I recently received an interesting letter from a middle school math teacher.  A few years ago this teacher did an informal survey of his students.  He wanted to find out how many of his students had TVs in their bedroom and other media habits.  What he found correlated with the national average: approximately 2/3 of his students had TVs in their bedroom and 1/3 did not.  Then he went to his grade book to calculate mean grade point averages for each group.  The non-TV in the bedroom group had a grade average of 3.2, the TV in the bedroom kids had a grade average of 2.3.   Now on the surface it looks like kids with TVs in their bedrooms do poorer in school.    Which on the whole I think is true.  But there is a bigger lesson in this little informal study and this teacher went on to find it.

He looked at his most successful students, including those in an honors math class.  What he found was that irrespective of whether they had a TV in their bedroom or not, (although most did not), these kids had parents who said “no”, put limits on their kids media use, enforced homework time and a regular bedtime, and had high expectations.  Unsuccessful kids, also irrespective of bedroom TVs, tended to spend little or no time on homework, frequently stayed up past midnight, excessively played video games, and heard “no” from parents much less frequently, if at all.  He found that many of these kids could succeed, but lacked motivation and the self-discipline needed for school success.

Now researchers could immediately poke a thousand holes in this little study, but that’s not the point.  This teacher resonated with the Say Yes to No message because of what he sees in his classroom every day:  the values of More, Fast, Easy and Fun have, for many kids, overtaken the character traits of self-discipline and the ability to say “no.”   This teacher is worried not only about individual kids’ futures, but our country’s future also.

Dr. Dave