School principals generally insist that teaching should continue until the last lesson of each academic year. Since it has cost me about HK$1.52 per minute for each class that my two children have sat through in primary and secondary school, I have endeavoured to take this directive very seriously. However, I have learned that little learning takes place on the last day, irrespective of how I teach.
One year we tabulated all the activities students had planned to engage in over the summer break, with the goal of making a frequency distribution table and plotting one big colourful histogram. That's when we realised that only one student was going to do volunteer work that summer.
I struggled to come up with an appropriate response that would commend the student without undermining the self-esteem of his classmates.
But recent findings from University of British Colombia (UBC) will stand me in good stead at the end of the next academic year. Writing in the journal JAMA Pediatrics last year, researchers from its faculty of education and department of psychology concluded that volunteering improves the health of adolescents.
"It was encouraging to see how a social intervention to support members of the community also improved the health of adolescents," says Hannah Schreier, who conducted the randomised controlled trial as part of her doctoral studies at UBC.
More than 100 grade-10 students from an inner-city school in Vancouver who were fluent in English and free of chronic illnesses were separated into two groups. For 10 weeks, one group regularly volunteered one hour per week working with primary school children in after-school programmes in their neighbourhoods. The second group was allocated to a waiting list for volunteer activities, but did not participate in any volunteering programme.