other instruments, etc. - are most often not balanced at all.

Those prospective Olympic ice skaters don't bounce from the skating rink to the library to the piano teacher to yoga class to etc. They do one thing and one thing only, and it becomes all consuming.

There are piano students in that category too but I don't think we're talking about them. So we're inherently talking about a group of kids who are in what I've been calling enrichment mode. Having chosen (or been chosen by) that demographic to work with, there are going to be distractions and limitations. Maybe that's not all bad.

My first year of teaching,
I had a boy (8-10 years old) that started crying at the piano, out of sheer exhaustion and despair of ever getting time to do everything. He ran down his schedule, and he had two or three activities a day.

I asked dad about perhaps narrowing the activities, and he pointed at me and said, "When you have a son, you MUST have him in soccer by age 3, if you expect to be any sort of athlete." and, "You have to have a competitive child to make it in today's world. College is just around the corner."

Colleges want depth, not breadth.

Yet, we all know students that dabble in different hobbies, activitities, lessons, and drop-out before one year.

That is teaching the students to quit when the going gets tough.

Plugging in piano as a hole in the schedule most likely means you will get, "I think I forget to practice. We were too busy!"

It is the parents that need to understand that piano is a language to learn. But, the parents are often too busy themselves to do much more than get to the child to whatever lesson, class, program, etc...

Yes, some families make time for certain and specific focuses and activities.

"Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart form it."
That verse means to guide your child to find their bent, their forte, their interests, and help them grow in it.

It does not mean dabble in four things for just one semester and then move on again and again, never being successful but always being busy.

That's my story.

What I was hoping people would say is their personal opinions of all these activities, (hobbies, sports, you name it, even kumon math)and whether you see them as valuable. I think piano lessons are infinitely more valuable than soccer lessons, for instance. A child gains coordination and an understanding of how to play soccer, and how to work with the rules to gain an advantage. I cannot understand why they would continue to want more and more detail in this area. You kick a ball around. You get better at kicking a ball around, or saving the ball from entering the net. But it can't translate into a career. Only a small per cent of those indoor soccer kids will go on to play in a way that even raises the interest of the average fan. I don't understand parents wanting to put them in soccer for years and years when their time would be better spent doing all the academic work that they eschew today. Music making has an academic component, especially once you add harmony and history. As for personally not seeing the appeal of something, I think there are objective standards by which we all judge how people spend their time. For instance, if your child spent an hour waiting for the bus each day, most of us would agree that that's a very low quality way to spend time. Only under specific conditions could this be viewed differently. Suppose while waiting for the bus, they end up counseling other children how to be good kids. This might redeem the lost time. But most people would avoid this scenario. I also value academic uses of time over social uses of time as well. Do you think kids loitering after school is as good as them coming home and writing reports on panda bears, or whatever?
Anyways, I wanted others' value judgements.