Officials at an elementary school south of Boston have banned kids from playing tag, touch football and any other unsupervised chase game during recess for fear they’ll get hurt and hold the school liable.Recess is “a time when accidents can happen,” said Willett Elementary School Principal Gaylene Heppe, who approved the ban.

While there is no districtwide ban on contact sports during recess, local rules have been cropping up. Several school administrators around Attleboro, a city of about 45,000 residents, took aim at dodgeball a few years ago, saying it was exclusionary and dangerous.

Elementary schools in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and Spokane, Washington, also recently banned tag during recess. A suburban Charleston, South Carolina, school outlawed all unsupervised contact sports.

“I think that it’s unfortunate that kids’ lives are micromanaged and there are social skills they’ll never develop on their own,” said Debbie Laferriere, who has two children at Willett, about 40 miles south of Boston. “Playing tag is just part of being a kid.”

Another Willett parent, Celeste D’Elia, said her son feels safer because of the rule. “I’ve witnessed enough near collisions,” she said.

Oh No!!! Not near collisions! that is terrible! What would we do with out these people carefully watching the kids run around the playground.

In the principal’s office:

“I brought this child in.”

“What did he do?”

“I caught him running around playing tag.”

“Is this true Jimmy?”

“Yes.”

“Thats IT! Detention for all the 5th graders! Get out of my office, scum!”

–Sean

Seriously… wtf? It’s so not about volleyball… and it looks like they are made of Jello… Kind of disturbing.

Ok, so I decided that I would get a blog over here cause I got bored of the blogspot one, and hadn’t posted over there in a long long time. This also looked interesting and it is open source so I can see how it works.

There is a pipe that burst (apparently) under my house in Peterborough, so my house STINKS! It is terrible. We called the landlord today and he was here almost all day (he is a great guy) working on the problem. He still hasn’t fixed the whole thing quite yet, but at least we can now flush a toilet without worrying about it filling up the basement. We still can’t run the shower (I don’t want to risk it really) or anything on the main floor yet. I am not sure exactly why this is (I think it might be because this is the pipe that burst). He is coming back tomorrow to finish fixing the problem (he is replacing the pipes that were broken). Fortunately this is reading break and we don’t have to worry about being anywhere or needing to get anything done really so we can stick around while he fixes the problem. I am not sure whether or not we will be paying him for the pipe that he needed to buy (as it is probably our fault that this happened).

I think I know exactly what happened actually… Matt decided to put paper towels in the toilet and it got clogged so he used a plunger and sent them down the drain clogging it and making the pressure in the pipe build up and therefore breaking the pipe. If that is the problem we shall have to talk to him about the miraculous thing called a dish cloth, which can be washed and not flushed down the toilet.

Reading break is not really a break at all though, it is a time to do 2 assignments, to study for the math 260 quiz, and possibly to meet with teachers about the 401 project. Hopefully I will have enough time to figure out the assignments by myself as I have not really looked at them. The 332 one is probably going to be the hardest one as we have to prove one method of CPU scheduling is faster than another (I think). The 305 one will be a lot easier (I hope) because I think I have payed better attention in that class compared to 332 (and it is more interesting to me). I wonder if Steve will be able to help me with the 332 assignment.

The quiz that I have to study for is COSC/Math 260. It should be not too much of a problem, as it is a really short thing compared to the others (man I love Firefox 2.0 RC3 with its integrated spell checker and dictionary). The first one was not too bad, I probably should have studied a bit better for it though.

And I am off.