Invisible Runner on Second (part II)

We used to play in the woods. Long, boundless games of imagination that usually involved saving the world, homemade bows and arrows, muddy shoes, and looking under fallen tree limbs for salamanders. Apparantly kids don't do that anymore. Again, we are so busy scheduling them with appropriate cultural and motor skill developing activities that kids have lost out on a basic part of childhood.

The same sorts of rules that applied to homegrown games of wiffleball or football in the backyard were as applicable but more changeable and just as useful in the development of a social hierarchy and skill. I was certainly not a beneficiary of that hierarchy. I fell at the bottom of the caste system, but that didn't prevent me from understanding how it worked and working through complex games of imagination. All tolled, I spent hundreds of hours in Willards Woods with my cousin, banishing evil, rescuing the needy (usually a frog, but possibly a bird, chipmunk, or lost dog), borrowing plots at will from Edward Eager, C.S. Lewis, or Joan Aiken.


It was when I was observing my students in the lab that I realized they don't play outside anymore. I can't imagine trying to tally the number of grasshoppers, dragonflies, fireflies, and other bugs that found their way into a glass jar with holes poked into the top in mybedroom when I was a child. Outside the Burlington Ice Palace alone, I probably studied 200 grasshoppers in their meadow, formerly a parking lot undergoing its own form of ecosystem succession. Yet this year, I encountered a set of children that were truly dismayed by the activity of looking at a preserved grasshopper, earthworm, or crayfish. And forget about dissecting a frog. Vomitting in the parking lot; migraines at home; fretful emails from parents: please don't make my son do this disturbing thing. No where was the delight or interest that I had as a youth and that I anticipated from my students.

"Didn't you ever play with bugs?" I asked, "didn't you play in woods or meadows?" No, they had preschool music class, Little League, Pop Warner, soccer practice, X-box, Nick Jr., and Disney Channel. One or two renegade children of dissident parents like me who sent their kids outside, and said, "Go play!" had the natural curiosity, had enough oooh and not so much eww to really find the activities enjoyable.

Just maybe some of the parents might forgo yoga one day, turn off the TV, and take a walk in the woods, stopping to look under some leaf detritus for salamanders. Hopefully they'll remember the decadence of an unencumbered childhood rather than scheduling: walk in woods, 10 a.m; salamander discovery, 10:17 a.m..