Less Homework, More Yoga, From a Principal Who Hates Stress

[Guest guest]

A Story of how Needham High School , Mass., is using yoga and other relaxation

techniques to help students fight stress :

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/29/education/29stress.html

 

 

It was 6:30 p.m. The lights were still on at Needham High School, here in the

affluent Boston suburbs. Paul Richards, the principal, was meeting with the

Stress Reduction Committee.On the agenda: finding the right time to bring in

experts to train students in relaxation techniques.Don’t try to have them teach

relaxation in study hall, said Olivia Boyd, a senior. Students, she explained,

won’t want to interrupt their work. They were already too busy before or after

school for the training.No one is busier than Josh Goldman. Captain of varsity

tennis, president of the Spanish club and a member of the student council and

the Stress Reduction Committee, Josh was not able to squeeze in the meeting at

all.

Mr. Richards noted his absence wryly. “Josh is a perfect example,” he said.

“He’s got a hundred things going on.”Here is the high-powered culture that Mr.

Richards is trying to change, even if only a little.But cultural change does not

come smoothly. When Mr. Richards stopped publishing the honor roll in the local

newspaper last winter, a move aimed at some parents who had turned the lists

into a public accounting, Rush Limbaugh accused him of politically correct

coddling of students, and Jay Leno mocked the school on national television. He

received hate mail from all over the country.Mr. Richards is undeterred. “It’s

not that I’m trying to turn the culture upside down,” he said. “It’s very

important to protect the part of the culture that leads to all the achievement,”

he said. “It’s more about bringing the culture to a healthier place.”His new

stress committee is starting to come up with recommendations, like the

relaxation consultants, and is surveying students about

unhealthy stress. This term, Mr. Richards is talking up the yoga classes that

are required of all seniors. He has asked teachers to schedule homework-free

weekends and holidays.

“The irony,” he said, referring to the homework breaks, “is that students tell

us they appreciate the time because it allows them to catch up on other

schoolwork.”

Mr. Richards is just one principal in the vanguard of a movement to push back

against an ethos of super-achievement at affluent suburban high schools amid the

extreme competition over college admissions. He has joined like-minded

administrators from 44 other high schools and middle schools — most in the San

Francisco Bay Area but others scattered from Texas to New York — to form a group

known as S.O.S., for Stressed Out Students.

The group was formed four years ago by Denise Pope, a lecturer at the Stanford

University School of Education and author of the book, “Doing School: How We Are

Creating a Generation of Stressed Out, Materialistic and Miseducated Students”

(Yale University Press, 2001).

 

High schools in other Boston suburbs — Wellesley, Lexington, Wayland — have

taken steps similar to Needham’s, organizing stress committees and yoga classes.