Doing Away with Recess

A recent column appearing in The American Spectator by Perry Glanzer suggests President Obama should "act like a good politician and tell children exactly what they want to hear" in his upcoming speech to the nation's schoolchildren. He should tell them, suggests Glanzer, that they need more recess. http://spectator.org/archives/2010/09/14/what-obama-should-tell-the-kid

Sadly, recess is dying by strangulation from other supposedly good things. Recently, I met my son's teacher and received a copy of my son's schedule. I saw lots of good things he needs to and should learn, but I also looked for what I always loved -- those precious times of recess.

Glanzer is right. In many schools, recess has all but been squeezed out. What remains is like a tiny patch of rainforest surrounded by pasture. One example is the East Providence School District, which recently announced its plans to scrape recess entirely - all 10 minutes of it. I wrote about it here: http://linestoabrasspot.blogspot.com/2010/09/enhanced-recess.html

There was an uproar, followed by the district's clarification that it was merely "enhancing" recess by, among other things, lengthening it from 10 to 15 minutes. On its website, the district boasted that recess, "would no longer be an afterthought squeezed in after a rushed lunch." At this point any parent who was paying attention would have been doubly upset and demanded to know, "Since when did you whittle recess down to a 10 minute afterthought?"

Glanzer remembers his recess breaks in school:

When I was in school, I had three of them. Fifteen minutes in the morning,thirty minutes after lunch and fifteen minutes in the afternoon. During those times I learned to create games with others, choose my own activities, get along, argue, and negotiate.

My own memory of recess is much the same. I wonder about those who would eliminate recess. I wonder how they remember their own recess breaks when they were in school. Have they forgotten, or did they just hate recess?