Thrashin Your Way Through Gym

In the 6th grade, my lung nearly collapsed after I caught a-bomb playing flag football and got sacked as if I were a thrift store rag doll.  That crap hurt for flag.  In the 8th grade, my shins nearly came off when we were forced to wear Rollerblades and play street hockey on the basketball courts.  How I got through that, I don’t know.  And probably the best of all extra curricular activities, which we were ironically forced to partake in, was line dancing.  Not just country western line dancing.  I’m talking about line dancing to French music.  On top of that, we had to perform in front of the entire school during lunchtime.  That was in the 10th grade.

It will be a different time and a different era when we see skateboarding in our schools as an extra curricular activity.  Well maybe most of you kids don’t have to wait that long because a school in New York is setting new ground for other schools to possibly use as a prototype.  So you skate rats don’t have to sneak your boards around school just so that you can show off in front of that chick that loves Ryan Sheckler and Fall Out Boy.

The teacher is Billy Rohan, a professional skateboarder and the director of skateboarding and skate park development for Open Road, a nonprofit organization that has been working with the city since the 1990s to involve potential users in the design of public parks. Because he is not a certified teacher, he is accompanied on the court by Mr. Mullen, the assistant principal, or a substitute teacher, not to get confused with Rodney Mullen. 

Check out the rest of the story over at the NY Times.