Opinions

Kids Don't Learn the Ropes These Days



I attended a recent back-to-school event in the gymnasium of my son’s elementary school. Other parents I know and like were there. Conspicuously absent was something I once knew but never liked. I speak of the dreaded climbing rope.

How this activity, a cruel mainstay of physical-education curricula throughout my grade-school years, got past the school board is beyond me. Maybe it was hidden from the lawyers. Perhaps a well-meaning educational theorist actually believed swashbuckling was an important life skill.

I don’t know. All I know is when my dreams carry me back to my coming-of-age years, I’m oversleeping the SAT, leaving the locker room in a shirt but no shorts and contending with the climbing rope: respectively my recurring high-, middle- and elementary-school nightmares.

If you’re over 40, you likely remember the scene. In a corner of the gym, three menacing ropes dangled from the rafters, descending 25 feet or so to the unforgiving floor. When I first laid eyes on them in the fourth grade, I couldn’t say whether these ceiling serpents were activity or punishment.

My fear was entirely reasonable in the grim context of gyms those days. Along the wall girls were made to perform something called a flexed-arm hang, at the end of which they rattled like Apollo 13 on re-entry. Saturnine boys meanwhile hoisted themselves up a wall-mounted pegboard better suited for Parris Island than elementary school. Joy hardly abounded.

My gym teachers—there were always two—quickly confirmed rope-climbing was a sanctioned activity. They relished telling me, knowing I was more inclined to derring-don’t than -do. While shinnying up to the rafters surely delighted future Navy SEALs in my midst, it terrified me.

In theory, a spotter at the rope’s base helped ease the climber’s ascent. In practice, however, the spotter swung the rope wildly, like a CrossFitter jacked on Mountain Dew. The rule seemed to be the better the friend doing the spotting, the worse the gyrations, making an already dangerous clamber more so.

Even in ideal conditions, you still had to wrangle with someone like Lars. This was the mean kid one rope over who, 15 feet above the ground, leg-wrestled anyone he could engage. All this—the pirouetting rope, Lars’s leg-whips—for what? The right to reach the rafters, look down and think: I’m too young to die.

Sure, there was a mat laid out below, one blue rectangle tucked tidily under each rope. But it looked thick enough to extend life for a day or two in the event of a free fall. I can see clearly now: The mats were there mostly to quicken the proverbial cleanup in aisle two.

This is why I was so relieved at back-to-school night. The teachers could have said anything in that gym about the year ahead and it wouldn’t have mattered. I saw what I came to see: No climbing ropes, or anyone resembling Lars.

It was a safe space—if not in modern parlance, at least in the way that mattered to me. My son should have a banner year.

Mr. Kerrigan is an attorney in Charlotte, N.C.



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