My biggest fear was free time and boredom. I didn’t know myself without my commitments or what to do if I didn’t have somewhere to be, or a private SAT tutor to report to. I defined myself by what I did, not who I was. The college application process seemed to reward this perspective. I was asked to report my grades and activities, and the general idea was the more the merrier! Even community service became an activity to take pride in.
It’s easy for gifted students to get caught up in a sea of over-scheduled existence. While it may seem appealing to participate in so many things, even gifted students struggle to find their paths to individual success and achievement. Unlike the student who has deficits in some subjects or abilities and excels in others, the gifted student succeeds at everything! So while some students can rely on interest or natural intellect to help them weed through the undesirable, the gifted students struggle to find their way amidst a fountain of innumerable successes - and while they may appear composed and directed on the outside, on the inside they are often silently struggling to figure out who they are and what they want out of life.
In light of my own retrospect, I challenge gifted, overscheduled, and overcommitted students to try something new for a day – Do Nothing. Take the hint from your peers who appear to be under-booked or uninterested and figure out what to do with yourself in the face of boredom. Put your calendar and intellect aside for a few hours, a weekend, or a few months this summer and depend on your creativity to fill your time. In a 2002 article from Newsweek titled “Doing nothing is something,” Anna Quindlen writes:
Downtime is where we become ourselves, looking into the middle distance, kicking at the curb, lying on the grass or sitting on the stoop and staring at the tedious blue of the summer sky. I don’t believe you can write poetry, or compose music, or become an actor without downtime, and plenty of it, a hiatus that passes for boredom but is really the quiet moving of the wheels inside that fuel creativity.
I hope that someday a college application will ask students, “What do you do when you have nothing to do?” Or that a business will hire recent college grads under the premise that they won’t live and die at their cubicles. The lack of free time has become synonymous with productivity and efficiency, and this culture of workaholics is trickling down into America’s youth. In a 2005 article in Education Week, Rhea R. Borja states:
In recent years more parents have started sending their 3 to 5-year-old children to for-profit tutoring centers to give them an academic edge in elementary school. Tutoring for tots has been spurred by increased academic accountability in schools, heightened competition to get into top-ranked colleges and new research that links early exposure to books, music and language to better academic performance in later years.
We are trying to give children as young as preschool the competitive edge, but at what cost to their creativity and introspective abilities? We need to strike a balance between academic enrichment and personal growth and development.
It may seem silly, but it may never be too late to learn the old maxim: “Go outside and play.” It’s the wisdom of many generations before us, and downtime may be the key that unlocks our best thoughts and our true creativity.
Works Cited:
Borja, Rhea R. "Growing Niche for Tutoring Chains: Prekindergartens' Academic Prep." Education Week 25.8 (2005): 10. Academic Search Elite. EBSCO. Web. 22 Feb. 2010.
Quindlen, Anna. "Doing nothing is something. " Newsweek 13 (2002): ABI/
INFORM Global, ProQuest. Web. 22 Feb. 2010.
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