Trends in Recess

After reading about some amazing five year olds, and their solutions to recess problems, you can read here about a different “solution” to recess bullying: hiring “recess coaches” to supervise in-school free time. In and of itself, it’s impossible to say whether recess coaching is a good or bad thing, since such “coaching” could consist of anything from the sort of casual supervision that has always been the job of school staff during recess to organizing structured game time, more akin to PE. What is disturbing, regardless, about this trend is the message it sends to children: this is one more way in which you’re incapable of solving your own problems, so we’ll have to do it for you.