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by Jim King One day, while I was facilitating a group of high school mentors and their grade school mentees, I was amazed by an eight year old's comment. We were involved with an icebreaker activity called Memory Circle. We had established a pattern for the beanbags to travel by calling out a person's name and then tossing the beanbag to that person. After first getting the order down, we attempted to increase the speed of the beanbag within the circle. Once the group accomplished this task they wanted to try something more difficult. The group decided to try four beanbags. After sucessfully using four, we discussed how to increase the difficulty again. The group decided to try eight at one time. As the eight beanbags were traveling around the established pattern you can imagine things became more hectic. Having completed three rounds, I started dropping the beanbags out one at a time until they were all gone, and then we took time to debrief the activity. After the activity we sat down and I gave each person in the circle a chance to comment about the beanbag or just pass. We started on my left, the first student said, "It was fun." The next youngster was a second grader and eight years old. He began by saying how he thought what we had just done was a lot like life! When the eight beanbags were being thrown at the same time, it was rather hectic and reminded him of many things in life that you are faced with that zoom by you everyday. Even though that is something that probably comes out of this Icebreaker at time, it really surprised me coming from an eight year old. Later, I grew to appreciate how amazing this observation was because of the background of this child. This eight year old did not come from a nuturing environment, nor was he a gifted student. He was an average student struggling through school and home life because of an abusive parent. Our principal was very moved by the comments of this eight year old boy. It may have been the defining moment in our program when he and I both realized the impact even simple group initiatives could have on our children. After that expereince he wrote up the following questions to take to our school board. Here are the questions: 1) How can such a simple activity inspire this type of complex thought? 2) What can we as adults learn from this young man's words? 3) How would you measure the value of this eight-year old student's experience? 4) What type of modeling are we doing as parents, school board members, administrators, teachers and support staff? 5) Five years from now will this child remember the books he read, the tests he took, the grades he received, or will he remember how the teacher treated him in class? Editor's Note: Jim King is a very well respected Physical Education Teacher and coach in his home community of Eureka, Illinois. About five years ago he attended several seminars in Adventure/Challenge Education at the Illinois State Physical Education Convention. As a lifelong educator he was "bitten" by the adventure bug and knew he needed to develop a program for the students in his school. However, he was not really sure what this Adventure "stuff" was or how it really worked. He slowly started to investigate by reading suggested books, attending more seminars, talking with speakers, calling them on the phone, and visiting schools with established programs. As he gathered information he talked with his building administrators and school board members about the program and the positive impact it could have not only for the school but the entire community. Today he has a fully integrated Adventure/Challenge Education program for his students and is developing plans to involve the high school, sports teams, and community groups. He will be presenting a workshop at the Illinois State Physical Education Convention, in November, 2001, about his program. He would be happy to give you all the information he has to help you start your own program if you are interested. Jim King
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