Some background about me: I have no experience with working with children in physical activity (and I suspect many of you are in the same boat). I was never physically active in school, but I am trying to become more athletic now, at 25. I started cycling about a year and a half ago, and more recently took up weight training. I’ve been having quite a bit of difficulty with the flexibility required by weight lifting–I suppose spending my youth playing video games didn’t really prepare me for athletic endeavors.
Reading over the thread, I saw a couple complaints that will never go away, no matter how PE (or any class, for that matter) is taught. For example:
The complaints of “stupid,” “boring,” “pointless,” “inapplicable to real life,” etc., are made of every class. The complaint about drills (and there were others like it) reminds me of band class, when students complained about fundamental technique exercises (scales, long tones, etc.). As I recall, there was a strong negative correlation between refusing to do the exercises and being any good at your instrument.
I agree with many of the ideas stated here, especially the elimination of bullying in PE classes, and measuring students on performance improvement, not on how well they do relative to the rest of the class.
For those that think that PE is important for decreasing the child obesity rate, there is some research (see here or here) showing that increased physical activity in school simply decreases the amount of activity done outside of school. It seems to me that, if we want PE to decrease the child obesity rate, we need to choose activities that continue to burn calories long after they are completed.
In my opinion (and I admit that this may be biased by what I am currently doing) PE should focus on weight training with basic, multi-joint exercises, being supplemented by flexibility work, and perhaps some cardiovascular exercise in the form of interval training. For example, you might have the students lift on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, do yoga on Tuesday and run on Thursday. I think this scheme has several advantages:
[ul]
[li]A foundation in strength and flexibility will help the students in any sports they decide to do, although the level of each they pursue will depend on what sport they are interested in.[/li][li]Increasing strength and flexibility will make you less injury-prone, and are useful in everyday life.[/li][li]Weight training provides an immediate and obvious measure of how you are improving over time. Improvements in team sports are often difficult to quantify, and the degree of improvement in a timed run, for example, may not be obvious to a student until a the teacher tells them their new time.[/li][li]Most students, especially at the high school level, are capable of making significant improvements in the weight they can lift over the course of a semester. This can generate a tremendous amount of encouragement.[/li][li]Overweight, untrained people can typically lift more than untrained people who are of normal weight, or underweight. This may help to encourage some of the non-athletic students.[/li][/ul]
I can also think of some disadvantages:
[ul]
[li]Such a class will require instructors who can teach the students proper lifting technique and programming. My high school offered weight training classes, but we received no instruction on proper form for the lifts. One of the two teachers had students learn the basic bones and muscles of the body, and talked about some very basic components of a weight training program. The other, as I recall, gave no instructions at all.[/li][li]Female students are likely to be very skeptical of such a program, from the (unfounded) fear that they will end up looking like Arnold.[/li][li]Parents are likely to fear that their students will get injured in the weight room.[/li][li]Effective training places demands on the diet and sleep schedule of the trainee. I suspect that students will not be willing to take these outside-of-class steps.[/li][/ul]