15 MINUTES

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15 Minute School
by Bernadine Sevy

I find there are two reasons for not doing school work, excluding of course the obvious, which we interpret to be bad attitude, laziness etc. I believe that children actually crave to learn, but their need to display their agency and fight anyone "making" them do something they don’t feel like doing can be overwhelming. The two reasons are being overwhelmed, not seeing light at the end of the tunnel, and boredom. So to fight these problems I put on my "marketing" hat and "packaged" school in a more attractive and palatable way.

First find a button. The button in our home is the computer. So what our children earn is computer time, minute by minute. Each child has a graph, each day they color their total minutes, next to the current date, on their own graph, they compete against themselves and this works well because who better to improve against.

They earn 1 minute of computer time for every correct spelling word. They are given 15 minutes to accomplish as much math as they can, they get more done than they used to all day, in some cases. One of my children could sit in front of a blank page, not even writing the date on it, from breakfast until dinner. It drove me crazy and he felt angry. 15 minute math fixed the problem. At the end of 15 minutes we check their math, figure out why they had problems with certain questions, and add to their computer time. Each correct math problem is an additional minute of computer time. Each 5 minutes of reading equals one minute of computer time. Once again I require 15 minutes but they read a lot more than that. It is, once again, for the reluctant child the "light at the end of the tunnel."

And so on, each subject will only last 15 minutes, and generally I hear a lot of: "Please let me finish this math problem", "Just 2 more pages Mom!" This is music to a mother's ears. This simple exercise in "marketing" has made the school day much more pleasant for the whole family. The reality is that we don’t get bogged down with anything, because we only have to do any one thing for 15 minutes. We actually get much more than the 15 minutes, but no one is making anybody do anything.