NEWS: Just Say "No" to Gymnastics

CULTURE: Just Say "No" to Gymnastics

An 11-year-old Los Angeles girl has been suspended from her school for doing cartwheels. Cartwheels.

Apparently, Deirdre Faegre had been repeatedly asked to stop her child-like behavior out of safety concerns for the other children, the principal claimed.

Faegre's father, in a wonderful display of parental logic, argued that it made little sense that other sports were allowed, but his daughter's flip-floppery was not.

Of course, we all know that cartwheels are just a gateway activity to harder actions, such round-offs.

Heaven forbid that a few children get bruised. Anyone else miss the days when a playground was a set of steel monkey bars eight feet over concrete, a metal slide that you could fry bacon on any time the sun came out, and a swingset the you could get twenty feet high on while you tried to get over the bar?

Ah, that little girl's just a flip-flopper, and she didn't really earn those merit badges of hers, either. Or at least that's what I heard from the Girl Scout Veterans for Truth...

hey, now. this is Lifestyles...

That is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. I could understand if she was doing cartwheels up and down the aisles in the classromm, but at lunchtime? What the fuck?

People are idiots.

Ah, those were the days. I remember one week in like third grade where two kids (in incidents separated by days) broke their arm falling off the monkey bars. We still had recess.



[Edited on Nov 12, 2004 10:12PM]

When I was a child, you didn't have a good recess if you didn't come in bleeding. At this rate, a paper cut is going to become the worst injury in a child's life.
And when they take away my paper is when I finally get off my ass and start whining some more.

At this rate, our grandchildren are gonna be some weak helpless little bastards

The link to the original article is broken, so I can't get more info on the suspension, but as someone who works with children, I can see how this would be valid. If the child had been asked several times to stop, she was being clearly defiant by continuing to do cartwheels. If she was in even a semi-crowded gym, and there are children doing other things, she could easily have not been able to see children in her path while she was doing cartwheels and kick somebody in the head.

i used to get beat up by girls on the play ground and i'm not ashamed to admit it... i would let them chase me and pretend i didn't like it, but you know all day i was looking at the clock, awaiting recess and my next beat down.

Patton must have been having a bad day or is simply out of her fucking mind.

In high school I was given a detention for whistling once. When I didn’t show up to serve it, I was called into the principles office the next day. I told him the teacher was stressed out, losing her mind, and trying to make an example out of me. He apparently hadn’t read what my detention was for and when he saw it the charge of “whistling” excused me and told me not to worry about it.

She was fired at the end of the year. Hopefully Patton will follow in her footsteps.

it worked for me when i tried it, but just in case...

http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/story.jsp?flok=ne-odd-12-l4&flok=FF-RTO-reodd&idq=/ff/story/0002%2F20041112%2F1051522742.htm&sc=reodd

"There was a problem retrieving the story."

Maybe I'm just doing it wrong.

i didnt bother reading the whole story, but seriously, i remember when i was in elementry school and middle school and stuff and like all the girls lining up and taking turns doing cartwheels during recess, i dont understand why there is a problem with it unless they were doing it down the halls or something dumb like that

it sure is.

It wasn't that much of a story, here it is:

when i was a kid, playgrounds were steel monkey bars eight feet over concrete, a metal slide that you could fry bacon on any time the sun came out, and a swingset the you could get twenty feet high on while you tried to get over the bar AND WE LIKED IT

...

[Edited on Nov 12, 2004 by crispy]

Man... seriously... we used to do shit that would just about get us killed... only not quite, because we weren't stupid. We'd push the swing-set until we were doing loops over the bar... it wasn't worthwhile unless the seat of the swingset ended up wrapped N times around the bar (for some suitably large value of N)!!!

Now... who's going to teach the new kids the fine line between crazy and stupid? It's an important line, but... who really understands it, now? Alas for our future generations of playground kids...

...I always rounds off were the gateway activity...

kids and parents are pussies these days in america. nuff said.

It's a playground. Kids are supposed to run around and get fresh air. That's the point. If she had been in a crowded cafeteria, then fine... sure... I can see that, but on a playground?

I wish they'd said where she'd been doing cartwheels. That would give a bit more perspective to the story.

she was in a caffeteria
read the story

its a legitimate afety thing
maybe a tad heavy-handed
but the youth need to be disciplined
hoodlum ganstas

when i was in sixth grade, there was this gymnast girl. we played capture the flag during P.E. and she'd just do cartwheels/flips all the way back across the line. it sucked!! you couldn't tag her without getting levelled and such. i did all of those fun recess things too, but come on, i wanted to win at capture the flag! it was scary!