Breaks? What breaks? Perhaps the saddest pages in the 1992 North Chicago High School student life section show the Senior Class Trip to Cozumel. I guarantee no senior trips to Cozumel happened in the last ten or maybe twenty years. Electives are even mostly gone. French went this year. Woodworking and radio/television broadcasting went a few years ago. What’s left? This last year, art, Spanish, music, a few business courses and ROTC.

Unfortunately, those senior trips did not improve test scores. Woodworking did not improve test scores. Colleges want to see a language and/or fine art, so one language had to stay behind as well as art and music. Still, test scores are killing the fun in many of our lower-scoring, toughest districts. The non-test-related academic drought has become extreme.

Electives represent breaks in the day for students, a chance to associate school with fun. Fun matters. If I have fun in high school, I am far more likely to go on for further education.

Can I “prove” this? I will ask, should I even have to prove this? Can we just use a little (uncommon) common sense? My proof drips from every word spoken by my alternative high school student some years ago:

“No way am I going to college. No way will I do four more years of social studies.”

I explained how college worked, including the fact that social studies could almost entirely be avoided with the right choices, but I was fighting an uphill battle. That boy had been hating school for awhile, part of the reason he landed in an alternative high school. He could not visualize a fun school experience.

Recess matters. Field trips matter. Class parties matter. Stimulating electives matter. Admittedly, festive gatherings take class time and should be minimized. But before taking off for a two-week winter break, taking an hour to celebrate the first half-year’s achievements with popcorn, cupcakes and Capri Suns makes all the sense in the world. I want my students to go home remembering how much fun they had on the last day before vacation. I don’t want them to go home and think, “I am so glad vacation finally got here and I don’t have to go to school.”

Stand up for recess. Please. Stand up for fun. Stand up for electives that don’t merely fulfill college application requirements, electives that inspire, refresh and challenge students. If parents, teachers and administrators in our most challenged districts don’t stand up for fun, America will never even make a nick in that achievement gap. I am certain of that.

One last observation: I have been subbing in wealthier districts for the last few years. They take trips, field trips and longer journeys to outdoor education, state and national capitols. Groups even take school-sponsored trips to foreign countries. They have parties throughout the year. They also have so many electives that my heart hurts a little. How can seventeen miles — the distance between where I live and where I worked — make such a difference? Want to learn French, Hebrew, Chinese, Russian or Spanish? You can do this where I live. The list of other available electives runs pages and pages.

Let’s just look at the sciences and social studies electives:

Educators talk about life-long learning frequently. Most of us are life-long learners. We chose teaching precisely because we love learning. My love of learning did not come from endless math and English drills. It came from family trips to national parks, weekly trips to the library, school field trips to museums, and classes like journalism, radio broadcasting, and Honors English. I probably owe my Spanish certification to the two months I spent as an exchange student in Mexico City during my senior year of high school. I certainly owe the fact that I am reading Guerra Mundial Z (World War Z in Spanish) right now to that long-ago trip.

That trip would be considered a disaster for school test scores today. Students who went with me were channeled into a special curriculum to allow them to miss two months of school. In fact, looking back, I assume we all missed The Test altogether. Maybe we took a special early or late administration of The Test. I don’t remember. But that trip became a pivotal part of who I am, and the bilingual teacher I became.

That trip gave me a language I never lost. That trip gave me the confidence to travel. I drank my coffee out of a Starbucks mug from Sevilla, Spain, this morning. Mugs here include Mexico City, Seoul, Northern Ireland, Germany, Edinburgh, Dublin, Vienna, and others. I got too lost driving through Portugal to manage to stop for a Starbucks mug there — I was just happy to find my way out of the country eventually — but I was not afraid to be lost in Portugal. My daughters, a friend of theirs and I were having fun circling the Iberian peninsula.

Eduhonesty: This post rambles a bit. To pull it together I offer the following for thought: Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. ~ Albert Einstein.

The ugliest part of what I just wrote rests between the lines. Who is getting most hurt by our push for higher test score numbers and improving data? I can answer that from personal experience: The poor kids, the lower-scoring kids, who attend districts with administrators who believe they can’t afford to sacrifice points, and so sacrifice recess and trips instead, administrators who are sinking all the funds they have available into mathematics and English tied to the Common Core curriculum. During my last formal year teaching, no field trips or “nonacademic” activities were allowed until after the conclusion of PARCC testing. That strategy may have added a few points to test scores — or may not have — but I guarantee the push, push, push of often-incomprehensible math and English decreased enthusiasm for education and learning.