Or my grade school’s favorite game, “pull down their shorts and check out their business chase.”
Actually, that would kick ass. Either as a kid or now. There was the perfect hill (well, it was really more of a long slope) at my first elementary school for that sort of thing.
Just a comment from someone whose sole athletic ability is math.
Dogdeball (and Chinese Baseball, and tag) were the few phys ed games that I liked. You needed no special skill, and they aren’t really team games, so no one could blame you for losing/doing something stupid. I never got hurt at all, and it was a lot more interesting than just running.
Here’s my take: if we just outlaw CHILDREN, that’ll solve the whole damn problem pretty quick.
But if we’re going to insist upon continuing to reproduce, we should probably let the kids be kids instead of trying to force them to be miniature adults- especially miniatures of anal-retentive adults obsessed with rules, structure and supressing everybody’s opinions and creativity so nobody gets offended.
I’ll say this for the idiots of the world: somehow they’ve managed to create a world where people are so worried about stepping on each others’ toes that no one stands up to an idiot anymore. They’ve made themselves a protected class somehow. 
The German bombers that missed the docks and bombed the area around my house created our playground. Half demolished houses were exciting and frightening places to play. Looking back now it was probably too dangerous, but I can only remember the fun we used to have.
Our school recesses were never monitored, it was just a free for all. If you were unlucky enough to come to the attention of one of the teachers for some bit of naughtiness, they would think nothing of giving you physical punishment. I’m not saying that’s right or wrong, but it used to happen.
Just a not-very-well-thought-out idea off the top of my head here, but could parents be asked to sign a waiver holding the school harmless in the event of minor injuries sustained in the course of ordinary play? I’m not a lawyer so I don’t know how well that would work; I suppose drawing a line would be tricky. To my way of thinking, tackle football would be out (I also grew up in the '70’s, and that wasn’t allowed even then), but touch football would be okay, as would dodgeball, tag, etc. Kids whose parents refuse to sign the waiver would have to sit out.
Oo! The one we got in the 80s had a short rope bridge. Sorta. It was planks of 4"x4" across thick, steel airplane cable. Kind like this but only 8 feet long and much higher tech.
Anyway, a cool thing we discovered is that if a smaller kid was on the slightly lower end, and you jumped and hit the slightly higher end with all you weight, the resulting sine wave would send the little kid flying tail over tin bucket! Muah-ha-ha-ha-ha!
Kids today! Wimps! All of them!
Why, when I was a kid we didn’t have grass! Our schoolyard was covered in coal-like gravel with nails in it (literally, it used to be a train station and you could sometimes find old nails, nuts and bolts, and I found a penny from 1827)! “Tetherball”? Pfeh! We were happy to have old tires to roll across the yard! And when I fell off the monkey bars and landed head first so that I had to pick gravel out of my scalp, I liked it dammit!
Oh ohh, and parents who don’t sign will be immeadiately marked by children’s services for “Yuppie Re Education”!
What a brilliant I deal, in one fell swoop we will identify all the A holes that case problems for the kids.
It would seriously suck though to have increadiably overprotective parents who wouldn’t sign that thing. Poor teacher that gets to explain it: “Little JImmy, you’re not allowed to have fun because your parents are retards. Now sit here and watch all the other kids have fun. And remember, you’re your parents property, you have no right to have fun unless they say so.”
I remember tires. One year a bunch of kids worked the tires that were stuck in the gound out, and for a couple of weeks we rolled them all over the place, up the jungle gyms, down the slides accross the field. Our hands turned black, and the teacher’s weren’t too thrilled about it, but it was fun.
Er… I should perhaps reprhase…
“When I was a kid, grass existed, but we didn’t have any in our schoolyard!”
As much as it sounds like a quick fix, I think a parent would have to be stupid to sign a form like that.
The problem, aside from the dumb simplification you’re making, is that it would be so easy for the school to exploit that, i.e. “Jimmy, if you tell your mom you got hurt at recess, you won’t be allowed to play anymore, or maybe recess will go away for good.”
We actually had two tires that were wider than normal (maybe they were from dune buggies or something or sportscars?) and were just big enough that kids smaller than a fourth grader could squish inside. So we’d race the tires across the yard with our friends inside them! You’d could almost gurantee that someone would puke.
We considered it training for a future career with NASA.
From what I understand, such waivers aren’t worth the paper they’re written on.
And that’s why you also don’t see teeter-totters near any trees nowadays…chalk that change to kids like me who provided the propellant for lift-off!:eek:
Yes. Teeter-totter, catapult… it’s a fine line.
And World Eater’s correct. Waivers rarely hold carry any weight in the instances of negligence suits. The waivers simply can’t predict the stupidity that people can inflict on each other and are only intended to show that there are certain risks inherent in such-and-such acitivity that any reasonable person could expect. There’s the problem – you end up in court anyway fighting over what you were actually agreeing to, and what is “reasonalbe” to expect from participating in said activity.
An answer is in order to those who have stated the OP did not involve PC. I respectfully disagree. In MHO, PC is a manifestation of fear, a fear which has overtaken society and logic.
We have to use special hyphenated words to describe certain people and ethnicities lest they become injured by our careless expression. Words not even related to them are on the banned list because they sound potentially offensive.
Everything has to run through the fear filter, as we can’t have kids praying, touching, swearing, reading, or saying anything in the slightest bit untoward.
Since when did you obtain a first class ticket to adulthood which was guaranteed to be free of controversy, bad words, thoughts, and :eek: possible contact with others?
I want my daughter to get bumps and scrapes, I want her kick a bully’s ass if need be, I want her to be free to select books from the library and ask me questions about their content, and not be afraid to say whatever pops into her head. Most of all, I want her to be free of fear to be herself.
Thank you, dances, you said it very well.
I suppose British Bulldog, or whatever you Americans call it, is out of the question then?
We played dodgeball until about 10th grade then poof nope. no more, not at all… maybe some day we can play kickball :rolleyes: woohoo.
I understand trying to stop violence and fights but man… lets all get into our protective nerf gear for a game of go fish.
I can’t speak for other countries, but from a Norwegian point of view, this seems absurd. When reading the article, I felt halfway sure that the OP had been whooshed, and kept waiting for the punch line.
Sure, we’re more safety concious than when I was a kid. A few years ago, we got new regulations about play grounds, and all fine, hard sand directly under play ground equipment had to be replaced with loose gravel. This makes sense to me - don’t prevent children from climbing, but increase the chance that they land on something soft when they fall.
When my children went to daycare, we once got a letter telling that the daycare had decided to teach the oldest kids (5-6 years old) to whittle. They explained why they wanted to do this, and what kind of safety measures they were taking. Predictably, there were no serious accidents. Equally predictably (we’re talking about small children and sharp knives here, after all), there was at least one minor accident, where a child cut his finger and had to be taken to hospital for a few stiches. All parents I spoke with about this agreed that whittling was a good thing, and none of them (including the mother of the child who’d cut himself) felt that the accident was anything to make a fuss of. Would this be possible in USA? Or is it likely that some parents whose child got a small cut would sue the daycare, and have a chance of winning the case?