ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, February 20, 1996 TAG: 9602200023
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: Beth Macy
SOURCE: BETH MACY
Remember the big issues you wrestled with during school recess: whether you were going to try to become one of the ``cool girls,'' or hang out with your safe, studious and boring (but loyal) old friends;
What you would say to bully Jane Ann Weaver when she demanded you turn over your milk money;
And how you would die if David Pendleton went on another one of his rampages, running around the playground randomly kissing girls?
Marilyn Fields remembers like it was yesterday the recess game of blind-folded tag, when Freddie Carter reached out his hand to find the nearest child - not knowing that the teacher was standing directly in front of him.
``I closed my eyes and prayed Freddie wouldn't touch a part of her anatomy he would live to regret the rest of his life,'' she remembers, more than 20 years later.
Fields, of Newport in Giles County, is embarking on a one-woman crusade to make you recall the best times of your life - those 15-minute increments when multiplication tables gave way to Red Rover and, in the words of Maurice Sendak, the wild rumpus began.
She wants you to know that your old friend recess has died a slow and, she thinks, painful death - caught in the crossfire of sinking test scores and bad public-school P.R.
An environmental engineer and a stay-at-home mother of two, Fields has a multi-page long-distance phone bill - from calling dozens of elementary schools in Southwest Virginia. Her research has confirmed her suspicions: that rare is the school that allows several grades of schoolchildren to be turned loose to their own devices.
That recess, by and large, has gone the way of the pogo stick.
She's not the sole grieving survivor. The demise of recess upsets Radford University professor Alvin Proffit, who heads the school's graduate-level education program.
A former principal and school superintendent, Proffit says schools began phasing out recess in the late '70s. ``These decisions were based in state superintendents' offices and back rooms with politicians determining what was good for education,'' he recalls.
``But I don't think that more [classroom-instruction] hours, per se, is the answer to declining test scores. If you cram kids into school all day long and don't give them any time to socialize, you reach a point of diminishing returns.''
Recess teaches kids to socialize and to be responsible, he says. It's where they learn - by practice - how to get along and how not to get along. It's where they come into social contact with kids of different races and socio-economic backgrounds.
``I don't see many situations where we ask adults to be confined all day long,'' Proffit argues. ``And we certainly don't have the kind of energy levels kids do.
``One of my great joys as an administrator was to go outside and watch kids, 50 yards away from me with seemingly no purpose at all, just running madly in circles.''
Like office workers who return from their lunchtime exercise refreshed, kids concentrate better once they've exhausted their pent-up energies, Proffit explains. And they like school better.
Proffit believes restoring recess might be one way to help kids deal with the pressures of drugs, sex and violence. ``Think about the decisions a 13-year-old kid is making right now. Maybe it would be good if we actually gave them time learning how to deal with people - in a more structured environment - rather than outside in a car at the mall somewhere.''
Marilyn Fields' children aren't yet old enough to hang out at the mall. But it bothers her the way her second-grader is made to wait for the bus in the ``bus room'' - usually a gym or cafeteria, where the kids are made to sit quietly.
``When I was little you were sent outside, and you took responsibility for getting on your bus, and you learned from it. Now they just sit there. And when I ask the principals why, it's because of safety issues and liability.
``It's not that the kids might get hurt, it's that the school might get sued.''
Fields says she took the matter up with her Parent Teacher Association, but was brushed off because ``they don't want to be political.'' Right now, she's trying to appeal to other area parents who might help lobby for the return of recess. (Call her at 626-7905.)
She's trying to appeal to those playground memories of Mother-May-I, double-dutch jump rope and David Pendleton's kissing rampage.
She thinks it's high time for the wild rumpus to begin again.
LENGTH: Medium: 86 lines ILLUSTRATION: GRAPHIC: Robert Lunsford. color.by CNB