SF Chronicle: At one school in Alameda, tag is banned. So is walking up the slides or stopping while going down. There’s no crouching under the play structure, no swinging jackets around one’s head, no playing with sticks and no hiding behind trees.
There are a lot of recess rules at Bay Farm Elementary.
On the opposite side of the island city, kids stuff themselves into car tires and squeal as they fly across the blacktop on the wheels of an old office chair. They can play tag, run up the slide, hide behind trees and crouch pretty much anywhere they want, including within wobbly forts and under the play structure.
There aren’t a lot of recess rules at William G. Paden Elementary.
The two schools and their divergent paths are no accident, and they may be familiar to many parents. They illustrate a modern anxiety over how children should play that is touching school blacktops across the state and country — and in this case, the same city.
The schools exemplify a renewed focus on the meaning and mechanics of recess, which was often neglected as schools increasingly focused on high-stakes standardized testing.
Research resoundingly supports the idea that kids learn best if they have a chance to let loose. But there are few official standards guiding recess in public schools, and that free time can look starkly different, depending on the decisions of administrators, who have a legal and professional obligation to keep kids safe.
Not everyone agrees on the definition of safe, though, and recess can become a hot topic among parents, whose mix of fears and fond memories of their own childhoods stirs complex emotions.
It’s a balancing act, experts say, one that should weigh independence and fun as well as safety and responsibility. MORE
SNIP: I don’t know whether to laugh or… laugh.
h/t Fred.
The snowflake teachers of today have no idea what life and childhood are all about….their loss.
And that is why my kid is in a private school.
Speaken for my self, at a young age my best teacher was pain.
Is it any wonder colleges have safe zones, blankie zones for napping?
So I guess putting 10 kids on one end of the seesaw(either sitting on it or holding it up), and 1 kid on the other end,then slamming it down, is banned. Our 4th grade human catapults were the best.
In regards to my previous comment, upon reflection, that still holds true.
When I was a kid (many decades ago), it was generally accepted that a certain number of people would not survive childhood. Nobody wanted this; it was just a fact of life. So there weren’t a lot of restrictions on how kids played. Mostly we learned how to avoid injuries by becoming injured from time to time. Differences between kids were settled by fights. Unless things got out of hand, adults didn’t get involved. I think they felt that if you weren’t allowed to face some adversity as a child, you would be unprepared to face it later in life, when problems would be much worse.
Anyway, somehow we all survived. Well…most of us, that is.
🙂
Ever wonder how people can just watch as someone is being beat to death and they don’t want to help them. They were taught that violence is never the answer, but in fact sometimes sudden and severe violence is the only answer.
Leave ’em be. It will sort out the woosies from the future functional members of society.
OMG one of my earliest memories – we were playing on the side of a dirt road, I was 7, a half mile from home, I was accidentally hit in the face with a broken beer bottle. 9 stitches. Good times!
That’s gay……….
Back when I was a kid, we had cap guns, toy rifles, BB Guns, Bows and Arrows (play), rubber Bowie knives, Bazookas, Army soldiers and used to play Cowboys and Indians, War, Cops and Robbers, King of the Hill, Buckeye wars, etc. Unless you fell the wrong way getting “shot” or weren’t quick enough to dodge a Buckeye, nobody really got hurt and we all had good fun. Now, in the name of Political Correctness and Leftist Do-Gooder Nannyism, all that has been taken away and what have we been left with?
Midnight basketball, kids doing drugs, Kids having kids, kids maiming kids and kids killing kids, girls turning into boys and boys turning into girls.
Gee Wally, that sure worked out well didn’t it?
Yeah Beave, add Common Core to all this and it’s the next generation being tore up from the floor up by the Communist Left!
@The Rat Fink: And don’t forget – we had firecrackers! Real ones, not today’s weak ladyfinger crap. Cherry bombs, M-80s, things that could blow a tin can thirty feet up in the air.
Today they’d probably call out the SWAT team on you.
🙂
Did anyone else play smear the queer on a gravel parking lot? That was a lot of fun, and I still have the scars to prove it.
Red rover, red rover send Gary (insert name here) right over. We played that in 1st grade back in the late 50’s. All the good kid killers were taken out of Manito Park years ago because of liability issues, I guess parents nowadays would rather blame the city for childhood injuries rather than let their kids have fun. The swings right next to the rather large pine trees were the best since you’d get the swings way up high in the air 10-15 ft. or so and jump off and try to miss the trees. I never did that but a couple of my brothers did, it’s a wonder we grew up and had children of our own. Or jumping off the roof into a shallow pool in the backyard like my wife and her 6 brothers and 2 sisters did, successfully I might add. They never told their parents about this until they were in their 30’s.
Pussification of the American kid… We got bloodied bruised and sometimes hurt pretty bad when I was a kid. We played tackle football, dodge ball with anything we could throw, something called POM where you run at each other knock each other over to eliminate players.
In Israel some of their best soldiers come out of the Kibbutz communities. When I visited their kid’s area looked like a junk yard. Broken toys and random household items you’d never let your kids near in America. We are not going to fair well in the future with liberals in charge of the education system.
Our police academy now has boxing as part of the curriculum. This is not to teach officers how to fight, no, no, this is to get them used to being hit. These rookies coming on never fought in school, never got smacked in the kisser. *sigh* Welcome to the South Side bucko.
Developed an intolerance for a**holes at an early age. Growing up I lost count of how many times I was in detention for fighting. The school yard and the bus stops were war zones. Then at home I’d get smacked for fighting in my school clothes. Happy days.
I thought that all kids played Doctor during recess! The times they have changed!
I say release a pack of feral Dachshunds and let the little bastards run for their lives. And they can get the hell off of my lawn too!
Give ’em a whole lot of wall outlets and a bag of pennies.
Seriously, how many times did you come home from school and your mom had to tell you to wash your face and hands?