After 30 minutes of practice at her piano my granddaughter asks, “Can I be done?” After ten minutes with a reading assignment I hear the same question, “Can I be done?” Later, when she is completing her math homework I hear her pencil hit the table top and “There, I’m done!” What does “done” mean to children today and what do we want them to think “done” should mean?
If it was late November, I would give Izzy a smart-mouth response. “If you are a turkey and the red button has popped out, you may be done. If you are not a turkey, you may not be done, yet.” My less of a smart-mouth response, the retort of a retired educator, sounds more like this. “And, tell me why you think you are done?” What an interesting lesson this poses. In the age of increased academic rigor and mandates for improved school performances, how does a child’s concept of “done” fit into educational accountability?
It would be easy to give my father’s answer to the question of done. “You are done when I say you are done,” left his sons sitting at the table looking at a pile of cold lima beans or liver or bowl of pea soup fearful that they may never be “done. It also kept them on the school yard fielding ground balls and catching fly balls until they could so without error. There are many times and situations when “You are done when I say so” works well. But, too often the mystery of “What will satisfy Dad today?” is not very instructive and certainly not transferrable to other tasks.
Without being too Pavlovian, I favor a criterioned and educational definition of “done.” A criterioned “done” would tell Izzy that her piano practice will be completed after she has satisfied the directions provided by her piano teacher. At the beginning of the practice, Izzy should be able to tell me what those directions were or read them to me from her lesson book. Then after her independent practice, she should be able to say “Listen (or watch) this, Gramps” and demonstrate what she practiced.
A criterioned reading assignment would consummate in her telling me what she understood from her reading, interesting turns in the story, the “big” points of the information article, and what she thinks or feels about what she read. If not a “tell Gramps” moment, she should be able to write these in her class book as a signal of “did this” to her teacher.
“Done” is seldom a quantitative moment; it almost always is and needs to be qualitative. Teaching children to understand their teachers’ qualitative interests is an essential school obligation. Teaching children to understand their parents’ qualitative interests is an essential parenting obligation. Finally, teaching children to create their own qualitative standards for when something might be considered “done” is an essential task for both teachers and parents.
Life experience has taught me that when a person is their own judge of “done” and has been taught that “done” is a quality of performance about which someone else may say “show me”, then “done” is a task completion that really means something – something more than time spent.
Of course, when asked how I like my beef or tuna, I always will say “Very rare, please. Not well done.”