RECESS!

Jerry Apps’ essay on recess brought to light many ideas about the importance of free learning, free interaction, and fun. Through different accounts of recess in rural areas, Apps argues that recess provides the time and space to develop “friendships that lasted a lifetime. We learned how to play, how to relate, how to get along with both boys and with girls [gender socialization], with those older, and those younger” (119).(Question: Is recess the only place this could happen? The same could be argued for playing with neighborhood kids. I feel like I learned such things in the classroom, Tv, and movies just as much as I did at recess.) Students are being socialized during these times of recess, not by an authority but by interactions where they are creating meanings like socially appropriate and accepted ways of interacting with the opposite sex or the power relations in ageism, or conflict resolution. Apps writes that it was a prerequisite to get along to attend a rural school. This essay reminded me a lot of the film we watched on the Albany Free School because the times allotted for recess was the whole school day for learners at the Free School. The one account of creating an igloo was analogous to the film that the young boy was making at the Albany Free School. The freedom to do these things would not be found in urban schools. Yet, recess is found in any school and I came to a greater appreciation for this activity. Recess is often thought of as an activity for elementary students and when students get progressively older we see less and less recess. Why do we have recess at a young age and not at the high school level? Vygotsky can be applied to Apps’ emphasis on recess because he argues that learning is happening not only in a classroom but on the social level of recess where the repeating interactions socialize children to know how to solve conflicts, interact with the opposite sex. The account by the teacher locked in the woodshed and being released when it was time to ring the bell also displays a social order that all the children follow. The children have to release the teacher because without the bell they would not know what to do next – Foucault may be applied to look at this situation as the disciplined body that cannot function without its internalized signs (the school bell).