Is My Kid’s ‘Pointless’ Favorite Activity a Waste of Time? A Teacher Explains
Last October, a mom named Clara lingered after our 3rd grade parent-teacher conference, one hand curled tight around the strap of her son Milo’s backpack, the other wiping a smudge of cinnamon applesauce off the edge of my desk. The other parents had already filtered out to the parking lot, and the hallway still smelled like the chocolate chip cookies the PTA had set out for the night. “I have a weird question I don’t usually ask,” she said, and pulled out a crumpled grammar worksheet where Milo had drawn tiny, carefully labeled rocks in every single margin. “He comes home every day, dumps his backpack by the door, and spends two full hours on this rock collection he keeps under his bed. Sorts them, rearranges them, folds little paper houses for them, talks to them like they’re tiny neighbors. I keep waiting for it to turn into something— a science fair project, a rock identification journal, anything I can point to as useful. Right now it just feels… is this thing a waste of time?”
I didn’t have a quick, polished answer for her, because I get some version of this question every single semester. A few years back it was the boy who drew nothing but blocky Minecraft pigs on every assignment he turned in, and whose dad wanted to know if he should ban drawing during homework time to force more focus on reading. Last year it was the girl who folded origami cranes by the dozen, stashing them in her desk, her backpack, the classroom bookshelf, and whose mom worried all that folding was eating time that should go to math intervention.
Most of the time, these questions come from a reasonable place. Adults are trained to measure time by its payoff: we work out for our health, cook to put dinner on the table, sit through meetings to keep our jobs, even leisure is supposed to count, whether it’s a side hustle or a self-care checkmark. So when a kid pours hours into something with no grade, no end product, no clear line to a test score or college application, it feels like wasted time they could spend catching up on multiplication facts or logging their required 20 minutes of reading.
I told Clara what I’d observed in class two weeks earlier, during our science unit on properties of matter. I’d set out bins of random materials—gravel, river rocks, foam, nails, cork—and asked kids to sort them by hardness, color, and buoyancy, then fill out a short worksheet. Most kids finished in 10 minutes, jotted down answers, and wandered off to independent reading. Milo spent 42 minutes at that table. He pulled 11 rocks from his jacket pocket, his personal collection, and tested every one against every material in the bin. He noticed his smooth creek rocks floated longer than sharp playground gravel, even when the creek rocks were noticeably heavier. He found dark gray rocks left a faint streak on classroom tile when scraped, while milky white quartz left no mark at all. He added three extra columns to his worksheet, drew a rough bar graph on the back, and spent 10 minutes explaining to a classmate why the textbook’s “heavy things sink” rule didn’t always hold up.
Clara blinked, like she’d never connected the after-school rock sorting to what happened in class. She only saw endless rearranging on his bedroom floor, no graded paper to show for it. What she missed was that all that “pointless” sorting was already building the skills we drill with worksheets, just on his terms. When he sorts 47 rocks by color, then weight, then texture, then rearranges the whole system when he finds a rock that fits two categories, he’s practicing building and testing rules—the exact same skill he uses when he learns not all fractions are smaller than one, or that some stories don’t follow the basic structure we teach in reading. When he sticks with it for two hours even when he can’t get his rock village roads to line up right, he’s building the stamina to sit with a confusing long division problem instead of asking for the answer after two tries.
I don’t say this to frame every silly kid obsession as a secret test-prep hack, because that misses the bigger point. I thought of Lila, the girl who folded origami cranes by the dozen, who was two grade levels behind in reading. She got so anxious reading out loud her hands shook and she’d shut down completely if called on. I started letting her fold a crane during our one-on-one reading practice, no requirement to sit up straight or hold eye contact the whole time. That semester, she read twice as many pages in our sessions as she ever had when I made her keep her hands folded on the table. By the end of the year, she’d gained two full reading levels, but origami never taught her phonics. It was just the thing that let her turn down the noise in her head enough to try the hard stuff.
I’ve landed on a few small, low-lift things I tell parents who ask this question, none of which require buying a curriculum or turning your kid’s favorite hobby into a forced lesson. First, once a week, spend five minutes with them with no agenda. Don’t open with “what are you learning?” or “can you write a report about this?” Just say, “show me your favorite one.” Clara tried that a few days after our conference. She told me later she sat cross-legged on Milo’s bedroom floor after dinner, didn’t mention flashcards or reading logs once, and just asked to see the rock that looked like a shark tooth. He talked for 22 minutes straight—she even timed it—about trading shiny quartz for it with his cousin at a barbecue, about how the tip broke off when he dropped it on the sidewalk, about how he kept it on his nightstand when he had bad dreams. She’d never heard him talk that long about anything that wasn’t a video game.
Second, don’t steal that self-directed time to stuff in more “productive” work. A lot of parents I talk to fill every 10-minute car ride with math flashcards, every quiet afternoon with educational apps, scared their kid will fall behind if they’re not actively learning every second. But when every minute of a kid’s day is scheduled by adults—school, tutoring, soccer, piano, even parent-arranged playdates—they never get to practice calling the shots, troubleshooting when something goes wrong, or sticking with a thing just because it matters to them. That’s not a skill you can drill with a worksheet.
I also don’t tell parents every minute of unplanned activity is valuable. There’s a simple, low-pressure check I use: if your kid is actively making choices, adjusting what they’re doing, and gets excited to tell you about it when you ask, that’s not a waste. If they’re staring blankly, scrolling or repeating the same motion for hours with no reaction, just zoning out after an overloaded day, that’s usually just reset time (which is also fine, in small doses) but it’s not the same as that active, self-chosen obsession.
Last month I ran into Clara and Milo at the grocery store, and he was carrying a chipped hunk of pink granite he’d found in the parking lot on the way in. He told me he’s adding it to his rock solar system on his bedroom windowsill, that it’s a new dwarf planet. Clara laughed and said she still has days where she peeks in his room after school, sees him lining up rocks for the tenth time that week, and that old “is this a waste?” thought pops right back up. She still reminds him to do his reading log most nights, still makes him practice multiplication facts for 10 minutes before dinner. But most days, she just leans against the door frame for a minute instead of interrupting.
Last week I found Milo at indoor recess, rearranging his rock solar system on the classroom windowsill, moving the Jupiter rock an inch to the left because the sun was hitting it wrong. He looked up and said his Io rock—tiny white, with a black spot—had rolled behind the heater that morning, and he’d spent 10 minutes fishing it out with a ruler. I didn’t ask what he was learning, or suggest he turn it into a science fair project. I just said I was glad he found it, and walked away. Some days I still wonder, too, if all those hours lining up rocks will add up to anything he can put on an application. But most days, I think the real waste is the time we spend making kids put down the thing that makes them care, just so they can check one more box that won’t matter half as much as learning how to show up for something that’s entirely theirs.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Is My Kid’s ‘Pointless’ Favorite Activity a Waste of Time