Remember Ms Spooflacker? The teacher I wrote about back on January 15, the one who thought it would be a good idea to make students who flunked a quiz wear signs to that effect at recess? The one who wasn’t going to let us jump on Melanie Rice’s trampoline?
On the first day of April during that school year, Ms Spooflacker was mad at us for some reason. Maybe we were talking during class. Maybe we defied her authority. Maybe she found the voodoo doll we made in her likeness out of a rotten potato. Whatever we did, it was bad enough that she was keeping us inside during third recess.
It was a nice spring day. We could see how nice it was from our desks as she spent part of the time berating us and another part discussing the history of April Fool’s Day.
And then halfway through the recess period, she smiled and said “April Fool!” and let us go out to what was left of recess.
Talk about a twisted sense of humor.
Even at my tender age I knew that for that joke to be effective, you have to start it ten minutes before recess begins. “All right, you punks, you’ve pushed my last button and I’m canceling your last recess. Sit down, shut up, and listen.” Now you’ve got your audience right where you want them. They’re disheartened. They’re crushed. All they wanted was one last chance to frolic about the playground but now they’re confined in a prison of their own making where they will soon be taunted by the merry laughter of the children outside. The good children. The obedient children. The children running free.
And then you time your April Fool punchline to coincide with the bell for third recess. Boom. You get your joke in and no recess time is lost. The children forgive you.
But that, alas, was not the Spooflacker way.
Hey, where were you guys? You missed your turn at bat in the kickball game.
Uh—we had to sacrifice half our recess time for a dumb joke.
Spooflacker?
Who else?
I can’t imagine things have changed all that much but when I was a kid recess time was sacrosanct. We had morning recess, the recess tacked onto the lunch period, and third recess. These breaks in the schoolday were like mini-Christmases—condensed periods of anticipation and a cathartic sense of reward, three times a day, every day. Nothing got in the way of recess. Even when it was raining you still got your time off and had recess in the gym. Boys on one side, girls on the other. No shoes but tennis shoes. In the land of the sock feet, the sneaker-wearer is king.
At Richland Elementary there was an upper playground and a lower. All the playground equipment was on the upper part: swings, tetherball, three sets of monkey bars (a rocket, a fort, and an arch), a maypole, the basketball court, teeter-totters. One cold day I fell off the maypole and scraped my head and instead of walking it off I blew my perfect attendance record. You really shouldn’t try swinging on a maypole wearing those big thick polyester mittens.
The lower playground was lower in the sense that it was down a hill that seemed huge at the time although a few years ago when I stopped by the old school I could hardly distinguish any slope between the old playgrounds at all. The lower playground had the official baseball diamond, a makeshift baseball diamond, a small kickball field, and plenty of space for football. First- through third-graders were allowed to play tackle football but fourth- through sixth-graders had to play two-hand-touch-below-the-waist.
For a few weeks in the autumn of my third-grade year we got on a football kick but the teams were always divided up into Guys Who Would Grow Up to be Good Athletes and The Rest of Us. As a veteran of the Rest of Us squad, I learned that it was a good thing winning isn’t everything. But one day I pulled off a somewhat masterful bit of deception. Steve Felix of the Good Athletes team had the ball and one of our guys was trying to bring him down. Our guy had Steve by the waist and was essentially swinging him in a circle. I yelled “Steve!” and, forgetting we were weren’t teammates, he lateraled me the ball. I took off for our goal line, thinking this could be the moment of triumph that gives our team the shot of confidence it needs to start competing with the Actual Athletes.
They brought me down a couple yards short of the goal. And then we ran four plays without scoring.
Sometimes in second or third grade we’d play classic kids games like cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, superheroes and villains, that sort of thing. But there was a weird element to these games. When the boys involved gathered at the beginning of recess, someone would invariably call out “I’m boss.” It was a dibs sort of thing. Whoever called it made the rules, like deciding who were cops and who were robbers.
Since that time, 1968-9 or so, I’ve met a lot of people and swapped a lot of stories. But I’ve never met anyone who said “Oh yeah, we used to determine the group leader by yelling out ‘I’m boss.’”
But that surely wasn’t limited to the playground at Richland Elementary.
What made it even more absurd was that after someone claimed the boss title, someone else would say “I’m second boss,” and third and fourth and so on. One day it got to the point where some kid yelled “I’m ninth boss.”
Kid, if eight bosses become incapacitated in a 15-minute recess, you might be playing too close to the nuclear dump site.
Recess time was freedom. Leave the notebooks behind. Leave the long division and the past participles and the Magna Carta behind. You can talk out loud here. You can run, you can skip, you can race, you can stand around and gossip. Burn off some steam, burn off the cobwebs, run and stretch and thank your lucky stars you’re not a grownup—or a seventh-grader. We knew there were no recess periods in junior high and deep down that just didn’t seem right. To go from three recesses a day to none? What magical thing was supposed to happen to us in the summer after sixth grade?
Don’t think about it. Just play. Play while you can.
We played basketball on a rough concrete court. Sometimes full-court, sometimes half-court, sometimes horse, sometimes just shooting around and talking. I had a classmate named Kyle Walker who was on crutches because of Osgood-Schlatter, and there were countless recess periods when Kyle would let other kids play with his crutches while he shot baskets balanced on one foot.
We played tag—regular tag, freeze tag, and ball tag (which surely wasn’t called ball tag although heck, maybe it was—but it was essentially dodge ball with potential targets running in all directions). We played iron horse, which was a dry-land version of the chicken game you play in the swimming pool: Mount up on your partner’s back and try to be the last team standing. In sixth grade there was a girl named Jeanie who was virtually unbeatable at iron horse, carrying a lot of us less-sturdy guys to victory.
We played red rover, which is the physical equivalent of the card game War and a good object lesson on how to build consensus. Before you could call someone over, your team had to agree on who to call over. How did this not take forever? Who was in charge of strategy? Do you call over a petite person with weak arms so you can catch them, knowing you’re weakening your own defenses? Or do you call over the roughest toughest person on the other team, knowing it will be a major coup if you can hold the line but also that you’ll lose a player if they break through?
Again, how did we decide in a way that didn’t take up the whole recess? Red rover was a game that needed a first boss.
It doesn’t take long for your body to get accustomed to the rhythm of each recess, so while you were hoping the playground supervisor would never blow her whistle, you always knew it was coming. Except when it didn’t. Occasionally, rarely, there’d be a recess period that seemed to run past the time limit. It was weird and uncomfortable. Should we start a new inning? Nah, it’s about time to go in—but wait, the supervisor is just walking around like she forgot what time it was! Yes, go, go, get up to bat!
I’m pretty sure now that those extra-long recesses were not the result of a forgetful supervisor but rather an agreement among the teachers: Keep those people outside an extra ten minutes while we recuperate, will you?
Either way, nobody complained about bonus recess time.
We moved on to junior and senior high and survived the transition to a recessless world. Nobody went crazy from unblown-off steam. Nobody’s muscles atrophied from the absence of red rover. We were mature young men and women now. We were past all that grade-school silliness.
Then we went to college and thought holy cow there’s a lot of recess time here.