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conuly
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A couple of months ago, my two oldest kids came home from school abuzz over the new game they'd learned in gym class. I'd never heard them express any kind of excitement about P.E. before -- they are not natural athletes -- but there they were strategizing and recounting the high points of their respective matches with unprecedented zeal. I tried to follow the discussion, but it was making little sense to me. My one foray into organized sports was a single spring on the Brookwell Cleaners Softball Team in 6th grade. I remember very little about the season other than the ache in my shoulder from holding my hand above my head in a futile attempt to distract the gnats from my face, the sound of my own teammates' jeers as I made my regular strikeout, and the euphoria of being allowed to take the bench whenever our team had the slightest chance of winning.
The game my kids were so agog over wasn't softball, though. It wasn't even foursquare, a game they'd once tried to explain to me without much success. Finally, I asked them what they were talking about.
"Dodgeball!" my 7-year-old son announced, gleefully. "It's really fun."
Dodgeball? My children were playing dodgeball? That cruel, brutal, violent schoolyard game so mercilessly satirized in the 2004 film with Ben Stiller? The game, more important, that exemplified everything that was wrong with my childhood in suburban New Jersey, a short, pasty-faced Jewish girl in a town full of scrubbed, blond, athletic WASPs, their long tanned limbs toned from years of tennis lessons and country club swim teams? Dodgeball? Over my dead body.
I know it's fashionable to claim to have been a nerd as a child, to insist on having scrabbled to hold on to the lowest tier of the social ladder, to recount years of torture at the hands of the golden and anointed. Trust me, I know just how trite my history of exclusion is. I know that when compared to a lifetime of true deprivation and abuse, suburban misery counts for little. Nonetheless, as someone who still, at 40, gets a clutch of nausea every time she drives by George Washington Junior High School, I am just not willing to let go of the reins of this particular hobbyhorse. I am convinced that my entire personality was formed in those long tile hallways where I was a victim of that most banal of childhood torments -- ostracism. Everything can be explained by, every torque and twist in my character can be attributed to, those grim, lonely years. Neither the jocks, nor the heads, not even the brains wanted any part of me. The other kids didn't talk to me, or even look at me, and if it weren't for the series of successively more hostile prank phone calls that I received, I could have happily deluded myself into thinking that none of them knew I existed.
Gym class, however, was where they allowed themselves to express their disdain. In gym class for some reason they were allowed to heap derision on the apraxic kids. ("No batter, no batter. Easy out.") Gym class was, of course, where the strongest, best-looking kids were made captains and chose us spazzes last. More important, it was where the figures of supposed authority allowed them to do so. Forget the work our parents did molding our minds and values. Everything fell apart as soon as we put on those maroon polyester gym suits.
And dodgeball. God, dodgeball. As my own children were planning their tactics, evaluating which kids would be easily taken out by a hail of red balls (considerations included general athletic ability, low vs. high center of gravity, established cowardice in the face of hard throws) I was rocketed back to those dreaded days on the blacktop at G.W. Jr. High. I remember quaking under the gaze of a huge, blond girl who even then I knew was destined to remember eighth grade as the apogee of her life. She smiles, heaves back her strong arm, and wails the ball. Before it even begins its arc through the air I'm on the ground, quivering, arms over my head, already crying even though I haven't been hit yet.
"I'm calling your gym teacher," I announced.
My children stared at me, mouths agape.
"What are you talking about?" my 10-year-old daughter said.
"You can't play dodgeball. It's cruel."
"It is not," wailed my son.
"Yes it is," I said. "It's mean! It's mean to pick on a kid because she's weak, because she can't catch a ball, or duck, or run fast enough."
The children looked at each other and then at me. Clearly, the more barbaric aspects of the game had not even penetrated their consciousness.
"Mom," my daughter said. "Please, Mom. Do not call our gym teacher. Please."
But it was too late. I was already marshaling my facts. The National Association for Sport & Physical Education has issued a position paper on dodgeball, and they don't like it any more than I do. Dodgeball is not an appropriate activity for K-12 school physical education programs, says the NASPE. A game that targets and eliminates weaker kids does not help them develop confidence. While it may allow for the practice of some physical skills, there are many other activities that do this better, without using human targets. Furthermore, the only children who like dodgeball are the children who don't get hit, who don't get eliminated, who don't get wailed on. Like, for some reason, my children.
I prepared for my conversation with my children's gym teacher by learning by heart the following statement from the NASPE. "It is not appropriate to teach our children that you win by hurting others." Then I made the call. My children go to a remarkable school where community service is an actual part of the curriculum. It made no sense for dodgeball to exist there. This is a school where conflict resolution is taken so seriously that when some neighborhood toughs threw eggs at the fourth graders, the head of the lower school brought them in for a mediated encounter session. This is a school that takes very seriously the theories of Vivian Gussin Paley, author of the marvelous book on childhood social ostracism "You Can't Say You Can't Play." I chose this school precisely because it is the polar opposite of G.W. Jr. High. The gym teacher and the head of the lower school called me back, not a little confused, especially when I explained that, while my children were enjoying themselves tremendously playing dodgeball, and that I didn't actually know of any kids who weren't, I still thought they should ban the game.
It was only while I was earnestly describing to the head of the lower school how detrimental dodgeball was to our children's developing bodies and minds, through the prism, I might add, of my experience huddling with my hands over my 11-year-old head while dozens of balls rained down on me, that I realized that what I was really trying to do was exorcise the ghosts of my own unhappy childhood. I was stirring up trouble at my children's school because 25 years ago I was miserable, and I had decided dodgeball was the very matrix of that misery, in which all the lines of force that were conspiring to crush my spirit were laid bare.
The thing is, my fantasies about being a parent always involved fighting for my unpopular child, doing for her what my own parents couldn't do for me when I was a girl. I am so ready to be that little girl's mother. I know just how to provide the proper sympathy, exactly what to say when the boys call out, "Hey, carpenter's dream!" (flat as a board, and easy to screw), or when you find a page in a slam book dedicated to you. My mother, as supportive and loving as she is, was always left somewhat befuddled and at a loss by my sufferings. "But I always had so many friends when I was a girl!" she used to say. Now that it's my turn to be the mom, maybe I overcompensate. I regale my children with tales of how I used to eat my lunch huddled over a book in a corner of the school library because no one would let me sit at their lunch table. I comfort them with stories about geeks and nerds who went on to conquer the world.
There's only one problem. My children are nothing like me, and they can never quite figure out why I'm laying it on so thick. They aren't living out my childhood, they're living their own. Whatever problems they might have, and they've got plenty, they're not the same ones I had. Sure, they feel sorry for me, or the me that I once was, but they don't really get it. My oldest daughter is supremely confident, secure in her position in her class and with her friends. She's always been popular. She was the queen bee of Gymboree. My son doesn't have her social ease, but neither does he have quite my awkwardness.
And he loves dodgeball.
Halfway through the dodgeball wars, I dropped the ball. On purpose. Whatever I think of the pedagogical value of the game, the fact is my children are happy. They like school, they like gym class. What they don't like is their mother working out her adolescent traumas by berating their gym teacher.
There are times as a parent when you realize that your job is not to be the parent you always imagined you'd be, the parent you always wished you had. Your job is to be the parent your child needs, given the particulars of his or her own life and nature. It's hard to separate your remembered childhood and its emotional legacy from the childhoods that are being lived out in your house, by your children. If you're lucky, your kids will help you make that distinction. They'll look at you, stricken, and beg you not to harangue the coach, not to harass the mother of the boy who didn't invite them to the birthday party, not to intervene to rescind the lousy trade of Yu-Gi-Oh cards they made. You want to protect them, but sometimes what you have to protect them from is the ongoing avalanche of your own childhood -- crashing down on you like a hail of dodgeballs.
Edit: Everyone calm down. I know, you're upset, and you have your reasons and good arguments. But it's frankly a bit scary at how quickly the discussion is escalating along.
A couple of months ago, my two oldest kids came home from school abuzz over the new game they'd learned in gym class. I'd never heard them express any kind of excitement about P.E. before -- they are not natural athletes -- but there they were strategizing and recounting the high points of their respective matches with unprecedented zeal. I tried to follow the discussion, but it was making little sense to me. My one foray into organized sports was a single spring on the Brookwell Cleaners Softball Team in 6th grade. I remember very little about the season other than the ache in my shoulder from holding my hand above my head in a futile attempt to distract the gnats from my face, the sound of my own teammates' jeers as I made my regular strikeout, and the euphoria of being allowed to take the bench whenever our team had the slightest chance of winning.
The game my kids were so agog over wasn't softball, though. It wasn't even foursquare, a game they'd once tried to explain to me without much success. Finally, I asked them what they were talking about.
"Dodgeball!" my 7-year-old son announced, gleefully. "It's really fun."
Dodgeball? My children were playing dodgeball? That cruel, brutal, violent schoolyard game so mercilessly satirized in the 2004 film with Ben Stiller? The game, more important, that exemplified everything that was wrong with my childhood in suburban New Jersey, a short, pasty-faced Jewish girl in a town full of scrubbed, blond, athletic WASPs, their long tanned limbs toned from years of tennis lessons and country club swim teams? Dodgeball? Over my dead body.
I know it's fashionable to claim to have been a nerd as a child, to insist on having scrabbled to hold on to the lowest tier of the social ladder, to recount years of torture at the hands of the golden and anointed. Trust me, I know just how trite my history of exclusion is. I know that when compared to a lifetime of true deprivation and abuse, suburban misery counts for little. Nonetheless, as someone who still, at 40, gets a clutch of nausea every time she drives by George Washington Junior High School, I am just not willing to let go of the reins of this particular hobbyhorse. I am convinced that my entire personality was formed in those long tile hallways where I was a victim of that most banal of childhood torments -- ostracism. Everything can be explained by, every torque and twist in my character can be attributed to, those grim, lonely years. Neither the jocks, nor the heads, not even the brains wanted any part of me. The other kids didn't talk to me, or even look at me, and if it weren't for the series of successively more hostile prank phone calls that I received, I could have happily deluded myself into thinking that none of them knew I existed.
Gym class, however, was where they allowed themselves to express their disdain. In gym class for some reason they were allowed to heap derision on the apraxic kids. ("No batter, no batter. Easy out.") Gym class was, of course, where the strongest, best-looking kids were made captains and chose us spazzes last. More important, it was where the figures of supposed authority allowed them to do so. Forget the work our parents did molding our minds and values. Everything fell apart as soon as we put on those maroon polyester gym suits.
And dodgeball. God, dodgeball. As my own children were planning their tactics, evaluating which kids would be easily taken out by a hail of red balls (considerations included general athletic ability, low vs. high center of gravity, established cowardice in the face of hard throws) I was rocketed back to those dreaded days on the blacktop at G.W. Jr. High. I remember quaking under the gaze of a huge, blond girl who even then I knew was destined to remember eighth grade as the apogee of her life. She smiles, heaves back her strong arm, and wails the ball. Before it even begins its arc through the air I'm on the ground, quivering, arms over my head, already crying even though I haven't been hit yet.
"I'm calling your gym teacher," I announced.
My children stared at me, mouths agape.
"What are you talking about?" my 10-year-old daughter said.
"You can't play dodgeball. It's cruel."
"It is not," wailed my son.
"Yes it is," I said. "It's mean! It's mean to pick on a kid because she's weak, because she can't catch a ball, or duck, or run fast enough."
The children looked at each other and then at me. Clearly, the more barbaric aspects of the game had not even penetrated their consciousness.
"Mom," my daughter said. "Please, Mom. Do not call our gym teacher. Please."
But it was too late. I was already marshaling my facts. The National Association for Sport & Physical Education has issued a position paper on dodgeball, and they don't like it any more than I do. Dodgeball is not an appropriate activity for K-12 school physical education programs, says the NASPE. A game that targets and eliminates weaker kids does not help them develop confidence. While it may allow for the practice of some physical skills, there are many other activities that do this better, without using human targets. Furthermore, the only children who like dodgeball are the children who don't get hit, who don't get eliminated, who don't get wailed on. Like, for some reason, my children.
I prepared for my conversation with my children's gym teacher by learning by heart the following statement from the NASPE. "It is not appropriate to teach our children that you win by hurting others." Then I made the call. My children go to a remarkable school where community service is an actual part of the curriculum. It made no sense for dodgeball to exist there. This is a school where conflict resolution is taken so seriously that when some neighborhood toughs threw eggs at the fourth graders, the head of the lower school brought them in for a mediated encounter session. This is a school that takes very seriously the theories of Vivian Gussin Paley, author of the marvelous book on childhood social ostracism "You Can't Say You Can't Play." I chose this school precisely because it is the polar opposite of G.W. Jr. High. The gym teacher and the head of the lower school called me back, not a little confused, especially when I explained that, while my children were enjoying themselves tremendously playing dodgeball, and that I didn't actually know of any kids who weren't, I still thought they should ban the game.
It was only while I was earnestly describing to the head of the lower school how detrimental dodgeball was to our children's developing bodies and minds, through the prism, I might add, of my experience huddling with my hands over my 11-year-old head while dozens of balls rained down on me, that I realized that what I was really trying to do was exorcise the ghosts of my own unhappy childhood. I was stirring up trouble at my children's school because 25 years ago I was miserable, and I had decided dodgeball was the very matrix of that misery, in which all the lines of force that were conspiring to crush my spirit were laid bare.
The thing is, my fantasies about being a parent always involved fighting for my unpopular child, doing for her what my own parents couldn't do for me when I was a girl. I am so ready to be that little girl's mother. I know just how to provide the proper sympathy, exactly what to say when the boys call out, "Hey, carpenter's dream!" (flat as a board, and easy to screw), or when you find a page in a slam book dedicated to you. My mother, as supportive and loving as she is, was always left somewhat befuddled and at a loss by my sufferings. "But I always had so many friends when I was a girl!" she used to say. Now that it's my turn to be the mom, maybe I overcompensate. I regale my children with tales of how I used to eat my lunch huddled over a book in a corner of the school library because no one would let me sit at their lunch table. I comfort them with stories about geeks and nerds who went on to conquer the world.
There's only one problem. My children are nothing like me, and they can never quite figure out why I'm laying it on so thick. They aren't living out my childhood, they're living their own. Whatever problems they might have, and they've got plenty, they're not the same ones I had. Sure, they feel sorry for me, or the me that I once was, but they don't really get it. My oldest daughter is supremely confident, secure in her position in her class and with her friends. She's always been popular. She was the queen bee of Gymboree. My son doesn't have her social ease, but neither does he have quite my awkwardness.
And he loves dodgeball.
Halfway through the dodgeball wars, I dropped the ball. On purpose. Whatever I think of the pedagogical value of the game, the fact is my children are happy. They like school, they like gym class. What they don't like is their mother working out her adolescent traumas by berating their gym teacher.
There are times as a parent when you realize that your job is not to be the parent you always imagined you'd be, the parent you always wished you had. Your job is to be the parent your child needs, given the particulars of his or her own life and nature. It's hard to separate your remembered childhood and its emotional legacy from the childhoods that are being lived out in your house, by your children. If you're lucky, your kids will help you make that distinction. They'll look at you, stricken, and beg you not to harangue the coach, not to harass the mother of the boy who didn't invite them to the birthday party, not to intervene to rescind the lousy trade of Yu-Gi-Oh cards they made. You want to protect them, but sometimes what you have to protect them from is the ongoing avalanche of your own childhood -- crashing down on you like a hail of dodgeballs.
Edit: Everyone calm down. I know, you're upset, and you have your reasons and good arguments. But it's frankly a bit scary at how quickly the discussion is escalating along.
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no subject
Date: 2005-06-08 06:15 am (UTC)And should we give such options for other classes? What if they don't feel like reading Romeo and Juliet? Or learning the periodic table of the elements?
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Date: 2005-06-08 06:17 am (UTC)NO!!I'm expressing my opinion!!! Those class you actually have to learn those things,what education do you get out of playing dodge ball.Being ridiculed!! NONE, your self esteem goes down
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Date: 2005-06-08 06:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-08 06:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-08 06:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-08 06:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-08 06:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-08 09:54 am (UTC)I went ahead and jumped in because of your saying a discussion was genuinely desired, but it doesn't appear to be that way to me, from the response I got. Just thought I'd mention it to you directly.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-08 06:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-08 10:01 am (UTC)Just as in math or english, thrusting a child who is developmentally delayed into a PE situation where they have *no chance* of success, is cruel and does not benefit the child to any degree. It is irrelevent what the subject is. If they cannot process/understand/perform, it does nothing to educate or help them to throw them into the situation without support. The appropriate response is to provide support until the child has developmentally arrived at the milestone and can successfully read the story/solve the quadratic equation/hit the ball.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-08 10:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-08 10:18 am (UTC)And some just don't like to be competitive. So they grow up to be inactive - because they never learn that you can have fun moving without having to win a game.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-09 05:04 pm (UTC)However, I think
(Thank you for being so nice in your response, btw. It's greatly appreciated!)
no subject
Date: 2005-06-08 09:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-09 04:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-08 03:37 pm (UTC)I was not traumatized by dodgeball, although I do think it's a stupid game for gym class. First of all, the students most likely to need physical exertion will be out fastest, and thus get very little. Besides, standing around protecting your face until you're hit isn't exercise. Second, it is outright dangerous. I had no good options. I couldn't remove my glasses, because then I'd be the equivalent of legally blind. I couldn't wear my glasses and participate, because getting hit in the face when you're wearing glasses is a totally different and potentially much more painful experience. And it did happen from time to time, as the metal drives into your face. It just doesn't have value.
But it didn't traumatize me. And oddly, I liked a variant that had a dodge ball base - it was called steal the jewels. What I liked about it was that it had a lot of strategy/tactics to it. You got out by being tagged with a ball, but then you went to the other team's jail, but had the chance to be rescued, either by catching a ball or by someone else on your team making it through the other team's side and tagging you. Then you got safe passage back for both of you. There were also jewels, which you could run into the other team's side to try to steal and bring back, if you got tagged, you dropped the jewel where you were and went to jail. This meant that the best players did end up in jail, as they kept moving the jewels closer and closer to the line. And your own side had an incentive to get you out, because more players on your side was inherently useful, and even a bad player has a chance of tagging an opponent with a ball if they only have to run up to them while they're trying to steal a jewel or free a prisoner. But also, you were always involved, even while captured. And it certainly involved a lot more exercise.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-08 04:20 pm (UTC)I'm with you with the glasses thing - I was 9 when it finally became impossible for me to do PE without my glasses on. But again, our dodgeball was knees and below, and played with sponge balls. You would really, really struggle to hurt anyone playing it, particularly since 7-11 year olds aren't notorious for their rippling biceps.
Last year in a theatre performance I had someone thrown at my face (literally.) In the actual examined performance they hit me so hard that a) I was worried I'd broken (or bloodied at least) my nose and b) my glasses cut my face and the left arm bent by three inches! Stupid tutors wouldn't let me take the 20 minutes to dash back to my flat to grab my sunglasses so I had to sit there answering questions unable to see and developing quite the headache.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-08 04:40 pm (UTC)While, as I said, this wasn't horribly traumatizing, it was one of the things that led to my insistence that people never throw things at me, and my instinct when something is thrown at me to cover my face, and generally not to even bother attempting to catch it. Of course, now that I'm legally blind and don't have depth perception, it matters a whole lot less. But basically, dodgeball isn't educational, and it isn't exercise for a lot of the kids - so it's kind of pointless and potentially harmful. So, I'm fairly opposed. But I do think gym is important and should be retained, but preferably retooled to be more educational and useful. I would love it if it taught martial arts for a unit. This would still allow for problems for some people, but it would teach kids how to fall properly and give them all a chance at some self defense. Yes, the bullies would abuse it, but they already have a physical advantage. And at least martial arts are useful.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-08 04:50 pm (UTC)Funnily enough, a few years later I had my first try at badminton and was absolutely dreadful (I'm now a member of my university society and still pretty bad ;0) The reason? I couldn't see the shuttle in the air. For some years I always tried to play with a coloured shuttle because I had slightly more chance of being able to see it.
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Date: 2005-06-08 06:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-08 06:42 am (UTC)And you shouldn't get ridiculed playing, that is a problem with the teacher, not with the sport itself. You could get ridiculed anywhere.
So I don't see how you are tying up self esteem with playing a game. We have a nation of couch potato children who are getting adult onset diabetes at an early age, who are unhealthy, who cannot deal with others because we are coddling them and not letting them compete and learn teamwork, and there are those out there who would continue this horrible downward slide into mediocracy and ill health.
I say: LET THE GAMES BEGIN!
no subject
Date: 2005-06-08 08:02 am (UTC)It was because my son has high-functioning autism, and had serious motor delays. He *COULD NOT*, no matter how hard he TRIED, ever, ever have any fun playing that game, and inevitably came home, sobbing and miserable and feeling terrible about himself.
Feel free to decry my motives and mock parents like me, but I can tell you that if my son was not in gut-wrenching pain, I would have let him play. This isn't about "coddling" a kid who might lose a reasonable amount of the time. I think it is ridiculously STUPID to send a very young, developmentally-disabled child into a situation in which there CAN BE NO SUCCESS, and the only conclusion possible is torment and tears.
Now he is 12, has more or less "caught up" in the area of motor skills, and if he wants to play tag, that's fine by me. It was *not* fine when he was 6, and regardless of the disdain being heaped upon those who believe in accommodating a disability, it is the correct thing to do, especially when the child is too young to COMPREHEND any logical reason for their perpetual failure.
There is a legitimate difference in the developmental capability of children (even non-disabled ones), and torment does not, will not, never can equal healthy "improvement" in the area. Sometimes occupational therapy helps, and sometimes all it takes is a little more time for an otherwise typical child to develop competencies. Either way, I cannot fathom the point of wanting to gleefully heap misery on a child who is probably already suffering enough from their challenges.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-08 09:05 am (UTC)I would think that protecting a child with an inability to do something and just having a blanket objection to a game are two different things.
Or did you just want to use me as a soapbox for your grandstanding?
Not even worth commenting on, since you have your own agenda and aren't at all paying attention to anything I am saying.
Or do you just want pity from me? Not happening. You're not the only mother here, and your child is no more special than any of mine.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-08 09:50 am (UTC)I find those complaints tiresome and magnificantly ill-informed in terms of developmental issues, since they are often levelled at situations precisely like the one I described. Since the complainers have no idea what the individuals in question actually have to cope with in life, it's pretty arrogant to demonize everyone who might want to help protect a child from unneccessary misery.
I was not "grandstanding" either. I don't even understand how that applies. Unless of course you think an actual individual situation isn't worth acknowledging.
Please very specifically explain to me how anything I said was a request for pity, or a claim your child was in any way less "special" than mine? I don't speak NT subtext, but clearly you must, if you garnered anything like that from what I said. As far as I can tell, *you* are the one who has manipulated words here, since I said none of those things, but the specific charge of "coddling" was exactly what I was responding to...
no subject
Date: 2005-06-09 03:00 am (UTC)