August 31, 2016 Article

The Old Coot lived for recess.

By Merlin Lessler

The Florida legislature has been working on a bill that mandates 20 minutes of free playtime in elementary schools. House Bill # 833 passed the House in February and the educational elites went nuts. They don’t want to waste 20 minutes of school time on recess. So far, they have been successful in blocking the bill; it’s bottled up in a senate committee and most pundits think that’s where it will die.

Wow! Am I out of step (as usual). I never would have survived a school day without recess. We had two 15 minutes periods of freedom in an otherwise rigidly regimented educational environment. It was those recess periods that kept me going. Something to look forward to other than the 3 o’clock dismissal bell. It kept us in line too. We knew we could be sitting at attention at our desk while the rest of the class whooped it up on the playground if we misbehaved in class. My crowd, on the boy’s side of the room, considered it capital punishment. We could withstand getting sent to the cloakroom, to the corner of the room, to the hall and even to the principal’s office as punishment for our crimes. But, to miss out on recess; that was a death sentence.

All the boys had ADD in those days. It wasn’t called that, and wasn’t controlled with medicine. It was simply referred to as “ants in the pants” and passed off with the comment, “Boys will be boys.”  Recess kept it at bay. Both, the promise of freedom, and then the actual experience. Our excess energy was drained off as we ran around the playground playing tag, bat ball or that now politically incorrect game, dodge ball. Now that I look back on it, the teachers must have liked recess as much as we did, a break from facing a classroom infested with a dozen or more twitchy, ants in the pants, boys with an attention span that was measured in seconds. The teachers had 15 minutes of peace and quiet, twice a day and another break at noon when we walked home for lunch. This was back in the day when neighborhood schools were in vogue. We walked to and from school in all kinds of weather so we were equipped for outdoor recess, no matter what the weatherman threw at us. There weren’t any adult monitors on our playground, but Mrs. White’s 5^th grade classroom overlooked the play yard. We could spot her peering out her window every so often and that was all it took to keep us in line.

The legislative effort in Florida to force recess back into the schools shows how far afield the educational system has strayed. How dare the school officials deny kids their inalienable right to recess? Too many people making educational policy decisions forget what it was like to be a school kid. They are more focused on a narrow field of test scores than making sure the kids are well rounded. And, believe me, recess on a playground helps round out a kid’s education. (And, makes sitting in class a little more bearable.)

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