It’s sad that all these stories must make people not want to be a teacher in America. The entire nation seems to be getting more shrill and lawsuit-happy with each passing year, but the schools seem to be one of the great leaders of Teh Dumb.
Nah, I guess I should’ve been more specific. It’s the team sports I have a problem with. At least in a math competition or a spelling bee, you’re using skills that are necessary to survive in the modern workplace. Who really needs to know how to play football after graduation anymore? You could argue that these sports teach kids how to work in teams, but there are other ways to do that, right?
Team sports are exclusionary by nature when you force everybody to participate (not quite the case in the OP, I realize). When it came time to pick teams, I was such a klutz that kids would actually get into fights about who didn’t have to take me on their team. Why put everybody through that? Why not let the athletic kids play football and everyone else run laps or something? (I used to love running laps during gym, mostly because it was one of the rare times I wasn’t the brunt of everybody’s scorn).
Ding ding ding, we have a winner. That’s part of growing up. The game is secondary to a basic lesson in life, learning to work and play well with others. The fact that it’s fun is a closely guarded secret known only to millions of adults.
I’m trying to imagine an administrator who is so dysfunctional as to attempt to codify a child’s life on such a micro-level. Aside from being sad, I immediately wonder what other policies are in the works.
This has got to be one of the silliest things I’ve seen lately. Both the ban and some of the comments here about being picked on as a kid in these games. I got my ass kicked everyday in these games up until 5th grade. I did toughen up. By the time Jr. High rolled around I was the MVP of the basketball and football team (I sucked at baseball) and the captain of the quiz bowl team. I went on to play footbal and basketball in high school and also ended up as captain of the “Academic Superbowl” team.
I got picked on because I was tall and wirey and weak in addition to being the a smart kid. I got pounded in dodge ball and no one wanted me on their team in any of the “pick your team” games. It absolutely motivated me to work on my physical abilities, agility, strength and stamina. I went from the last kid picked to the first kid picked over one summer of dedication to physical strength. As much as you might be able to squeak by in life behind a computer or a desk or sitting on the couch eating ice cream, there is also a good possibilty that one night you wake up and there is a fire in your house that wants to play “tag”. Perhaps if you had some experience and education you could get yourself up and run away. Maybe not. Maybe you spent too much time whining and hiding from any supposed need for the development of physical strength and agility and now you are stuck with hoping someone else will come help you.
It’s a mean world out there and you will most likely face physical competition at some point in your life whether it’s a guy trying to “tag” you with a switch blade or you find yourself in tower one with the only means of escape being your ability to run down a flight of stairs with a reasonable amount of developed agility. No matter how civilized our little world may become, there are times when all that goes out the window and the laws of natural selection will take over. I think it is not only reasonable, but prudent, to prepare ourselves and allow our kids to prepare themselves (as they will, when left to themselves) for such realities of life.
Wow, you’ve managed to encompass all of the major flaws of the Dope in a single paragraph. Bravo.
I was a spelling bee champion, I write for a living, and I can tell you that skill is not necessary for survival in the modern workplace. I’ve worked with some really poor spellers, actually. Some time ago, somebody invented this thing called Spell Check, and since then, my ability to spell words like aorta, annuity and picayune have not been an issue. I’ve always been very good at doing math in my head, too, and calculators have made that pretty useless as well. Gym hasn’t done me much good in my professional life, but neither has Calculus.
I went to a VERY small Catholic school, too. My seventh grade class had 22 people, I think. No one was ever beat up on by the entire class and no one was ever forced to play tag or dodgeball against their will. I don’t think your small, Catholic school was the problem. I think you just had asshole classmates.
You’re mistaking physical competition with psychical training. I can learn how to run quickly without ever having to race somebody. I can learn to fight off a possible mugger by taking a self-defense course. Not once do I have to join a team or play some kind of sport to accomplish this stuff. Sports are fun for some people, and any kid who enjoys them should be allowed to participate, but I doubt they’re necessary.
I’m not arguing against P.E. – what I hate is the fact that so much of P.E. is wasted playing football or softball or soccer (if I’d been allowed to run laps during all the time I spent standing around and waiting for that stupid ball to come to my part of the field, I might’ve actually lost some weight).
Oh Jesus Christ. Fact: the vast majority of young kids enjoy playing football, rugby, cricket or other team games. Fact: running laps is the single most boring activity in the history of mankind.
Why should everyone else’s life be made a misery because you’re completely inept at team games? Team games provide exercise whilst also being incredible fun for the vast majority of participants. You don’t like team games? Your problem.
No, there is no istake. You left out the part that physical competition was what motivated me to train psychically as a kid. So then the asshole kids left me alone. Until we teach kids all this civil stuff, they tend to let the animal in them rule, which entails sorting out the weak from the strong. It’s just natural.
And did you do any of these things? Or are you speaking hypothetically? For that matter, someone could stay home all day and read books and the encyclopedia–why should they even go to school when they can learn all that on their own?
Answer: in order to improve upon any skill, physical or mental, one must have an awareness of one’s weaknesses; the only true way to judge that is by comparing oneself to another. It’s a hard, ugly fact of life–some people are better at certain things than others. You can choose to improve, or you can give up. It’s obvious which path you chose.
Oh, please ! You’re blaming the school because you were a fat kid? Because they didn’t provide the sort of activity that hypothetically would have been better for you? And if they had, would you have even engaged in it? Why couldn’t you have “run laps” after school? Or on Saturdays?
I think that says it all.
You know, I was the fat kid in school, the one that never got picked for anything either. I was the one that people fought over who had to take me on their teams too. That being said, I would have paid someone to never have to run laps again.
On team sports, once teams were chosen or assigned people pretty much had to accept the fact that you were on their team and you worked together. Someone may have had something negative to say but for the most part once the activity started and you actually caught the ball or defended a better player or created a distraction to help your team they let the animosity slide and appreciated you for what you were. Even if you didn’t do any of that and you just stood there sucking up air the rest of the kids were distracted in trying to win the game so they had better things to do than make fun of you.
However, running laps and being passed over and over again by the faster, better athletes who mocked you as they ran by was embarrassing. And because running laps is only running with no other aspect to it, if you are not a runner by nature you really have no other strengths to help you. It got to the point where I walked around pretending to have an attitude about gym class and that I wasn’t running because I had problems with “the man” in hopes of saving face when in reality I quite liked gym-where else could you find the resources and enough people to play scooter hockey?
I learned a lot about being comfortable with myself and knowing that it didn’t matter what other people thought about me from the whole gym/recess experience. If I felt bad on the playground because I wasn’t as good at soccer I sure as hell felt better about myself when I proved myself to be ahead of the curve in english or science later that day. I learned to appreciate my strengths because I understood my weaknesses. I think that is a lesson more children need to learn.
We’re still talking about sports here, right?
Nah, I was fat because I ate too much. It would’ve been nice to to work on that during P.E. though, especially since it’s called “physical education”, and one of its ostensible purposes is to help kids get into shape. I didn’t lose the weight until college, when I started jogging after class. My main motivation was all those fine college girls.
Or, as they are known in the teaching biz, classholes.
Emphasis mine. Hire more people with what?
I can hear it now: “The school says they need more money so that they can let the kids play tag! At school! TAG! As if we send them to school to play games…”
Y’know, I have heard this whine about “not enough money” for schools in the U.S. for a long, long time. I don’t doubt that schools could use more money, but they could also use a little more budget and organizational creativity IMO.
I really have to wonder how expensive or difficult it is to (1) get a couple of volunteers from the community; it seems to work for crossing guards, (2) when local teaching college students come in for observation, include playground monitoring as part of their observation time, (3) give older kids in the school a chance to be playground monitors, or (4) set up a realistic schedule so that teachers who always spend recess in the building are out on the playground once or twice a week.
If it really comes down to needing more money for this, go to the school board and ask for it. Then ask for it again after the perfunctory refusal. And again. Don’t explain it in terms of “needing people to monitor tag”, but cast it in terms of playground safety. Hell, raise the bugaboo of potential child predators, and gussy it up with charts and statistics (I’m only half-joking here). Get what you need–by hook or by crook–to do the job right.
I’ll say it again: The ban is simply a product of administration laziness. It ain’t because they “can’t find the money”.
So, they should lie to the board and the community.
For tag.
I know that you want to be angry about this, but if you’ll back up a second you’ll realize that you are advocating something you really don’t want to advocate. You do not want schools doing the end-around the school board and by extension the voters in order to appease you. Because next time? They’ll be doing the end-around to appease someone else.
I’m always astonished when people feel contempt for an organization, and then suggest ways to give the organization more power.
I would like to see school boards implement a “use your common sense” rule.
Last weekend, I watched a rigid school rule cause the emptying of an entire stadium of people. Apparently, if a football game official sees lightning, the game must be delayed & the stadium emptied until there is a 30 minute period without lightning. Sounds like a good rule until you realize that the “lightning” they saw was actually the light from said lighting (which was many miles away) reflecting off the clouds on the horizon. The sky over the stadium & for miles around was completely clear. IANAMeteorologist, but I would guess that lightning strikes under such conditions are pretty damn rare.
The rule I have always heard is that if you can see lightning, you can be struck by it.
I’d consider this an area where too cautious is better than not cautious enough, considering the downside is simply a delay of a game.
So does that rule apply to “if you see the light from the lightning reflecting off a cloud on the horizon but never actually see anything resembling lightning itself”? If the radar at Accuweather was any indication, that lightening would have had to travel upwards of 25 miles from the storm area where the ligtning was to that football field where the game was canceled with a clear sky overhead. Seemed a tad over-the-top-cautious to me.