The kids should be coming out to ‘play’ soon
At Broadway Elementary School here, there is no more sitting around after lunch. No more goofing off with friends. No more doing nothing.
Instead there is Brandi Parker, a $14-an-hour recess coach with a whistle around her neck, corralling children behind bright orange cones to play organized games. There she was the other day, breaking up a renegade game of hopscotch and overruling stragglers’ lame excuses.
They were bored. They had tired feet. They were no good at running.
“I don’t like to play,” protested Esmeilyn Almendarez, 11.
“Why do I have to go through this every day with you?” replied Ms. Parker, waving her back in line. “There’s no choice.”
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Playworks, a California-based nonprofit organization that hired Ms. Parker to run the recess program at Broadway Elementary, began a major expansion in 2008 with an $18 million grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
[...]
Dr. Romina M. Barros, an assistant clinical professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx who was an author of a widely cited study on the benefits of recess, published last year in the journal Pediatrics, says that children still benefit most from recess when they are let alone to daydream, solve problems, use their imagination to invent their own games and “be free to do what they choose to do.”Structured recess, Dr. Barros said, simply transplants the rules of the classroom to the playground.
“You still have to pay attention,” she said. “You still have to follow rules. You don’t have that time for your brain to relax.”
You will obey, slave!
They tried this a while back when I was in elementary school. They gave up. We simply were not organized enough. Sure, we could play basketball or even semi-tackle football on the playground, but not running win-sprints.
It got bad enough that at one point the exercise was turned into a one mile run… following eating. Not good. A number of the kids got sick to their stomach, many threw-up. It was done once. Organized games lasted all of about a month or so.
Obedient childs become Republican voters.
Just remember to file your taxes too!
Heaven forbid they fucking play TAG! can’t have winners and loosers… Fucking Democrats and their police state.
Fixed this for you:
“Heaven forbid they fucking play TAG! can’t have winners and losers… Fucking Democrats and Republicans with their police state.”
This BS was going on when Reagan, Bush and W. Bush were in office and Congress was under Republican control… it is not just a Democrat thing.
“In Wyckoff, N.J., an upper-middle-class township in Bergen County with a population of 17,000, hundreds of people signed a petition in protest after the district replaced recess in 2007 with a “midday fitness” program. ”
A “midday fittness” program is gym class
>> dusanmal said, on March 16th, 2010 at 8:06 am
>> It is liberal schools which want control of every aspect of the child life.
You’re just making this up.
It is CONSERVATIVES who tried to standardise every aspect of education with rigid centralized control of schools– from the 80s ’til now.
It is LIBERALS who created the “free the child” educational philosophy of the ’60s and 70s.
If you don’t understand this, you really don’t understand the American educational system.
Even though I’m a liberal, I see some value in the conservative “control the child” model as a corrective to the liberal “freedom” philosophy of education.
But, of course, a balance needs to be struck (which is easier said than done.)
#27 “But, of course, a balance needs to be struck (which is easier said than done.)”
How about letting kids play at recess and saving the structured activities for the classroom. Makes a lot of sense to me. Instead, since they are making recess work, then the kids will want to goof off during class. Of course that is why we have Ritalin now. School administrators need to find something else to do. Those who can’t teach; those who can’t even do that become administrators.
Structured recess would deny the children a very important developmental context. This is where most humans that come from organized societies learn to deal with social contact. It is not a trivial mattered, these children, sheltered from an unstructured social contact will suffer greatly in the learning of social conduct and integration. Sure there are bullies out there, and many other challenges. Sheltering your children doesn’t protect them, it keeps them from learning skills they will most definitely need as adults.
It’s not a liberal vs conservative issue… THIS time. Both are too blame. It’s all part of the War on Kids. One philosophy or another keeps this garbage getting much worse, and it’s always in the name of making sure the kids are safe from physical and psychological harm (which can never happen). I would hate to be a kid in this day and age… I’m really concerned about what happens when they grow up.
thewaronkids.com
Honestly, I’m so sick of the “war” between liberal vs conservative, as if one is perfect. You need a healthy balance of both otherwise things go crazy.
What the fuck? Let kids be kids. It not like childhood is forever!
As a kid in 1960′s New Zealand, we had to march between classes while the loony headmaster played John Philip Sousa through loudspeakers.
Jeez, when I went to grade school in the late 60′s, after fifth grade, you didn’t get recess any more. You got mandatory P.E. two 40-minute periods a week. And the “coach” was a real SOB. All he lacked was that rifle.
How about having recess like we had when I was a kid. I went to a Catholic school, but most of the nuns and teachers were actually pretty cool at recess. They got kickball and whiffle ball games going. If we wanted to do something else like tag, that was OK too.
Recess at that school was much more fun than recess at a public school I attended for a year before middle school.
In short, the schools should drop the over-organization of recess, and let the kids have their own kind of fun, stepping in only in the case of injuries.
Sounds more like the Hitler recess method. Ve haff vays of making you play by der rulez. structure every minute of school time. Getting them ready for life in the military service.