Recess Battles: Playing, Fighting, and Storytelling

1. Violence as “The Recess Problem”

17 - 1 VIOLENCEAS “THERECESSPROBLEM” Mr. Rumble, an energetic, middle-aged white man, wore professional clothes and sparkled with the energy of someone who was confident in his role as principal. He welcomed me as a fellow professional and became nostalgic for his graduate school days. A man in transition, he allowed me complete access to the school for research purposes. I observed not only the school yard but the cafeteria, the gym, the evening holiday performances, and the third-, fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade classrooms , and hung out in the teachers’ lounge. Eventually I was allowed to videotape—with parental permission—from the school’s second-floor window and on the playground itself. As part of my agreement with Mr. Rumble, I was asked to find patterns of aggression in the school yard as I recorded the children’s folk games. This agreement rationalized my constant presence, given the ever-present concerns regarding “school yard violence” and “the recess problem.” Because educators assumed that recess was violent, playtime had been canceled, reintroduced, canceled again, turned into gym, made into a formalized program, and then reinstituted as a consequence of teachers’ union demands. Years after the first cancellation, teachers at the school still spoke of “the recess problem,” and I set out to find out what that problem was. 18 Playin’and Fightin’ In the teachers’ lounge and in university libraries, the playground has typically been associated with violence, chaos, and bullying rather than what I saw: friendship, skill, challenge, and the negotiation of culture. The grown-ups of the Mill School consistently used chaotic, wild, and unruly to describe school yard happenings. Their eyes saw the zigzagging runners and the children who refused to cooperate to line up and were surprised that the children actually played as many games as they did. The staff grimaced at games with names that invoked mock violence (Suicide Handball and the Fighting Game) yet were nostalgic about their own childhood games, which they remembered with difficulty (Red Rover, tag, dodgeball). Educators used the violent game titles to rationalize militancy and told stories of children needing to be taken to the nurse after recess play. Given the Mill School’s mix of pretend violent drama and real aggression, distinctions used by animal ethologists to study play fighting in the wild offer the most useful place to start. Gregory Bateson, ever watchful of animal play, notes that play fighting is very much like the real thing but is not the real thing exactly.1 Play fighting and real aggression are communicatively different, signaling different kinds of relationships, even though the mock and the real fighting can slip from one to another in an instant. In play fighting, the children, like animals, generally remain together after the episode is over. In moments of real fighting, the individuals separate.2 The quality of the activity is signaled by this extension of continued relationship or the breaking up of the interaction. Anthony Pellegrini’s work on rough-and-tumble play has raised some important questions regarding the exact descriptions of this type of activity , highlighting adult misperceptions about what is destructive and what is merely playful.3 But the literature on play fighting has virtually ignored children’s control or lack of control in the creation of violent moments. I decided to have the children give advice about “the recess problem” and to comb through the video ethnographic data to look for patterns. Where and when were children getting hurt in the school yard? Is the removal of their playtime justified, or is it, as sociologist Pierre Bourdieu would suggest, a “useful fiction”?4 In their interviews, the children gave clues to the key moments to be studied. They repeatedly mentioned the difficulty of ending recess and how children were often hurt while lining up. One boy who spoke little 19 Violence as “The Recess Problem” during our discussions said that “going in was the worst part of school.” It was the pointer I was looking for. When the bell rings, we like— When the bell rings— We try to stay there— I know! When the bell rings, and when our teacher [speaking urgently into the microphone]— When the bell rings and when our teacher, and when they don’t come, and when they don’t come out early— Yeah. We start playing rope again! And when the bell rings...