Recess

The time in elementary school we used to have in which no college-bound goals were being pursued was named "Recess." That is how I describe those 25-30 slots of time. In junior and senior high school these times were referred to as physical education and we changed our clothes in locker rooms to engage in these activities.

In elementary school there were no locker rooms and the gyms were tiny. We were smaller then so I guess there wasn't the need for large open spaces.

I think anytime we were given a break from the grind of advancing to the next year in our schooling was good. We could have simply been sitting on our desks throwing a cotton ball around in complete silence and that to me was a fine way to break up the routine of our day. I actually think it was called "Silent Ball" because you weren't allowed to speak and if you dropped the ball you had to get off your desktop and sit in your chair. The game proceeded until two were left.  The final participants could be on opposite sides of the classroom. To watch these final moments of the game couldn't help but raise your heartbeat because you had to watch the action and control your voice. Hand signals were all that were allowed and the game was largely self-regulated in order to give our harried and over worked teachers some time to gather their thoughts and catch up on their paperwork.

Almost 50 years have passed since my last game of Silent Ball, and I don't know if the Ridgewood Public Schools still call this form of activity "Recess." I do know that I read about today's elementary school children being diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder at an alarmingly high rate and can't say what the equivalent to this was in my day. Maybe it didn't exist, but who knows for sure?

I do understand that people today across all age groups tend to believe that our well-being can be measured by what we own. Though I would side with those people who think this is not a long-term route to happiness.

I would also suggest that our development into mature adults requires imagining life without material possessions and believing that we can actually be happy in a set of circumstances where opulence is not the end goal. In our Silent Ball moments we experienced the mild deprivations of not being able to speak or leave our seats on the top of our desks. We learned indirectly in these blocks of time called recess the time honored practice of being grateful for freedom of speech and movement. These freedoms we hopefully later discovered in our development into adults were our real needs.

I guess I am saying that for people to be truly happy they have to distinguish their wants for material things from what they truly need. In Silent Ball their were moments when we we desired to shout out to those around us that someone had left their seat in an attempt to catch the ball being thrown around the room in silence. We knew this violated the rules of the game, but we also knew the rules said we couldn't speak. This sort of thought provoking task I'm not sure our teachers had in mind as their goal for our recess time. It's nice to believe their were molding young minds, when in actuality they were trying to catch their breaths from the pace of tutoring young minds five days a week. I don't blame them at all. Sometimes the best things we can teach are by those examples we set when we are just being ourselves.