This morning Kathy told me that her first-graders are learning about exercise. This is how you explain what exercise is to kids that age: anything that makes you breathe hard, feel hot and turns your face red is exercise.
So then we reflected on a world that requires teachers to introduce the concept of exercise to little kids, who in another day and age would just naturally be outside breathing hard and feeling hot and turning red in the face. Then I remembered how Mrs. Thompson in the fourth grade used to play a record called "Chicken Fat" every day so we could get the wiggles out and also not turn (apparently) into fat chickens. So maybe we weren't really breathing super hard then after all.
A song like that seems kind of p. incorrect right now. But then practically everything we did in my school was p. incorrect. We prayed and the teachers smacked us with rulers. Also paddles. You had to wait until the fifth grade, though, until you got smacked with a paddle.
Good times!
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7 comments:
Oh, I got the school paddle. And also many visits to the principals office. It was a conspiracy.
Chicken fat, I want to hear that song. I would love to go back and watch you in elementary school. I'm so pulling that video from the shelves in heaven.
Hoping my kindergartener has Mrs. Kathy for first grade next year. Hoping a lot.
I just ended up smacking them with my words... p. incorrect or not, I taught my 3rd graders the chicken fat dance. They knew I thought they were fat... :)
Touch down, every morning.
Touch down, starting low
Give that chicken fat back to the chicken
And go you chicken fat go.
Yes, go you chicken fat go!
I just heard that in MA, schools are sending out "fat report cards" because, apparently, parents can't be trusted to know if their kids are overweight. "Socially? Great. Academically? Stellar. But sorry, your kid is fat. Bummer for you." (Is that crazy?)
(I am having "go, chicken fat, go" thoughts, too. I must have known that song once, long ago.)
Wow, I never saw a paddle at home or at school.
My father used an ax.
The elementary school principle, Miss Mary Hammer, used water boarding in the basement to great effect.
One of mine and Julie's friends is a grade school teacher. She teaches 3rd grade but she had to go to recess with them and teach them tag, how to race, and hopscotch because none of them had ever played them before. Most of the boys asked "why can't we play X-Box at recess?" What have our kids come to? Give them 20 years and we will be fat, unable to have a conversation, and have only virtual reality lives.
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