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Should contact activities be banned from recess?
NO
Training and supervision are the keys to consider
By Donna Thompson
Rather than enlightening the public, these articles do little more than create heated debate from both sides about the pros and cons of childhood games. People concerned with the safety of children are accused of creating a nation of wimps, while people on the other side are considered misguided Neanderthals living in the past. One reason for this conflict is that the media are confusing the issues. There are in fact, two distinct questions that need clarification: The first deals with the importance of recess. The second concerns what takes place during recess. Fusing these two questions does little to address either concern.
The National Program for Playground Safety believes that all children should be allowed to have recess. Just like adults, young people need a change of location and activity to become refocused on intellectual pursuits. In addition, the ability to run and play helps children rid their brains of carbon dioxide that builds up during sedentary work and replace it with oxygen (as adults we do much the same thing with caffeine). However, just as there are certain permissible behaviors that occur during coffee breaks, recess is also a time where some informal structure and rules of behavior should apply.
Children need recess to freely engage in physical and social activities. They can practice telling stories, play games and visit with friends from other classes. They may even have the chance to burn some calories in order to prevent obesity. But, recess is not a free-for-all.
Recess activities should be supervised and monitored by trained supervisors who can ensure safety and intervene when children are exhibiting unsafe behaviors. In addition, all children should know and understand the acceptable rules of conduct, including appropriate ways to play games such as tag.
If a school decides that tag is an acceptable game, children need to be taught how to touch, run, change direction, fall, and avoid bumping into other players. These abilities may seem elementary, but many children today lead sedentary lives, which means that many of them lack these basic skills. These skills can be taught in physical education classes. And children need to know that grass is a more appropriate surface than is blacktop to play certain games such as tag. Following these simple principles will allow safe and active play. With proper direction, contact activities such as tag can contribute to children’s development of spatial awareness, social skills and physical abilities.
Donna Thompson is executive director of the National Program for Playground Safety.
YES
They don't work in modern school settingsBy Gary D. Askins
Our collective golden memories confuse the issue and gild the lily. We argue the question against images of a barefoot youth spent frolicking in ankle-deep grass while laughingly evading a playful tag. It’s nostalgia that has nothing to do with today’s typical recess landscape: asphalt, all-weather, multiuse surfaces designed to facilitate maintenance and organized sports.
And experienced teachers know that free-for-all games at recess are a combustible mixture. The rules of games like tag are easy—there are no rules. The game is in the hands of the students, and the rules can be changed instantaneously. In tag, a touch can become a shove or a slap, escalate into a slug and eventually deteriorate into a full-on, no-holds-barred brawl. And it’s naive to think that all students relish the thought of a game of tag at recess. These activities often find targets—the “new kid,” the smaller kid, the kid who doesn’t excel at sports—and the games become tantamount to daily torment for these children. When was it ordained that the new, the different or the strange were fair game and it’s just kids being kids? When did these kids lose their right to be left alone?
Free play and unstructured play do not require that any school allow its students to run amok without regard for the safety and the physical and emotional health of others. Children can run, skip, jump, frolic and they can hide— but they should not be allowed to cause pain.
I’m on the side of this controversy that says tag should be played by the children who want to play the game at home or at parks—places with plenty of grass and space for kids to run and hide and have fun. Let schools continue to offer supervised play that teaches children to follow rules, and to treat each other with respect and fairness. I have taught school for more than 20 years, and I have held to the classroom rule: “All students will keep their hands, feet and other objects to themselves.”
Many urban schools are lacking anything remotely resembling a free play space. Playground accidents are the No. 1 cause of injury to elementary school students. Each year approximately 150,000 children go to the emergency room as a result of playground injuries. The litigious nature of our culture and the exponentially increasing number of lawsuits against school districts have necessitated risk-management strategies that seek to minimize the monetary costs of “free play.” Without a dramatic change in our collective tendency to take all conflict resolution issues to court, the only reasonable response for schools is to limit their risk exposure.
AFT member Gary D. Askins is a recently retired master teacher of math and theater arts at Salado (Texas) High School.
