I have decided: 2021-2022 is the year of extracurriculars in our house. Whatever my kids want to do – golf, sewing, drama, singing, basketball, tennis – you name it, I will go through hell and high water to make it happen.
Allow me to explain.
I’ve known about the gist of Angela Duckworth’s book Grit for years now, but never read it. I fortuitously picked up the book at the library this past week and am so glad I did. I’ve been listening to Angela Duckworth’s podcast, No Stupid Questions, which she hosts with Stephen Dubner, of Freakonomics and have really been enjoying their weekly digressions, which feels like I’m listening in to a conversation with two old friends. So I was anxious to read Duckworth’s book.
In a section on interests, Duckworth delves into the importance of finding something you’re passionate about and what that can look like. Surprisingly, being passionate about something doesn’t mean you’re going to love every minute of it. But how do you find those things that move you? Duckworth writes, “interests are not discovered through introspection. Instead, interests are triggered by interactions with the outside world.”
This is one of my primary aims as a homeschooler. As a child, I myself didn’t stop to think what I might like to do for a living until I was in my second or third year of college. Often times, when we are young, we are so caught up with the business of being students, that we don’t have to explore what truly moves us beyond studying the parts of a cell or endless terms for a history test. When I chose to homeschool, one of my goals was to give my kids the time to explore life beyond the classroom. I’ll be honest – the last year of COVID has definitely thrown a wrench in those plans, but I hope to get back to this next school year – helping my kids find things that interest them outside of their typical schoolwork, whether that be volunteering at an animal shelter, knitting, drama or sports. Without our frenetic mornings getting out the door and harried evenings getting through homework, dinner, bath and bedtime, we have time to do these things.
In the same section, Duckworth writes, “Before hard work comes play. Before those who’ve yet to fix on a passion are ready to spend hours a day diligently honing skills, they must goof around, triggering and retriggering interest.” Duckworth quotes sports psychologist Jean Cote, whose research indicates that this stage of playful discovery is especially important for athletes to find out which sport they truly like best and also allows them to work different muscle groups, thereby creating a more well-rounded athlete and one less likely to burn out from early specialization.
Another point of Duckworth’s book that resonated for me was in her section on practice, in which she describes how toddlers and early preschoolers will try over and over again to master a skill, without becoming frustrated. At some point, as they progress through school, these children find that making mistakes is something deemed “wrong” by the people around them. She quotes psychologists Elena Bodrova and Deborah Leong, who profess how important it is for adult caregivers to model emotion-free mistake making. It is us who attach shame, embarrassment, and fear of failure to mistakes. Kids aren’t naturally born with those inclinations, so we have to retrain ourselves to show our kids that making mistakes is how we learn.
Once kids get a little older, picking one extracurricular and sticking with it is extremely beneficial, according to Duckworth. An admissions counselor at a college can have a hard time predicting which applicants are most likely to do well in college and complete their degree. One scientist who discovered a way of doing this was Warren Willingham, who directed the Personal Qualities Project in 1978. The study found that the single greatest predictor of graduating from college was follow-through in high school extracurriculars. “Notably, the particular pursuits to which students had devoted themselves in high school didn’t matter – whether it was tennis, student government, or debate team. The key was that students had signed up for something, signed up again the following year, and during that time had made some kind of progress.”
To me, this is the crux of homeschooling – allowing my kids to find extracurriculars they love (or maybe love for a short time), to experiment with what they like, because we have the time. After all, they are only in our care for 18 short years (for my son, that’s only 6 more!). In the big picture of life, that’s nothing! And yet, how formidable are those years when it comes to shaping a human being. At the beginning of their life, I felt like my job was to incubate, to protect them from the world. As they get older, I find that more and more, my job is to prepare them for the world that awaits them. Exploring interests provides the inimitable combination of challenge and intrinsic motivation.
Duckworth summed it up succinctly when she wrote, “School’s hard, but for many kids it’s not intrinsically interesting. Texting your friends is interesting, but it’s not hard. But ballet? Ballet can be both.”