Latest idiotic "Won't SOMEBODY PLEASE think of the CHILDREN?" moment [school rules]

This is a cop-out; I’ve been to plenty of elementary schools as an adult where there were teachers on the playground. A teacher’s job is to educate students, and that’s a job that demands they interact with them outside of their classroom and subject. This doesn’t have to be an everyday activity, but a teacher who spends every recess huddled in his/her classroom is, quite frankly, missing an opportunity. The ones who think it’s all about putting their lesson together are the ones that drone on for the sake of hearing their own voice, then blame the students when they don’t understand their obviously-superior command of the subject. I’m frankly not surprised such teachers don’t go out on the playground; they’re not very good teachers to start with.

And frankly, even if there weren’t teachers on the playground, any competent adult ought to be able to supervise a playground. If “tag” was getting out of control on that Colorado playground, the solution is to get better supervisors. If they don’t have enough supervisors to do the job, hire more. In short, deal with the issue, bag the excuses like “not enough money/time”, and do the job.

Really this argument can be made about many physical activities. Would you likewise ban wrestling as a PE activity, which allows kids to throw other kids to the ground? Or bouncing on a trampoline, which allows kids to fall from potentially dangerous heights? The key in any of these is to teach kids how to do these things safely with proper supervision and guidance, yet still allowing them to learn something from the activity. I’m not necessarily a fan of dodgeball, but it’s clearly a method for improving hand-eye coordination and general agility. Minimizing the risk of injury is important, but declaring it evil because it “encourages kids to throw things at each other” is just silly.

Another cop-out. You are assuming the people in charge were competent to judge, and I can’t possibly argue with that because “you don’t know.”

But these types of stories pop up quite frequently; not necessarily that tag is banned, but there are cases where a child is suspended under zero-tolerance for having aspirin, or a kid is suspended for having a butter knife in his truck under a school’s zero-tolerance weapons law, or a kid suspended over hair color. All of these fall under the general subject of “we can’t really bother dealing with an underlying problem, we’ll just ban it.” What makes you so sure this case is a reasonable reaction to particular circumstances in this school and two in a nearby district, rather than part of a demonstrable national trend in bad educational supervision?

Again, children should not have to put up with harassment on the playground. But there is such a thing as over-reaction to a problem. Some young children, for example, have a problem with being touched. Dealing with that child in a caring and personal way is a far more reasonable solution than issuing restraining orders to every child.

I sense from this–and I apologize for any bad assumptions here–that you were the victim of bullies in school. I truly have sympathy for this, but I also realize it may cause you to over-identify with the perceived child victims in this case. You, of course, might turn that around on me and assume I was a bully in school, or at least didn’t recognize any torment I was inflicting on other kids. You would be wrong, but if the standard is going to be set only on how people feel about X, and we’re not allowed to judge whether or not that feeling is reasonable, then there’s nothing to debate.

This is like playing the “Adolf Hitler” card in the argument. Furthermore, it is a whitewash of the many factors that caused the tragedy at Columbine, which illustrate more clearly the dangers of high school social cliques, student isolation, and the failure to recognize and deal with bullying behavior. That last point is key; I’m contending that school officials often find it easier to pick a path-of-least-resistance policy regarding such issues than deal directly with the causes and perpetrators of bullying behavior.

Banning tag does not end bullying; it simply moves it to a new location. Plus it makes the official who calls for it look like an idiot. Nobody does anything to challenge it because they just don’t want the hassle, or they think its too minor to spend time fixing. Lather, rinse, repeat.

To bring this full circle - the response of some schools to Columbine was:

A) Look at issues of bullying by certain groups
B) Look at the dis-enfranchised at their schools to see how they might be better integrated

or

C) Ban trenchcoats?

If you guessed C, you are right! (OK, all 3 were done at some schools - I am making a point here). Some schools decided to just ban trenchcoats.

Banning tag falls into category C, IMHO. I HAVE worked on the playground as a volunteer, and I have also been called into the Principal’s office both myself and representing my son (his school has rules about chasing games that take place on hard surfaces vs. the grass). The quick ban is the coward’s way out. Now, perhaps the school can do a parental announcement that they are banning tag due to a lack of resources, but if the PTA steps up and provides some lunchtime volunteers it can continue…

Finally - dodgeball. Our version had everyone inside a circle, with the teachers throwing your basic 4-square balls at you. If you got hit, you went to the perimeter of the circle and started throwing too. It taught / conditioned you for agility, speed, spatial awareness, and other forms of mental alertness and aerobic conditioning.

People in this district should consider themselves lucky all that got banned was tag. Schools have banned physical contact. Now that sounds like “physical contact” like pushing, shoving, punching…but no, it means any physical contact (touching) at all.

Wow, that is completely moronic. That may be the stupidest thing I’ve heard in several years. Are they trying to produce antisocial behavior? If you manage to convince a kid that physical contact is bad, that’s what will happen.

The news story looks fairly straightforward to me. As others have pointed out, it’s a lazy administrative decision. Case closed. To those of you for whom this is indicative of some larger, worrisome social trend, or those who think it’s some kind of politically-correct conspiracy to turn all our students into Nancy boys, I say this:

Good! I hope they ban every competitive sport in every school in the nation. I had absolutely no use for physical competition in school, and I still can’t stand sports. I was that kid on the playground who always got singled out for tag or pelted with the dodge ball, and it didn’t toughen me up. It just made me bitter and resentful. (Funny how some of you played these games but can’t seem to remember what they’re really like. Maybe you were lucky enough to avoid becoming a target.) Show me one cite that purports to show that physical contests (not just physical exercise or striving to meet some standard goal of physical fitness) are actually good for a kid. Because the idea is nonsense at best, and social Darwinistic, macho propaganda at worst.

Isn’t that cute? Another one who had the whole school beating up on him all day everyday.

I was a geek. I was occasionally picked on. I lived for gym class.

I loved dodgeball. I loved tag. I loved playing capture the flag in the muddy, dirty pond area behind the school. I loved the end of the year when we played softball outside. I loved ditching lunch to go play ultimate frisbee in the field.

There’s a reason that a lot of adults have started dodgeball leagues. It’s not because they’re hoping and praying one of the grown-up geeks the whole school picked on will sign up and they can do it again. It’s because dodgeball is ridiculously fun and they want to play it during their free time.

It’s geeks like you that give the rest of us a bad name.

I hate to defend anything that even smells remotely of being P.C. but in the U.K. similar traditional and harmless activities are being banned in schools not because the poor dears might hurt themselves or suffer the trauma of losing a kids game but because of the "Compensation Culture"we have now and the greedy parents who are only too willing to give it a go to get cash out of the system if their kid scratches its pinky or whos kid even says its scratched its pinky.

On a no win no fee basis they cant lose out financially but Local Authorities have to spend scarce cash defending the most ridiculous of claims and often pay out rather then fight the case because its cheaper.

Here too. I was overweight and slow in middle and high school (not that that’s changed much), but I loved playing competitive games in gym.

Playing Dodgeball/Kickball etc. I could contribute. Maybe it was only guarding a pin (instead of knocking out everyone on the opposite team, we had four pins up and you had to knock them all down to win), but I could contribute. Even as big and slow as I was I was good at protecting the pin and even knocked a pin or two on occasion.

The humiliating part was the physical tests. I didn’t have to be reminded I was slower than everyone but sure enough once a month we had to write down our mile times. Even worse was having to do the chin-up test in front of the class. Acting all pissed off that “my hands slipped” to futilely try to save some face when I knew damn good and well I had absolutely no chance of ever completing one.

As someone that was almost always among the last picked, I’d have played those games every day if I could.

I think that you’ve hit the nail on the head. I was a fat, slow, asthmatic, geeky girl-child in school too (it hasn’t changed much for me either). I loved dodgeball, kickball, softball, etc. I realized early on to use some of my strengths to compensate for my weaknesses. While I was a wipeout at strictly running, I could use my reasonably good hand-eye coordination and observational skills to avoid being tagged or have to be a quick baserunner. I also learned to play as a team, using all of the teammate’s skills collectively. I actually wasn’t the last one picked some of the time!
I’ve carried that over into adult life, using what I do well to compensate for what I don’t.

If I didn’t want to play tag on the playground, I simply stood out or sat down. Who gets chased against their will in tag? If you don’t want to play and you get tagged, you simply do jack shit and let the fuckers run.

And also, tag for me in those days was usually a kid sanctioned event. We never had the monitors or PE teachers organize tag. It was always, “let’s play tag!” and always involved willing participants.

I wonder if you feel the same way about spelling bees, quiz bowl, Math Counts (aka Mathletes), the FIRST competition, or any of the other competitve, non-physical sports offered in many US public schools. And before you say “those things are voluntary,” they are all used as templates for classroom activities, where everyone is expected to participate (and don’t tell me you never had a teacher organize an all-class “Jeopardy!”-style game during a class period).

Do you think such activities made the less-intellectually-gifted kids “bitter and resentful”, that it didn’t “toughen them up (intellectually)”? Do you think they were “socially Darwinistic”? I am truly sorry for whatever slights you received on the playground, and I certainly appreciate your personal evaluation of your own experiences, but I don’t think its justified to extend them to a national education policy. Competition is, for better or worse, a part of life in the U.S., and while I don’t think kids should suffer at the hands of poorly-organized competitive activities (which it appears you were the vicim of), it’s not the nature of competition itself that’s at fault, and in fact (as missred and Cyberhawk’s wonderful posts shows) anyone can learn something of value from it.

I don’t know as much about the education system in the UK, and I don’t doubt the fear of lawsuit is a popular meme, but I wonder if ones of the type you describe are ever actually effective beyond a few isolated incidents that are inevitably overturned on appeal. If you have some cites to share, that would be helpful (I’d be looking for things where the child’s injury is slight in comparison to the compensation requested, regardless of whether or not the school could/did fight the suit; my guess is that nearly all suits of this type were laughed out of court, and the few that did make it through underwent such public outcry that they were settled for far less than requested, and they didn’t really financially impact the school).

Yes, our breaks were unsupervised. I guess a teacher or two would look out of their staffroom window to make sure there was no actual carnage, but other than that we were left to our own devices. This was normal in Scotland in the 1970s and 80s - no idea how things work nowadays.

The “entire schoolyard” thing was somewhat hyperbolic. But my school was small, no more than 100 pupils, so it would be fair to say that a large percentage of the kids would harass the small percentage of us who wanted to talk rather than run about.

You think? I’m not so sure. I loved soccer, and while I wasn’t very good at it, I played most lunch periods, in an unsupervised game involving most of the older kids.

But soccer has rules, and the kids knew them. Sure, I took abuse occasionally for screwing up and allowing the other team to score, but there is a difference: I was a willing participant and I knew that the other kids were right - I had fucked up.

But tag, where I was an unwilling victim of gratuitous abuse? Not fun.

Good point. The make up of the Dope being what it is, I don’t think we have as many people who felt inferior in the classroom as they did on the playground or in gym. But a lot of kids feel excluded or picked on for different reasons; that doesn’t make the activities themselves worthless. Schools shouldn’t overlook any of that and should discourage it as much as possible within reason, but banning games is overreacting.

Well, let’s see, when you have five or six boys coming at you from several different angles, trying to purposely knock you down (and this was in seventh grade, btw), it’s kinda hard to “stay out or sit down.”

(And the purpose wasn’t even tag).

Once again, I think some of us are saying, SOMETIMES, things get out of hand. You’ve never seen that? Some kids just have to be told, “Either play right, or don’t play at all.”

And I think what the rest of us are saying is schools should hire teachers who will do that during recess/gym instead of banning all of these fun games.

And honestly, I believe a lot of these “And the whole school beat me up everyday!” stories are highly exaggerated on the Dope.

Naturally. But somehow, those teachers are few and far between. And we’re stuck with the morons, sadly.

Also, I’m not saying the ENTIRE school beat me up everyday. But in seventh grade, apparently I was the class punching bag. You’ve never been around middle-school aged kids much, have you? And I don’t know what it was like for everyone here, but I went to a VERY small Catholic school, and we had about oh, say thirty in our entire class, total.

I would love to hear from some practicing teachers on this point: What, exactly, do they think their involvement/responsibility is to their students outside of the classwhere or subject they teach?

I have met and spoken with a wide range of teachers in middle and secondary school. The better ones realize that teaching is NOT simply providing some font of wisdom that you expect the students to naturally drink from, but to actively educate in any setting provided. And this means eschewing a single-approach method to teaching and discipline: Some kids need to be educated differently than others, some need to be disciplined differently than others. These teachers don’t say things like “it’s not fair to the rest of the class that Johnny is taking up so much time”, they just deal with the problem and just accept that some students are going to be more work than others. While I might not agree with Guinastasia that these teachers are “few and far between”, or that we’re “stuck with the morons”, I will say such an attitude is in the minority on most faculties I’ve seen, faculties where the majority of teachers are there just to teach their subject their way, and if the kid doesn’t learn or is out of control, it’s someone else’s problem.

The version we played in junior high school was similar: each team had two traffic cones, and a team lost if all of its players or both cones were hit.
I had been moved ahead a grade, and was small and nonathletic even apart from that, so I was useless in “coneball”… until I changed the rules. Instead of trying to throw, catch, dodge, etc., I squatted in front of one of the cones, with my back to the other team, arms encircling the cone to protect against ricochets. (We weren’t allowed to actually touch the cone.) I basically gave my team a third cone, and I even got a little bit of respect for it. Other players would occasionally imitate me, but they didn’t have the commitment to turn their backs. They’d face the opponents, which made it tempting for them to try to catch balls, making them a larger target.