On Risk, Playgrounds and Growing Up to be Capable

Imagine: An adult is hit by a soccer ball on a playground, and unfortunately suffers a concussion. What would you do, if you administered a school? An administrator in a public school in Toronto faced this issue recently, and so banned the use of inflated balls in the schoolyard.

In some schools, games of tag and other chase and elimination games have been banned, following particular complaints of injury or the bruising of self-esteem.

Some places have removed playgrounds, because there is some fear that children may hurt themselves.

At our school, we are very aware of risk, and – because of that awareness – we will not be banning tag, banning balls, or removing playgrounds. A friend of mine, Stephen Smith, who teaches and writes at Simon Fraser University (phenomenology and Physical Education) notes that risk is an important component of development in children. It is through the taking of risks that children learn to be competent, to overcome fear, to work with others, and to measure their own abilities and learn new ones. When children play outside, they are often very shrewd judges of their own capabilities; they will only go so far up the rope climber unless they are certain of their own capacities. Their sense of their own self-worth is developed through increasing their competence, not through avoiding challenge.

Report Cards: Politics, Education and the Rhetoric of Caring

In this Morning’s Vancouver Sun, there was an Op-Ed by Geoff Johnson, a retired public school Superintendent, entitled, “Make report cards relics of the past”. Mr. Johnson suggests that “All the fuss about report cards and the importance of letter grades supported by vague generic comments is a fuss about the wrong thing. As public education moves toward 21st-century individualized learning, the systems of reporting progress will need to move with it and the traditional report card will become a quaint relic of the previous century.”

He is, of course, both right and wrong. We might agree that public school report cards have to change. We may also agree that poorly scheduled parent-teacher interviews, characterized by long lineups of parents, need to change. We agree that children need individual attention. However, saying that report cards should be relics of the past indicates that Mr. Johnson needs greater exposure to well-done and well-conceptualized report cards that pay attention to the individual child, and do not simply regurgitate comments that are found on a list, stored in some computer somewhere. Families and children do benefit from report cards – they may not, however, benefit from sloppy, poorly executed report cards, and ill-considered parent-teacher interviews wherein public school teachers are swamped.