The little girl, a third-grader, is walking along the edge of the playground, in that safe no-man's-land where the blacktop meets the grass. She stops and swings her jacket over her head, bringing it down toward her feet as if it were a jump rope. There are still 25 minutes of recess left before she can go back inside.
Over on the grass there are girls doing cartwheels and girls playing soccer and boys trying out their WWF moves. On the blacktop there are kids playing tag and kids shooting baskets. On the edge, between the blacktop and the grass, is where the kids who hang back hang out.Recess may, stereotypically, be every child's favorite "subject." But for many kids, recess is the most difficult time of day, a time when it's most apparent that they don't fit in.
"Hi, Mr. Hansen," says the little girl, happy to come upon an ally.
Barry Hansen is the principal at Mountain Shadows Elementary in West Valley City, a school with 1,000 students and a spacious stretch of lawn where kids can run free. Like all elementary school playgrounds, it's a place where you can easily see both how fun and difficult childhood can be.
How are you today? Hansen asks the girl. OK, she says. What are you doing, he asks. Nothing, she says. Where are your friends? Playing soccer, she says. I don't like to play soccer, she adds. What would you like to do, asks Hansen. I don't know, says the little girl.
Hansen has done his share of recess duty over the years and has become something of a playground sociologist.
"An interesting society takes place during recess," he says. "You've got your social kids. You've got your deviate element, whose whole mission is to disrupt. And you've got your loners."
You've got, in other words, a miniversion of the adult world. A miniworld where the people who will someday be adults are learning how to get along in a place with rules but not much structure.
Unlike the rest of the school day -- when a child's time and behavior are prescribed -- recess is a time when a child is pretty much on her own. Where anything can happen.
Here come two second-graders, complaining that another little girl called them "the b-word." Hansen tells them he'll have a talk with the girl and later, true to his word, he seeks her out in her classroom. In the time it takes for her to walk from her desk to the door, her chin has started to tremble. "I want my mommy," she says between sobs.
Later, Hansen confides that the little girl comes from a difficult home situation, has likely been abused and shows signs of both depression and aggression. Her teacher explains that "she was fine in class this morning, but she sometimes loses it on the playground."
"Recess time is, for many, many children, the most challenging time of the day," says Doug Goldsmith, executive director of the Children's Center, a therapeutic preschool for children with emotional and behavioral problems. "Parents seriously underestimate how complicated recess is.
"If a child has great athletic or social skills," says Goldsmith, "then recess is ideal. You play hard and everybody wants to be on your team."
For the others -- the ones who are clumsy or timid or haven't yet figured out the nuances of when to laugh or how close to stand -- it's harder. These are the children who will be teased or ignored, who won't know what to do, who may turn into bullies themselves.
Even for those kids who do fit in, the complex politics of recess includes learning to negotiate and fend off. Visit any elementary school at recess, and you'll see a fair amount of shoving, some of it good-natured, some not.
On many playgrounds, says Goldsmith, "the level of aggression is more intense" today, even at the preschool level, and not just at his preschool. Survival on the playground is harder than it was 20 or 30 years ago, he says. Because more kids see more violence -- on TV, in video games, sometimes at home, he says -- "we've upped the ante."
In addition, he says, "we're socializing kids too soon and too quickly. We're putting 2-year-olds into group play situations when they're not neurologically wired for group play. And there often aren't enough adults there. It's each kid out for himself."
At Harry S. Truman Elementary in the Granite district, Sheral Schowe runs TIP (the transition intervention program), aimed at reducing school violence in children as young as 6.
"Most of the referrals for my classroom are for kids who have acted out only at recess," she says.
The acting out ranges from teasing to extortion of other children's lunch money. Through positive reinforcement, says Schowe, the nine-week program teaches students (and their parents) more acceptable social skills.
Most schools now focus on "character education," teaching children values such as respect and caring. At some schools children also learn social survival skills. At Plymouth Elementary in the Granite district, school psychologist Pat Bowdey helps children learn, for example, how to react to teasing.
"We practice a lot," says Bowdey. "We practice what to say to yourself. Or what to say back. You can say, 'I don't like it when you call me names.' Or you can make a joke out of it, or give them a compliment."
Some schools are also trying to rein in recess. Some, like Northstar Elementary in the Salt Lake City district, have tried to make recess more structured. Aides and volunteers arrange and monitor games of basketball and flying Dutchman. Anyone is invited to play, but the games are especially geared toward those kids who can't figure out what to do at recess and at those kids whose social skills need some fine-tuning.
At Crestview Elementary in the Granite district, school social worker Edy Miller and intern Mark Hales have run a six-week "recess intervention" program this year in every classroom, kindergarten through sixth grade. The program, based on a unit developed by Sara Spencer and Laura Layton at Woodstock Elementary, aims to create a "threat-free environment" at recess.
Miller and Hales have also taught Crestview second- through sixth-graders the conflict mediation process and have trained some students as conflict managers. Last week, eight fourth-grade conflict managers, donning their "I Am Fair" aprons, practiced resolving some make-believe conflicts, then headed out to the playground for the first time as real-life conflict managers.
Conflict managers. Recess intervention. It may not be the recess that parents and grandparents remember. And yet some things haven't changed. The playground is still filled with little girls practicing their handstands. And, on a recent afternoon, there was even a little knot of girls hovering over a "cootie catcher."