Grex Aaypsi Conference

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Grex Aaypsi Item 20: Fun Night
Entered by rcurl on Sat Oct 23 21:54:41 UTC 1993:

I had a most peculiar experience - "chaperoning" at Fun Night at Tappan
Middle School. Fun Night provides swimming, games, and dancing, for from
7-9 pm. The dancing had a professional DJ, flashing lights, artificial
smoke, and Hi-C and pizza was served. Alice and I were assigned to the
dancing as "chaperones", along with about 6 or 7 others. We were given
few guidelines - break up fights, discourage "close dancing", etc. I
don't think the students were given *any* guidelines (our daughter said
she wasn't). The only useful work I did was help mix Hi-C. Otherwise
I "hung around", and began to think I was supposed to be just a cop
figure, to encourage decorum. The kids essentially looked right through
me. They were very exuberant and the closest thing to what I was told to
deal with was (I think our daughter called it) was "freaking", or 
crotch dancing (I think - but how would I know 8->). I saw other parents
or teachers getting kids off the window sills, etc. A lot of popcorn was
spilled on the floor. However, my overall impressions were:

1.  A lack of civility. Children and adults did not interact socially,
the latter serving primarily as police.

2.  No guidelines for the behavior of the children, or for the actions
adults were to take if they observed unacceptable, but not guidelined,
behavior.

3.  A lot of yelling and shouting, and what passes for dancing, but no
group dynamics.

4.  Almost absolute racial segregation, with black and white children doing
their things almost entirely separately.

Before I transmit my impressions and suggestions to the principals of the
school, I would be interested in hearing any other observtions on "Fun
Night", since this was my first experience.

4 responses total.

#1 of 4 by katie on Sun Oct 24 16:19:01 1993:

I attended a lot of those as a student at Tappan. Sounds like they haven't
changed.

#2 of 4 by scg on Fri Nov 5 17:22:55 1993:

My students at Tappan (I spent the last nine weeks helping teach the newspaper
class) were talking about the fun night as if they enjoyed it, although the
only thing I heard them talking about specifically was the free pizza.  
Several students were talking about the ways of getting more than one slice,
which ranged from having friends who didn't want pizza give it to them, to
going up and insisting that they hadn't already had a piece.
   I get the impression that the fun nights may be the only thing that's 
improved since I was a student at Tappan.  This does sound pretty similar
to what went on when I was there, except that we would NEVER have been given
free anything.  The fun nights were always fund raisers, and the pop machine
would be unplugged and the prices would be jacked up way above what the 
machine would have charged.

#3 of 4 by rcurl on Sat Nov 6 07:08:31 1993:

As far as I could observe, fun night was just that - in an unstructured
chaotic sort of way (which is probably the most "fun").

#4 of 4 by dana on Wed Nov 17 00:11:48 1993:

It does sound like a standard middle school gathering.

I do think that some instruction to the students could be useful.
Many of them would be unacustomed to socializing in such mixers.
Expectations could be high, even though they will always break 
into their default cliques.

I found that sort of limited information very useful when I
was in school - even though it was very simple.  Oddly enough
it was presented in sex segregated fellowship groups by some
of the mothers.  

I didn't think then, nor do I think now that it was overly
paranoid or puritanical.

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