The Mathematics Behind a Bathroom Break

As a classroom teacher, I never took whole class bathroom breaks.  I never had time! Whenever I heard other teachers talking about how they stopped at the bathroom on the way to or from lunch or specials, I thought, "How do you have time for that?" I would actually look at my schedule and what I would be doing while the other class was at the bathroom. I couldn't possibly miss (insert important activity here) to go sit outside of the  bathroom!  I asked, "How are they doing it?" But perhaps more importantly, I have to ask, "Why are they doing it?"
Most people, by the time they reach the age of three or four, know when they have to go to the bathroom.  Therefore, by the time a child reaches kindergarten, they should know if they have to go. I know there are a few exceptions to this but not many.  Keep in mind I taught kindergarten for four years (without full-class bathroom breaks!) So, when I see classes in other grade-levels taking bathroom breaks, it makes me ask the following questions:
What are the other students doing while everyone else is going to the restroom?
What could the whole class be doing instead of sitting outside of the restroom?
How much instructional time is being missed because students are sitting outside of a bathroom?

The answer to the first question is usually nothing.  Nothing. They are usually just sitting there.  Sometimes teachers let them take books or they quiz them on materials they have recently learned in class.  But most of the time the teacher is trying to manage whose turn it is and what the other students are doing (a.k.a. no talking in the hallway!) and so he or she doesn't get to spend a lot of time giving said quizzes. This leaves about 20 kids sitting in the hall while someone else is using the facilities.

What could they be doing instead?  Lots of things! We always say we never have enough time to cover everything, to squeeze all the materials in.  We could recover that time and use it for an extra station rotation, another guided reading group, more time to work on a project or to read a story.  There are infinite ways that we could better spend our time rather than sitting or standing in the hallway outside of a bathroom.

How much time does it actually take for a whole class bathroom break? Well, let's say for our purposes it takes 10 minutes.  That is probably conservative, but let's go with it. Most classes that take whole class bathroom breaks do it twice a day.  So we'll say it's just 20 minutes a day.  If we factored in transitions and all of those things, it's probably more, but we'll say 20 minutes. So, in a week, that's 100 minutes, or over an hour-and-a-half.  In a month, that's 6 hours.  In a nine month long school year, that's about 54 hours of time our students have spent waiting to use the bathroom.  That's over 7 days of instruction.  And remember, this was our conservative estimate of time. If we take that number up to 15 minutes per bathroom break, or 30 minutes a day, that's two and-a-half hours per week, 10 hours per month, 90 hours per year, or almost 13 instructional days.

I know I will ruffle some feathers with this post, but I'm willing to do so to make my point.  Can we afford to spend from 7 to 13 days standing outside of a bathroom? The students in my homeroom classes certainly couldn't.  I needed every minute I could find to teach them everything they needed to know.

So, what could we do instead?  A lot of kindergarten and first grade classrooms have bathrooms in the room.  Even if you don't have a bathroom attached to your classroom, you still have an alternative to whole class bathroom breaks.  When I was in the classroom, my class had two times a day when we rotated through bathroom breaks.  One was earlier in the morning during Daily 5 and one was in the afternoon during math stations.  The children had an order that they would always go in while everyone else continued to work in their stations. When a child returned from the restroom, they told the next student it was there turn to go.  If that student didn't need to go, they told the next person. I encouraged them to always try but I didn't make them go.  If someone needed to go at a different time, they could ask permission to do so. Our bathroom rotation time was before specials so the students weren't asking to go during PE or music.  Rarely did I have a student ask to go at a different time and even more rarely was there a break down in the rotation where someone forgot to tell the next person.  Even with five-year-olds, this works.

If your class is taking whole group bathroom breaks, ask yourself why.  Is it something you have to do?  Could you change it?  Why did you start doing it in the first place? I know a lot of fabulous teachers who still give whole group bathroom breaks and I just have to wonder if they've considered doing it differently or if they just do it because that's the way they were told to do it and they never thought about doing it differently.  It is something to consider. . . . Thoughts?