Does Heat Affect Kids’ Learning? What I’ve Noticed As A 4th Grade Teacher
Last Wednesday, I walked into my 4th grade classroom to find the AC dead. The maintenance guy said he couldn’t get there until after lunch, so I propped open the two narrow windows by the door and turned on the beat-up box fan I keep in the closet. By 9:15 a.m., the wall thermometer read 83 degrees. Pencil shavings in the trash can smelled warm and stale, and half the kids were fanning themselves with the fractions review worksheets I’d passed out. I’d scheduled a 10-question pop quiz that morning, and by all accounts, most of the class should have aced it—we’d practiced equivalent fractions all week.
Mia, who usually finishes her work 5 minutes early and gets every problem right, stared at her paper for three full minutes, twisting a strand of hair around her finger. “I can’t remember,” she said when I leaned over her desk. “What’s the top number called again?” Ten minutes later, I collected the quizzes, and half the class scored 15 to 25 points lower than their average from the past week. Javi, who can simplify fractions in his head faster than I can, wrote 2/4 instead of 1/2 for four out of five questions. I almost marked it down to careless mistakes, until after lunch when the AC kicked back on, the room cooled to 72, and I had most kids redo the quiz on the back of their paper. Only two kids got the same low score. Everyone else bounced right back to their usual.
That’s when I started asking: does heat actually change what kids can remember, or is it just that they’re too uncomfortable to pay attention? I talked to our school’s guidance counselor a couple days later, and she told me it’s not just fidgeting. When your body is overheating, it has to spend extra energy cooling itself down—sweating, adjusting your heart rate, all the stuff that happens without you thinking about it. That energy has to come from somewhere, and most of the time, it takes it from the working memory your brain uses to hold onto the facts you just learned. So it’s not that Mia forgot what a numerator is forever. It’s that at 83 degrees, her brain didn’t have enough extra space to pull that fact out when she needed it for the quiz.
I saw the same thing play out with my own 10-year-old son last weekend. We were at a backyard birthday party for my cousin’s kid, it was 91 degrees, and we’d asked him to play his piano recital piece for my grandma, who’d driven three hours to see him. He practices that piece 10 minutes every single day, and he hasn’t messed up the second verse in a month. But standing there on the patio, sweating through his polo shirt, he forgot three quarters of the notes. He got frustrated and walked inside, sat down on the couch next to the AC vent, and 10 minutes later he hummed the whole thing through from start to finish without a single mistake.
Before this, I used to write slow, foggy work off to laziness or bad attitude. I’d tell kids to just try harder, or remind them they knew the answer yesterday. Now I’ve made a few small changes that don’t take any extra work or money, and they’ve made a huge difference.
For example, I don’t schedule quizzes or memorization work between 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. on hot days anymore. That’s the hottest part of the day, when most buildings hold heat no matter what. Instead, we do hands-on projects that don’t rely on pulling facts out of memory—measuring the playground, sorting rocks for science, drawing maps of the neighborhood. For parents, that means don’t force your kid to cram for a spelling test or finish a tricky math worksheet at 3 p.m. if your house doesn’t have consistent AC. Move it to after dinner, when the air cools down, or split it into three 5-minute chunks instead of one 15-minute block.
I keep a case of cold water bottles in the mini fridge by my desk, and I keep a pack of cheap disposable wash cloths in the freezer. If a kid says their brain feels foggy, they can hold a frozen water bottle to their neck or wipe their wrists with a cold cloth for 30 seconds. Cooling down your pulse points cools the blood going to your brain fast, and it’s enough to free up that working memory again. At home, you can just keep a small bowl of cool water by the homework table—have your kid dip both wrists in for 10 seconds when they’re stuck. It costs nothing, and it works better than yelling to pay attention.
I also close all the blinds on the south side of my classroom before I leave on a day that’s supposed to be hot the next morning. That drops the starting temperature by 4 to 5 degrees before kids even walk in the door. At home, you can do the same thing—close the curtains on the sunny side of the house during the day, and open the windows at night to let the cool air in. It’s a small change that makes a big difference if you can’t afford to run AC all day.
We’ve got a full week of 80-plus degree days forecasted for the end of this month, and the school district still hasn’t approved money for a new AC unit. I still catch myself sometimes expecting kids to perform the same way they do on cool 70-degree fall days. I keep the thermometer taped to my desk now, though, and when it creeps above 78, I adjust. Yesterday, when the fan died for an hour, we just sat on the floor by the open window and did read aloud, no math, no quizzes. No one got a bad grade, no one got sent out for being off task. It’s not perfect, and some days the heat still gets the best of all of us. But it’s a lot easier on everyone when you stop asking kids to fight their bodies to hold onto what they’ve learned.
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