insert rolleyes smiley here.
the hundred or so calories that running for a mile burns off ain’t gonna make a lick of difference if they’re still eating the same way.
while we’re at it, should we have ex-drill instructors run it too?
Not a bad idea. We’ve got the fattest kids in the world. We have to do something.
Of course, taking the vendining machines and the crap food selections out of the cafeterias would be a good idea too.
You, and people like you, are the problem. You are sacrificing long-term gains for short term results. If you want to “burn some lard off those asses”, making them want to keep exercising even once you’re no longer their taskmaster will go far further than this antagonistic bullshit.
Who cares what they want? School is not about what you want. There is no difference between whining about PE and whining about math or science.
doing the wrong thing just to “do something” is doomed to failure. your basically recommending we associate exercise with pain and suffering (“run them 'til they puke”) which all but guarantees they’ll avoid it as much as possible. The little bit of exertion that any PE class can force on kids isn’t going to make a damn bit of difference in their weight.
this, however:
is the first thing that should be done. running PE like basic training won’t make kids thinner. getting all of the excess empty calories out of their diets will.
we care when people talk about doing something harmful just 'cos they want to feel like a hard-ass.
I think schools should offer MsRobyn’s idea. And if the school is too small, keep the second part.
I didn’t hate Phys Ed. in (private) elementary school. I sucked at a lot of it, but we also had a lot of team games and stuff, and sometimes I didn’t suck. I don’t remember it being that bad, and I usually got an A.
Now, Phys. Ed in junior high (we don’t have middle school) was mandatory and it sucked. Three years of rotating through the same things: volleyball, basketball, softball, and athletics. You HAD to know the theory and rules of each game, and you HAD to do X amount of some sort of sport-related drill right. The written tests were the ones that kept me from flunking and gave me a C most terms.
Right now, I’m in the best shape I’ve ever been. I’m more active than I was as a teen. It took years of stop being scared of going to the gym, of signing up in aerobic classes and realizing I like this and I do have some skills. Oh, how I wish my school would’ve offered a different PE curriculum… Aerobics! Basic yoga! Steps! Dance! Turns out, I AM good at aerobics, I AM good at something I like… And had I learned that earlier, I would’ve been healthier for longer.
In school I hated PE, but in the military I loved the shit out of PT. After a few weeks of participating in non-manditory midday PT, I was put in charge of the the after-hours manditory session for guys who needed to lose weight if they’d be allowed to re-enlist.
What changed? I think it was the absence of a “Lord of the Flies” atmosphere. PE is part of overall social training, where we learn that the stronger, more coordinated among us are our betters, and should be rewarded: the rest of you non-jocks & cheeleaders should be content to bask in their glow. PT is just that: physical training: turn your mind off and do it, and later enjoy the way you feel and look.
No gym teacher ever screamed at me like the noncoms in boot camp did, but in boot camp it didn’t mean anything beyond the immediate situation: that one extra sit-up.
And it must be pointed out that the games we organized on our own were a lot rougher than flag football much less dodgeball: Crack the Whip, Smear, King of the Hill. I enjoyed harsh competition for its own sake as much as anyone. It’s just that by high school I’d already assumed the right to think for myself, however flawed, and didn’t accept the gym teacher’s presumption of moral instruction.
Anyway, to answer the OP, besides calesthenics and running an obstacle course, if I can dream, my ideal PE would include kendo, fencing, hacking at watermellons with a saber from horseback, popping water balloons with a lance from horseback, parachute training, cross-country hiking or skiing, rock-climbing and repelling, etc. “An Ordeal is a Square Deal” is a better lesson than “Beautiful People are Better than You.”
Let’s not blame the schools for the parents failure. It’s not like the parent can’t see little Johnny out growing his levi’s.
Why not just turn it into junior ROTC, ship em off to basic in the summer time.
Declan
And this is why your ideas are so destructive. Health Education - Phys Ed included - is about what the student wants: in particular, making sure the student wants to do the right thing. It’s not to make them learn the rules for one stupid game or another, it’s to shape them into the kind of person who will continue to exercise by choice for the rest of their life.
That’s where the puke part of run 'em till they puke comes in.
That seems like a fantastic way to make an entire generation of people hate all physical activity. How exactly is that supposed to help the obesity problem?
Actually the real JROTC doesn’t sound all that bad. Many districts allow students to take it (& similiar) programs in lieu of PE.
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]
no offense, but this is the case with everyone in these types of threads.
as far as bullying goes, I’m sorry to say that you won’t get rid of bullying unless you get rid of children, and I’m not sure too many people would get behind that.
This is why I hated gym. I’d rather have had another swimming course or yoga or weight training or even riding an exercise bike for 45 minutes. And I can’t play volleyball nor football to save my life, and was too clumsy to get the knack of gymnastics.
I’m 53, so I went to school in the 60s and 70s.
First thing: we need to quit dumping kids of all abilities into the same class. In high school, we had remedial math and English classes for the kids who needed to be brought up to speed in these areas, and we also had the basic math and English classes for the majority of students, and then we had the advanced classes. Something similar needs to be done for PE. And I disagree that grades should be about effort. There should be some guidelines to work towards. We don’t grade on “effort” in math or science, we only grade on correct answers. In PE, the correct answer is to run a mile in X minutes, or do X number of pushups, or whatever. Now, I usually got a B in PE, based on the effort grading, and I’d probably get a D or fail outright on the results, but for the most part, I think that kids can make the goals, if they’re put in the proper class in the first place. Maybe remedial PE would have easier goals, but it should still have goals.
Second: PE should be about EDUCATION as well as fitness. When I, and later my daughter, went to HS, there was a requirement for a one semester of Health. This wasn’t a physical activity class, but rather a class where we learned about proper nutrition, various common diseases, and how the body worked in general. This is where I had a section on Sex Ed and drug and alcohol awareness, and I’m pretty sure my daughter had this section too.
Third: The regular PE class should consist of basic fitness, and how to achieve fitness. This means how to do aerobics and weights. Maybe a one or two week introduction to various team sports every now and then, and this happens in the first year of PE in middle/junion high and high school. Most of the time, though, PE means that the students are working on getting fitter, and learning how NOT to hurt themselves while doing so.
Fourth: Team sports should be a complete separate class, just like Trig is taught in a separate class. Joe or Jane want to play basketball? Fine, they sign up for the basketball class, as an elective. They don’t get to skip other classes for basketball practice, they get their practice IN CLASS, without missing English. And the coach chooses the ones who get on the team, from their performance in class. Maybe these classes should be electives, and shouldn’t count as PE. Cheerleading is a team sport.
Fifth: Coaches should not have their team sports players in their non-PE classes. For instance, in high school, one of my English teachers was also the cheerleader’s coach. Cheerleaders and football players always got a lot of slack from her. They were allowed to turn their papers in later than other students, and were allowed to take extra or make up tests whenever they wanted. She was obviously biased in favor of the cheerleaders and football players, and any student who wasn’t in those sports NEVER got any help from her.
Looking back, I wish that I’d been taught more about how to do aerobic exercises, how to lift weights properly, and how to generally get proper exercise, and I wish that we’d spent a lot less time on lessons on basketball and tennis. I’ve put together a fitness plan that works fairly well for me (I am making measurable improvements), but it’s not from anything that I learned in school.
Good points in the OP.
I hated the team sports part of gym. And anything requiring a good amount of balance. But team sports suck the most:
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If you think that just putting a random class of kids in a team is going to make them work as a team you’ve never seen kids.
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Many team sports make it way too easy to just dodge all the action. Or worse, have positions where even if you want to join in, you’re not doing anything for 80% of the time.
I was a fairly decent middle distance runner, a strong swimmer and I cycled to school and back every day (19 miles). If I could have spent PE doing swimming, running or cycling I’d have actually enjoyed that. But instead we had to do softball, volleyball, bloody soccer or jumping on beams.
I joined ROTC in high school and enjoyed it. The PT wasn’t horrible and it was much more effective under the watchful eyes of grownups and cadet officers than it was when I was one of 40 kids in a gym.
I’d have liked to see different levels of PE classes, based on ability, and more non-team-sport options. Aerobics, weight lifting, and running would be more useful to most people than team sports. If you can’t have both team-sports and non-team-sports PE classes, don’t offer the team-sports one.
I think that any sport (including cheerleading) you play for the school should count as a PE class, and the kids who are on a team shouldn’t have to take a regular PE class as well. There should be a PE class offered that would basically be a practice period for that sport, and that would fulfill PE requirements. Getting the kids who are on sports teams out of the PE classes with the kids who aren’t would be a good first start on separating PE classes by ability.
One change I’d make, going all the way back to elementary school: eliminate kids picking teams from PE class. If there’s an activity that requires people to be on teams, assign people to teams randomly (maybe have them draw slips of paper out of a hat), rather than allowing someone to pick team members. That would get rid of some of the social drama. We don’t generally waste math or English class time on social drama, why should we waste PE class time on it?
What this will do, especially for the less-athletically-inclined and less-competitively-inclined kids, is teach them that physical activity is something they hate doing. That doesn’t make it likely that they will want to find ways to be physically active outside of school, or after they graduate.
You’re also opening the school up to a lawsuit, if some kid chokes on their vomit (I knew a girl in my middle school who died this way) or is otherwise injured in PE class.