School Says Game of Tag Is Out

Pretty soon we're just going to deserve it when an asteroid crashes into the planet.

I'd be interested to see the literature (if any) that the school used to justify its stance on how tag can negatively impact self esteem.

Apperently there was an imbalance between the different players that couldn't be fixed, so they considered the game unusable.



Oh well. MURDER* could be used as a more fair replacement. Less pure running and more ways to use your talents (can't run? Aim well. Can't aim? Dodge well? overall weak? Don't get the ball ALL the time!).


*= Basic concept: kids fling ball against a wall. If you touch the ball and drop it, you run to the wall before someone else hits you with the ball. Fail and you get a letter (starts with M, next is U, then R.. until MURDER). Getting all letters means standing on wall and getting slammed by ball.

As for dodge ball, however, I used to love the game, but a kid at my school did get sent to the hospital playing it. This beast of a man hurled a ball close distance and wailed him knocking him unconscious and giving him a concussion. I don't think it was intentional, but for some games, I can see the need to ban them.

My school went to court over it.

Heh, funny you should mention Murder, There is a school that is pressing Criminal charges against a 12 year old girl because she was "too rough" while playing that game.

Tag has been designated a bad game for a few years now actually. In california atleast.

There is a women who wrote a book called "The feminisation of Amercian boys" where she complains about all these things.

They are also finding that less and less males are going to university, and that girls who do exceptionally well in school, tend to do poorly or have so sense of self motivation once they graduate.

Its been a trend in the American education system for some 20 years now.

If the dumbass parents weren't so oversensitive and coddling, their precious kids wouldn't be so poor at Tag would they.

in the case of the 12 year old girl, the boy who got hit by the ball, His parents DID NOT ask for any legal action, the school did!

Same applies to the schools.

I think it's time to revise our stereotypes and let the idea settle in that in another generation to come, if that long, it'll be males doing the cooking and childtending and the girls that earn the big cash.

Time to read the manuals of your kitchen tools, guys! (and implement a decent online help system into the stove, darnit! IntelliSense-enabled cooking recipes FTW!)



I'm all for treating eachother nice and fair... but seriously, banning TAG? Meh. What's next, twisters? Can't jump? Too poor to buy a twister or too annoying to have at least two friends? Discrimination! Ban the game!

I remember in my school, (about 100 students from K-8th) we would play football. We told the teachers it was touch, but we really played tackle.

Once one of our friends hit his head on a concrete block surrounding a lightpole that was in the middle of our field. We were told to play in another field. Nobody sued, nobody banned our games.

What has the world come to? I bet if columbine type students were able to do P.E. (which they seem to have rmeoved from school cariculem as well) and get thier agression out in harmless activities, they would be less inclined to hold all thier anger in and then explode on day... litterally.

Daganev,

I'd love to see some research that justifies how the quote, "feminization of American boys" leads to trends in males being less likely to enter college or the notion that girls who do well in school "have no sense of self motivation once they graduate."

To be quite honest, these sorts of statements are something you would read in National Vanguard (which is a white supremist organization that tries with fancy words to make itself out to be something more than a group of racists). In fact, I found an article on this topic by National Vanguard while trying to find anything on google before checking an online research database, who is claiming the exact same thing...

If you really want to see the reasearch on it, go to the bookstore and pick up the damn book.

Its not a 1 page book, its about 300 pages.. its not a topic and study which can be easily summerized.

However, the statisitcs are clearly there, and the UC Regents have been trying to find a way to solve this problem.

The -simple- aspect of this is that in an attempt to make girls feel more comfortable in speaking out in class, educational formats have been changed to make things more intuned with the way girls think. Thus school becomes increadibly easy for the gifted women, just as in previous generations school was increadibly easy for giften men, who would end up not having much self motivation when graduating either. Its just a swing of the pendulum. If you are not challenged, and are rewarded for not being challenged, people tend to lose any motivation to go above and beyond.

However, this is more of a problem for women, because in the workforce, the mentality is still male centric.

You truly need to read some of the work by Albert Bandura and some of his contemporaries. Aggression is not something that is just "released" into the air.

Sorry, I got the title of the book wrong...

Marked Men: White Masculinity in Crisis
by Sally Robinson -

Who said anything about releasing agression into the air? You certainly can't release agression sitting still in a chair in a classroom while doped up on ritalin.

Come up with a the right title then as there is no book I can find that is called "the feminization of american boys."

Oh, and Albert B's definition of agression, is not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the basic definision of agression meaning the need to release energy through physical motion. Not violent agression or thought patterns.

If you need, here is an article about male vs female enrollment.

http://www.womanthouartgod.com/edgendergap05.php

from a feminist website no doubt.

You will have to forgive me, I read this in the bookstore some 4 years ago, I don't have the greatest of memories for such details.

Heh, I just looked at the first link again... yeah the article is from 2002.. I was surprised that it was banned "again"... but now I know.

Have you read any studies whatsoever on Columbine? I find it very alarming that anyone could take the stance that the "problem" in this case was that these boys never got to vent their aggression through some physical means.

It is worth noting that Eric Haris didn't hold his anger in till he exploded. He was exceptionally "angry" releasing his aggression all the time. For this reason, he was medicated with Luvox, which is the reason he was rejected from the Marines.

It wasn't as if he just saved it all up and exploded one day. He was exploding all the time.

My theory is that the principal can't run fast enough to stop the kids getting him. Sometimes, I think no new crazy thing can emerge from somewhere in the US, but then you see this. Yeesh.

Ok, after reading the article, and some further thoughts, I'm rather annoyed about how Fox presents that story.

There's two sides to it:

A) A school enforces adult supervision during a game that, as we all know, frequently produces small injuries, people running into each other, falling down, etc. We're talking about real kids here, not teenagers who're more or less able to look after themselves. Schools are legally required to ensure the safety of children while on school grounds. That's what they do.

B) A school bans a happy innocent game because it makes weak kids develop mental quirks because they feel bad losing. The game is not a safe way to train your physical abilities while having a good time, it's about winning, because you're either a winner or looser, if you can't win tag you won't get good grades in PE so you'll hate sports and grow fat and nobody likes fat people so you'll never get a decent job and die as a pennyless deserted wheelie at the age of 40, all because of that vile trice-cursed tag!

Guess which side makes more sense, and guess again which side takes up 90% of the article. Good old Fox.

Of course, that's not all there is to it, but it annoys me none the less.

good job twisting my words again...

There have been NUMEROUS events since columbine where children have been found plotting silently to imitate columbine, or have actually gone into school with guns and done such things. Its an adjective that described doing violence in school, not an analsyis of the particulare columbine event. Sheesh.

You know, like saying kleenex instead of facial tissue.





Isn't the story more about the mindset of the teachers and administrators more than the event of asking for suprivesed tag? The headline is a bit misleading, but thats what I thought the story was about, the thought process.