Is my kid’s unstructured messing around a waste of time? What I learned as a teacher mom
The dryer beeped halfway through math homework Tuesday, I was leaning in the doorway of my 10-year-old Leo’s room, shoes still on from a full day of 3rd grade teaching, and I was this close to losing my patience. Leo was supposed to be working through a page of multi-step word problems. Instead, every inch of the worksheet’s margins was covered in pencil doodles of great white sharks, each with tiny labels for different types of teeth. I’d asked him three times in 10 minutes to get back on track, and each time he’d mumbled he was almost there, never looking up from his pencil.
I said, “Leo, that worksheet is for math, not shark art. Put the pencil down and do problem three.” He looked up, eraser smudge on his cheek, and said, “I was thinking about the problem while I drew. It’s helping.”
I’ve heard this a hundred times. Last year, one of my students’ moms emailed me three times asking if her son’s constant doodling during lessons was a waste of time, if I needed to stop him before he fell behind. I’d always brushed her off a little, but standing in my own kid’s room, I felt the same panic she did: we’re already pressed for time, homework is taking forever, this isn’t what we’re supposed to be doing. This has to be a waste of time.
I didn’t snatch the paper, not this time. I sat down on the edge of his bed, the one covered in dinosaur sheets that he still refuses to replace, and I said, “Show me. How does drawing sharks help with this problem?”
He turned the worksheet around to show me. The word problem was: A 2,000-pound great white shark eats 1.5% of its body weight in food every day. How much food does it eat in a week? Leo had drawn the shark next to the problem, then next to the shark he’d drawn 21 ten-pound salmon, little numbers next to each one. “I can’t do 2000 times 0.015 in my head,” he said. “But if I draw the fish, I can count it out. 30 pounds a day, times 7 days is 210, that’s 21 fish. See?”
Oh. I’d missed that. All I saw was the doodling, the thing that wasn’t the homework. I didn’t see the thinking that was happening right there in the margin.
I started thinking about all the times I’ve heard parents ask “is this a waste of time?” Is it a waste of time that my kid spends an hour building a car out of old cardboard instead of doing the STEM worksheet the teacher sent home? Is it a waste of time that they stop to collect every acorn on the walk to school instead of practicing their spelling words out loud? Is it a waste of time that they draw instead of taking notes during lecture?
We’re all so used to counting productivity by what checks a box. If it doesn’t have a grade, if it doesn’t get done on a schedule, if it isn’t what we intended for that 20 minutes of time, it feels like a waste. But from 12 years in the classroom and 10 years as a mom, I’ve learned that most of the time, it’s not. That 3rd grader I had, Javi, he drew dinosaurs on every single worksheet. His mom begged me to make him stop, said he was just distracting himself. I tried taking away his extra pencil for a day, and what happened? He sat there staring out the window, couldn’t finish a single problem, got so fidgety he had to walk around the room three times. When I gave the pencil back, he finished his work 10 minutes faster than most of the class, and got more answers right. His brain just needs that small, constant movement to focus. It’s not a waste of time—it’s how he pays attention.
Now I have three little things I do when I’m tempted to call something a waste of time, and they’re all so easy anyone can do them. First, before you intervene, ask “can you show me what you’re working on?” Not “what are you doing that for,” just a curious question asking them to show you their process. Nine times out of ten, what looks like mindless messing around is actually their brain working in a way that doesn’t look like what we expect. Second, set soft boundaries instead of hard bans. For Leo, that means no doodling on the actual test pages we have to turn in for grading, but he can use every bit of margin he wants, and he gets five minutes of doodle time before homework starts to get his brain settled. For the kid who collects acorns on the walk, that means leaving five minutes early so you have time to stop, instead of yanking them along. Third, if it actually is avoidance (let’s be honest, sometimes it is—Leo has definitely used doodling to get out of writing an essay), you don’t have to shame the activity. Just reschedule it. I say, “That shark drawing looks so cool. Let’s get these three paragraphs done first, then you have 20 minutes of full doodle time before dinner. Sound good?” It works way better than throwing the paper away.
Last month, Leo’s science teacher sent home a quiz with a note attached. The question was about energy flow in ocean food chains, and Leo drew a whole diagram of his great white shark eating smaller fish, eating plankton, in the extra space on the page. The teacher wrote “love this visual explanation—extra credit, and it helped me see he totally gets the concept.”
I still catch myself feeling impatient some days. Last week, we were running late to soccer practice, and Leo stopped halfway down the sidewalk to watch a line of ants carry crumbs from our weekend picnic. I had my hand on his arm to pull him along, ready to say we don’t have time for this, when I stopped. I asked if he could show me what he was looking at. He counted out loud how many ants were carrying one crumb, told me he was testing if bigger crumbs needed more ants. We showed up three minutes late, and coach didn’t even care.
Some days I still wonder. There are only so many hours in the day, after all, and we have all these things we’re supposed to get done. But I’ve stopped asking “is this a waste of time” right away. Most of the time, the stuff that doesn’t check our boxes is checking theirs. It just looks different than we expected.
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