Come on, you remember recess, right? That was the two or three times per day in elementary school when we all got to run around like lunatics, dangle from the monkey bars, play dodge ball, or rock the teeter-totter with that cute little guy or gal we had a crush on.
Times were simpler then, whatever cares we had in the world seem so minor compared to the ones we have now. Even then, you were amazed at how quickly a few minutes of catching some air on the swings could clear your head.
Then came junior high and, all of a sudden, there was no more recess.
Who came up with that bright idea? Who decided that we were suddenly too old to want (or need) to run around and interact leisurely with our fellow man, or that everything needed to be so regimented, to the point that we couldn't even have our own kind of fun in gym glass? Nope, creepy gym teacher wanted us to climb up a stupid rope instead.
If you ask me, the first person who came up with the idea to do away with recess at the junior high level was a humorless, party-pooper of kid and, as a result, had absolutely no friends with which to play during recess. Of course they'd go on to be a school administrator. They always do, it seems.
But enough about those dipwads.
I say that it is time to not only put playgrounds on every junior high, high school, and college campus, but to put them in the work place as well. If recess was good enough for us when we're 8, gosh darn it, it's good enough for us when we're 38, or 48 for that matter.
The kids who were never any fun to be around always seem to grow up to be shitty, humorless teachers and administrators who relish raining on the parades of one generation of children after another, as if that somehow makes up for them not being able to cut it on the playground as kids themselves.
They're the same adults who decide that the local Little League should be the kind where they hit baseballs off of tees, nobody keeps score, and everybody gets to play because, as kids, they were the shitty players who couldn't catch a cold, much less a baseball.
Hey, I was a crappy Little League player, don't get me wrong, but at least I learned a little something about competition, being part of a team, and doing whatever you had to do to win (which, in my case, meant letting Steve Armstrong's 50 mph fast ball ding me on the shin with two outs and bases loaded). Whereas I was eventually able to convince my dad that baseball just wasn't my thing and move on with my life, it seems a lot of the other kids who rode the bench made a solemn oath to themselves to one day make Little League safe for lame-o's.
Let's face it, recess has more to do with life and how you live it than five years of algebra, or just about any other class, for that matter. As adults who spend eight hours sitting our asses at work, and another one or two hours in traffic each day, we could use a little recess each day. No, I don't mean sacrificing your lunch hour to go for a power-walk or jug, either. When we were kids, we ate lunch, then we had recess. We should have the same thing now as adults.
Instead, we've let the companies we work for talk us into pay cuts and longer hours. Even though they're required-by-law to allow employees two fifteen-minute breaks per eight-hour shift, I've worked for more than one company that did so quite begrudgingly and looked upon such breaks with the same amount of disdain they did company theft.
What companies fail to realize is that a happy employee is a productive employee and, well, a playground would be nice. I will tell you that however bad my grades were in elementary school, they'd have been a lot worse if I didn't have recess to look forward to all the time.
At recess, we didn't just run around and get sweaty. We learned to interact with others, improved our physical and coordination skills, and were given a much-needed respite from the confines of the classroom. These days, we could all use a break from the cubicle jungle that isn't spent in the break room, or surfing the internet at our desk.
We deserve...yes, deserve to have two or three recesses per day. We deserve the opportunity to shoot some hoops, play some four-square, or swing on the swings with our buddies before returning to the grind.
I personally think that doing so would help resolve a lot of the problems we have these days. As it stands, we adults have lost complete touch with our inner child, and, in doing so, have forgotten how to have fun. Hell, some of us have convinced ourselves that we don't need to have fun and that being an adult means you stop having fun. I think we all know a few of those types.
Of course, they're easy to recognize. They're the ones shaking their heads as they read this, who, at their very heart, find the idea of recess at any age ludicrous. If only they'd been able to hang with me as a kid...if they had, they'd know the joy of recess and look upon that time as the most productive part of the day. :)
