Dan's Papers - June 5, 2009

The last month of school always felt like the last quarter mile on a 3-mile jog. You know you'll reach the finish eventually, but until then it feels like running in place, in quicksand. For school-aged kids, the only thing that gets you through is the precious June field trip. Being far away from my school years, I'd completely forgotten about field trips, but now that our son has a few scheduled, it all came back to me.

Growing up in Pittsburgh and attending a Catholic school for 11 years, I had some interesting field trips. Aside from one foray per year to the local amusement park and Pittsburgh Symphony Concerts for Children on school days, the big events were baseball games. Catholic nuns really like baseball. For Sister Clarence, a round Irish nun with an equally round, red face, it was a second religion. When the Pirates played their last game at Forbes Field, the entire elementary school was given the afternoon off to go to the stadium for the game. But other than that special occasion, our "field trips" to the games were confined in the classroom. Clarence would put her little transistor radio on her desk, facing out toward the class, and we would sit quietly with our hands folded, listening to the broadcast.

My son has it better. Living in the Hamptons, he has the opportunity to visit incredible places. He's already gone to LongHouse Reserve in East Hampton - Jack Larsen's beautiful garden filled with specimen plants and outrageous sculpture. Last week the class went to the pond in the Bridge Golf Course and scooped out tadpoles and saw bullfrogs' bulging eyes peeking above the water's surface. They went from there to Morton Wildlife Reserve, where chickadees land on your hand if you're lucky - and very still. Then they hiked to the beach. Next week they'll go to Little Fresh Pond in Amagansett to catch crabs.

Not only is he enjoying outings in some of the most beautiful spots on the East Coast, he's also improving his mind and behavior. Studies earlier this year showed that recess - specifically in natural settings - improves a child's academic performance. A pediatrician at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine led one study. It showed that kids 8 and 9 years old who had at least 15 minutes of recess every day had better behavior than classroom bound kids. What's ironic and sad about this is that often children who misbehave in class are punished by losing the privilege of recess - the very thing that would improve their behavior! A Harvard study showed that kids who passed physical fitness tests did better academically. The more fitness tests they passed, the better.

The most striking report involved kids with ADHD. Those who took a simple walk outdoors had improved attention and concentration. If those walks were in natural settings as opposed to urban areas, the kids did even better. In fact, in some cases, the exposure to nature had better effects on the child's behavior than a dose of medication.

When my partner and I left the city, I was concerned that we might be depriving Hudson of the maximum academic/cultural stimulation he would need to compete in the big bad world (mea culpa). But we knew there were many advantages of his growing up out here. To remind myself, I kept a picture on my desk of him at about two years old. He's standing with his back to me in a concrete playground wet with rain at dusk. Just across the street is a flickering neon Liquor Store sign.

I know I know. Central Park and the parks along the rivers. But this was our playground at Bleeker Street, across from our apartment. Every time I looked at that photo, then looked out the window, I felt pretty sure we had made the right choice. And now modern science has absolved me of any residual guilt.