Cool runnings Sledding slides into curriculum at Orono school

When I was a child, I waited all day to get out of school to go sledding in winter. Bundled in hats and gloves and bulging hand-me-down coats, my sister and I would tromp next door to Mrs. Carson’s to borrow her Flexible Flyer. It belonged to her much-older son and, while we had our own sleds, none was as fast as that Flyer. Mrs. Carson, who was elderly and lived alone, was only too happy to let us in the basement door to grab the old sled.

From there, we would meet our girlfriend in the alley behind our house and head for the modest hills in the neighborhood woods. Other kids would be there, too, their sleds and aluminum saucers already icy with use on jumps and curves painstakingly built earlier in the day. Sometimes we would place sleds side by side, like boats rafting, and lock arms before heading down piled three bodies high.

With the wind smacking our faces, we had such a sense of freedom, release and abandon. The snow meant all the more to us because we lived in a temperate climate. We coveted snow as a rare wonder. Whenever it came, about once a year, we had the day off from school. Surely our city invested more in daffodils, tulips and cherry blossoms than in snowplows, so it was safer for us school kids to stay home – sometimes for three days.

The point for us was: Snow equaled no school and no school equaled sledding. When the evening news forecast flurries, all the 11-year olds went to bed praying for a blizzard. Please, we pleaded with St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes, let there be snow tomorrow.

Imagine my surprise when Bangor Daily News photographer Leslie Barbaro left an enterprising handful of snow-play pictures on my desk recently with a note explaining that sledding had been elevated to an official curriculum for winter physical education classes at Orono Middle School. Are you kidding? I thought. But it was true. The kids were students and the students were sledding. In class. I was aghast. And jealous.

Perplexed, I called Chad Kirkpatrick, first-year phys ed teacher at the school. What, I asked, is going on here?

“We are trying to give these kids skills they can participate in for the rest of their lives,” Kirkpatrick told me jocularly. “This is about healthy lifestyle. If these kids are doing things they enjoy into their 30s and 40s and 50s, I’d be happy. And they’ll be healthier for it.”

That’s what Dodi Saucier said, too. She and Kirkpatrick designed the six-week winter activity unit to get students, ages 11 to 13, out in the fresh air using the resources in their own back yards – or schoolyard, as the case may be – to get exercise. They ice-skated. They snowshoed. They played broom ball. They cross-country skied. And by golly, they sledded.

It wasn’t as if Saucier and Kirkpatrick had to teach children to sled – any more than they had to teach them to put on hats and scarves (although the lesson plans do include a chapter on preparedness for the outdoors, and Kirkpatrick, a committed outdoorsman, assembled a grab bag of warm clothing to share with students). To underscore the importance of a fitness philosophy, the teachers required students to check heart rates while sledding and to write in activity journals at home. They wanted young people to think locally, expansively and carefully about maintaining strength and good habits – just as a way of life. After all, exercise doesn’t have to culminate in March Madness or the homecoming football game or the winning goal.

“Phys ed used to be so sports oriented,” said Saucier, who has taught in the Orono school system for 20 years. “Our big push now is to get kids to recognize the need for physical activity and to motivate them to engage in it more. Competitive sports aren’t for everyone. We didn’t want to focus on perfecting skills but on raising awareness of ways to be active.”

Fair enough. But isn’t it disorienting to enter class and hear your teacher say: “OK kids, suit up, we’re headed for the slopes”?

“It was kind of weird,” said seventh-grader Ruth Worboys. “It was good fun though.”

Moreover, it wasn’t boring.

“Most of our previous gym teachers did inside stuff like volleyball or basketball,” said Michael Benn, an eighth-grader who learned to skate during the class. “I thought this was a lot better and funner because we got to go outside. It felt like the weekend.”

My point exactly. What’s the world of education coming to if kids actually get to have fun at school? Another way of saying this is: I was born at the wrong time.

Frankly, teaching young people to make use of the world around them in an active, recreational, conscious way seems rather enlightened – in a gymnastically Zen way, if you will. The kids I spoke to said they may not have learned the same lessons as in a traditional class but they agreed they could easily be persuaded to engage in winter activities both in and outside of school. Without pleas for divine intervention, these students can realistically hope the unit will become a regular part of the school year. (Unless, of course, global warming kicks in a little too forcefully and snow disappears entirely from the planet, in which case we all had better plan to drop to our knees and pray to St. Jude.)

For spring, Kirkpatrick is cheerily organizing an outdoor club. He plans to take members white-water rafting or hiking. Maybe eventually, they could get credit for walking to school, too. (My idea, not his.)

As for learning lifelong habits, one boy had me considering the possibility of unearthing the old Flexible Flyer. “Even older people sled,” he assured.