Smith: How lessons from recess help prevent violence
It’s the same every day that the sky isn’t cold and angry. Hundreds of antsy kids line up at the front door of the Southeast Neighborhood School of Excellence, wait for the signal to cross the street and then spill out onto the playground.
It’s recess. The one time of day when kids get to let loose and be kids.
As adults, long detached from our years in elementary school, we imagine recess is about fun. We think of it as a time to scream and laugh with abandon. And to play basketball, kickball and four square with our friends until, sadly, it’s time to go back inside.
But teachers and administrators know better. They know what recess has become.
Fistfights and arguments.
Bullying and tears.
Selfishness and shaming.
“I hated recess,” said Principal Kristie Sweeney, who walks the halls of SENSE greeting elementary students by name. “It would start at 11 and I’d spend the rest of the day dealing with stuff from it.”
Kickball, for example, was a disaster. The kids didn’t know how to work together as a team. It was all about “me” and “I.”
“It would be, ‘I’m going to roll the ball.’ ‘No, I’m going to roll the ball.’ And you’d have 12 boys who want to roll the ball and nobody wanted to be in the outfield,” Sweeney said. “So the teacher says, ‘Fine I’m going to roll the ball.’ And now the kids are in the outfield fighting about other things when the teacher has her back turned trying to roll the ball.”
The teachers and administrators at SENSE slowly came to realize that their students, most of whom come from poor households near Fountain Square, had no idea how to resolve conflicts without resorting to insults or outright violence.
They didn’t know how to play together and, therefore, live together. You’ll hear the same thing from other school administrators, particularly those who oversee schools in the impoverished urban core.
“This is high poverty and high crime, so social skills are our biggest problem,” said Karen Hastings, principal of Washington Irving Elementary School on the Near Eastside. “The biggest issues happen during recess and on the bus, during unstructured activities. Kids get into sticky situations and they don’t know how to handle it.”
It’s no wonder then that, fast-forwarding into high school, thousands of kids are expelled every year in Indianapolis, with about one-third kicked out because of fights and other conflicts.
And when you fast forward further, you see that of the nearly 110 homicides in Indianapolis this year, a third of them have involved fights or attempts at revenge.
That’s right. Dozens of people have been murdered this year over arguments about as stupid as who’s going to roll a kickball.
When we talk about reducing violence, we can’t overestimate the importance of teaching people how to resolve basic, interpersonal conflicts early in life. If we don’t, all of Indianapolis will continue to pay the price, both in terms of lives lost and in tax dollars to hire more police officers.
Thankfully, a handful of schools in Indianapolis are trying to tackle this problem.
SENSE last year brought in Playworks, a California-based nonprofit that specializes in teaching elementary-age kids how to play with each other and resolve conflict amicably.
When Playworks coaches go into a school, they work to reshape recess. In distinctive turquoise T-shirts, they guide students in modified versions of games they already know. The emphasis goes from winning at all costs to learning to play hard, but play fair.
For example, a soccer match at SENSE involved three teams that would rotate in and out of the match after every goal. The competitiveness remained with kids dashing up and down the field, but there were no fights. Everyone knew the rules.
When disagreements do happen, the coaches urge students to settle the conflict by playing rock-paper-scissors. It may sound dumb, but it works. Teachers say they see students using the method to solve problems not only at recess, but in hallways and classrooms as well.
“I’ve seen that so many times, even with second graders,” Playworks coach Courtney Williams said. ‘You cut me in line.’ ‘No you cut me.’ ‘OK, rock-paper-scissors.’”
At Washington Irving, which brought in Playworks a few weeks ago, students are still adjusting. One recent afternoon, most of the students on the playground were happily sharing basketballs and hula hoops, but it didn’t take long for a tug-of-war to break out over a jump rope.
Hastings wasn’t surprised. But after watching the Playworks coach quickly defuse the situation, she was optimistic. The argument didn’t last long and the kids took off to run around the playground instead.
“It’s going to be a great program at this school. I can already tell,” she said. “If they learn that now when they’re young, maybe when they’re older and get stressed, maybe instead they’ll go for a run.”