Is Doodling in Class a Waste of Time? A Teacher Explains What She Notices
It’s 1:40 on a Thursday, the last period before the bell, and I’m standing at the whiteboard explaining equivalent fractions for the third time this week. Half the class has checked out in the usual ways—one kid is picking at a bandage, another is watching the clock. Then there’s Eli, in the second row, head down. His worksheet is blank except for the bottom corner, where he’s drawn a small city. Water tower. Pipes running along the ground. A bird sitting on a wire.
I crouch next to his desk. “Eli. What did I just say the denominator tells us?”
He doesn’t look up right away, but he answers. “How many pieces the whole thing is cut into.”
“Right. So where’s problem one?”
He flips the pencil over, writes the answer in about nine seconds, and goes back to the water tower.
That moment didn’t settle anything for me. It just made the question harder to ignore, because the version of me from my first year of teaching would have taken the paper away and told him to focus. And I don’t know anymore if that would have been the right call.
The question comes up most often at conferences. Eli’s mom sat across from me in October with his folder in her lap and said, “Can I ask you something honestly? He draws for like an hour every day after school. Same kind of stuff. Buildings, pipes, machines. Should I be worried? I don’t want him to look back at fourth grade and think he wasted it.”
She wasn’t being dramatic. She was tired. She’d been looking at sign-up sheets for coding club and travel soccer and a Saturday art class, and none of them felt like the answer.
What I told her is what I’ve come to believe after nine years in classrooms: doodling during a lesson is sometimes a waste of time, and sometimes it’s the thing holding the lesson together. The hard part is that both versions look identical from across the room.
Here’s what I’ve learned to check. Can the kid answer a question about what I just said? Not a hard one—just a basic one. If the answer comes back accurate, whatever’s happening on the paper is running alongside the lesson, not replacing it. Second: does the work get finished? Eli’s worksheet is usually done by the end of the period. Sometimes the last two problems come home. But they come home. Third: does the drawing change over weeks? Eli’s cities started as boxes. Now they have cross-sections. That’s not a kid zoning out. That’s a kid thinking about something for months.
The other version is real too. I’ve had students whose drawing starts the second a task gets hard, and the worksheet stays empty, and when I ask what the lesson was about they genuinely can’t tell me. Same behavior, different function. That’s the one I step in on.
So I stopped treating it as a single problem with a single rule. What works in my room now is small and specific:
Every student has a designated spot for notes and work, and a margin or a corner they can use for whatever. If drawing spills over the whole page, we move it into a small notebook that lives in the desk. The rule is out loud and simple: “You can draw while I’m talking. When I count down from three, I need eyes up here.” Then I actually count down, every time, so it means something. If I’m giving directions for a test, that’s a no-draw zone, and I say so in advance rather than snatching paper mid-sentence.
And I do the comprehension check. Not to catch anyone—just a quick “tell me what I just said” as I walk the rows. Two seconds. It tells me more than the paper does.
At home, the advice I gave Eli’s mom was to stop trying to replace the drawing and start looking at it. Not as a portfolio. Just: what’s in there? She started asking him what the water tower does. He talked for eleven minutes. She kept a folder on the kitchen counter, not to show anyone, just so the drawings didn’t end up crumpled at the bottom of a backpack.
She also cut the after-school time down from an hour to about forty minutes, not because it was a waste, but because homework and dinner needed to happen. That’s the unglamorous part nobody mentions. Most of this is scheduling, not philosophy.
There’s a moment I keep coming back to. In February, we did a unit on water systems, and I asked the class how a siphon moves water uphill. Eli’s hand went up before anyone else’s. He explained it using a drawing he’d made at his kitchen table three weeks earlier, something with a bend in a pipe and a bucket. He wasn’t showing off. He just already knew, and he was surprised the rest of us didn’t.
I don’t think that means the drawing was secretly homework. It just means he’d been thinking about pipes for a while, and eventually the thinking ran into the curriculum.
I still don’t have a clean rule. Last month a substitute covered my class and Eli’s worksheet came home blank, which means the structure I built around him doesn’t travel. So we adjusted. He sits closer to the front now. The notebook stays in the desk. Some weeks it’s fine and some weeks I’m reminding him four times a period, and I can’t always tell if it’s helping or if he’s just gotten better at hiding it.
What I can tell you is that I stopped asking whether the drawing was a waste of time and started asking what it was doing. Those are different questions, and only one of them is answerable on a Thursday afternoon.
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