Here is a photograph of the school where I attended kindergarten. At recess I played on this playground. Another friend and I played on these teeter totters. You will notice hard earth underneath these things. We didn't have sand or black rubber matts like the playgrounds of today. One day at recess some older boys came over and wanted to use the teeter totters. I got off. Before my friend could get off or maybe it's possible she didn't want to get off, the bigger boys got on my side. I don't know if they intentionally came down as hard as they did or perhaps they didn't understand the laws of physics. As my friend's side of the teeter totter reached the apex she arrived with such force she couldn't hold on and she went flying up through the air down to the dirt. Her little body lay on the playground while kids and teachers gathered around her. Her skirt was spread out. She was out cold. To this day I don't know what happened to her. I was scooted back into the school with all the other kids before she got up or before the ambulance came. I tried to stay back with my friend but a teacher told me to leave so I did. I don't know what happened. She didn't come back to class that day. She didn't come back to school for the rest of the school year. I don't know what time of year this incident happened but we weren't wearing coats. Was it September? April? May? What happened to my kindergarten friend? I saw this photo on Facebook today and it brought me right back to that moment. If I had a choice in the matter my friend had a good outcome. Her parents came to take her home and relax the rest of the day and since it was the last week of school they left for a summer vacation early. She returned to that school the next year (I changed schools so this might have happened) and lived a long and happy life. I don't see seesaws like this in playgrounds anymore. Now the seesaws are lower to the ground and don't have a single fulcrum but more of a spring type fulcrum. To me, looking at that picture now, I would guess the high point of that teeter totter was a good three or four feet up in the air and that design, while fun, is probably too dangerous. Seesaws were very fun. I remember the head rush I would get coming up to the top. My brain was probably sloshing around inside of my skull pan. My rear end would lift off the board a couple inches and I hung on tight and squealed with delight. I was enjoying pure and simple vestibular joy! Coming down hard was also fun but painful to the rear end and perhaps my vertebra were getting jostled. I had to be sure to keep my hands on the handle-never folded behind me over the end of the board. If two kids were not the same weight we would compensate for that by moving the heavier kid more toward the middle. The heavier person might have to sit in front of the handle bars. Another option, if we had three people, was to have the two people closest to the same weight on the ends of the board and the third person standing in the middle of the board with one leg on each side of the fulcrum. We were having fun and indirectly learning about physics. I guess the moral of the story is that all great fun comes with a little bit of danger.
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