Saving recess: In praise of childhood, free and wild

My oldest son was a few days into his first year at a Florida elementary school when he stunned me with his answer to what I thought was a routine question.

While driving us home, I wondered how he was fitting in, so I asked: “So, what do you do during recess?”

He came back with a question: “What’s recess?”

I nearly crashed our Volvo with the shock.

“What do you mean ‘What’s recess?’? Don’t they give you recess? You know, a break between classes where you get to go out to the playground and play?”

I was speaking a foreign language. No, he insisted. There was no recess, no free play time. At the tender age of 7, my then-first-grader was already hauling a rolling backpack loaded with binders that tracked his rotating schedule of fully-immersive Spanish classes and assignment files for multiple teachers.

It was my first exposure to the fact that the carefree early school days I experienced were nothing like the test-oriented drills my son endured in his Florida public school.

According to the American Association for the Child’s Right to Play, some 40 percent of elementary schools nationwide have either eliminated or cut back recess time.

Over our many moves around and out of the country since then, I am glad to have my boys back in the San Joaquin Valley where, to my relief, many of the things I experienced as a child continue to exist. Sadly, many of these things no longer are familiar to children elsewhere.

Among the things I hear have become endangered: the exchanging of personalized Valentine’s Day cards; holiday pageants (particularly Christmas plays); seemingly “dangerous” activities such as tetherball or dodgeball; and in-class birthday celebrations, particularly with sugary treats such as candy or cupcakes.

For better or worse (I’m looking at you, dodgeball), my boys have experienced all of these since we returned to California last fall.

Other things from my youth are outright extinct: blackboards and the cleaning of erasers by clapping them together; carbon-copy paper and “ditto” machine copies that gave off an inky scent; and, sigh, the shelf of encyclopedias along the back of the class that I could randomly explore during rainy-day recesses.

Over dinner the other night, I asked my boys about other things that might be different today than when I was a kid - other than having to saddle up the dinosaur to get to school, of course. The one that provoked their shock is one that seems hard to believe now, even though I remember it clearly: A designated smoking area for students.

In my high school, the teen smokers had a picnic table on the far side of the open-air quad. I remember it was seen as a better option than having them sneak cigarettes in the bathrooms. Teachers were still allowed to smoke inside the teachers’ lounge. Back when smoking was, for the most part, socially acceptable, the time when our arts classes focused on ceramics, many of us would make ash trays to take home as gifts. I remember being in kindergarten when I used two ceramic floor tiles and four boxes of matches to create a decorative match dispenser for the family coffee table.

“Why did people smoke?” my youngest son asked. Not sure what to say, I paused and my oldest son chimed in, “because they didn’t know it would kill them yet.”

There are other things we did, I suppose, because we didn’t worry whether they could kill us: drinking from a water hose; riding in the back of a pickup truck; bicycling across town, alone and without a helmet.

Being a latchkey kid, I watched a lot of TV growing up, back when the number of channels we had could be counted on one hand and you had to manually turn the on-the-roof antenna to get decent reception. One of my favorite shows was “The Little Rascals” so, not-too-long ago I had my kids gather around to watch a DVD of some of the best shorts.

What stunned me was the realization there were rarely any adults around for the “Our Gang” kids. One of my favorite episodes had them building a a replica firetruck out of scrap boards and scavenged hoses and parts. There were no parents telling them to stop, nor babysitters to guide them on the design. Other shows had them organizing plays, auditioning for talent shows, presiding over clubs (including the non-politically correct He-Man Woman-Haters Club).

I’m sure I didn’t have quite as much freedom as Spanky and Alfalfa did in their idealized world, but I recall my childhood as being pretty darn close to that.

I skateboarded around my neighborhood without elbow pads. I spent summer afternoons riding my bike downtown for a root-beer float or over to a girlfriend’s house to play Barbies. Kids from the neighborhood went with me on “hikes” to the edge of town. If a new family moved into our neighborhood, we’d show up uninvited hoping to find new playmates.

Does this still happen?

When I ask my sons about how they’re making friends in our new hometown, the reactions are entirely foreign to me. “I don’t talk to kids in class. I don’t want to get in trouble for not listening,” says my youngest. My oldest tells me there isn’t time to have random conversations with strangers. “What do you mean?” I ask. “What do you do in those few minutes of free time while you’re sitting there waiting for class to get started?”

“I read,” he says. And, sure enough, when I drop him off at school, I see other high schoolers reading - their internet-connected phones bringing the world to their fingertips.

Is that a bad thing? I don’t know. But, I hope it doesn’t bring the extinction of free time. I hope to see a bit chaos and randomness survive. I hope that we never lose recess.

This story was originally published April 5, 2016 at 6:47 PM with the headline "Saving recess: In praise of childhood, free and wild."