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.
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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!
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.