High School P. E. Requirements

Great Debates
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What do you expect? We all hit obstacles in our life that we don’t like. For you it might have been PE while for others it might have been math or something else.

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And of course this happens at every school. It was never the minority students who made life miserable for the majority students.

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Well actually I was quite miserable through middle school. But by the time I got to high school I started having a much better time.

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I didn’t even bring up harassment of kids for being gay or in the minority. We were talking about PE.

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Boo hoo a tiny fraction of kids were miserable in PE. Let’s change the whole system to cater to these kids.

Marc

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Most students probably thought of it as an easy A. The physical requirements for PE really weren’t all that difficult. I’m sure there were exceptions though depending on the school.

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Probably a little of all of the above. I’d be willing to wager that most of the kids picked on in PE were also the same ones picked on outside of PE.

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Sure it’d be better. I’m not saying there’s no room for improvement. But then I don’t think picking on students is “allowed” by gym teachers in general. But yes it does happen just like it happens in other aspects of school life.

I’ve not seen many sharp criticisms of PE in this thread. Just that it made some kids miserable.

Marc

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Marc: *Boo hoo a tiny fraction of kids were miserable in PE. Let’s change the whole system to cater to these kids. *

Marc, we’re not talking about some kids merely not liking PE much or not doing very well in it: we’re talking about many situations where students were cruelly harassed and/or learned nothing whatsoever. Would you shrug your shoulders if one of your guys on the wrestling team who happened to be not too bright were actively tormented and/or completely overlooked by teachers and students in his academic classes?

Don’t you think that such a “system” could use some changing? Not just for the sake of the kids who are miserable, but also for the sake of those who are making them miserable. You’re an (ex?-)wrestler and/or a coach, I gather: is it your experience that allowing poor sportsmanship makes kids better athletes? It’s not mine: I fit the klutzy-loser stereotype perfectly before high school but then went to a very small school where everybody simply had to participate in everything, including varsity sports, because otherwise there weren’t enough bodies to go around. Also, PE was competitive and challenging but not cruel; the expectation was that the talented kids were supposed to help out the less talented. It didn’t seem to slow the jocks down much or ruin their competitive edge, and I bet they were far more valuable later to their college teams because they’d learned good sports ethics. And, by the way, the best players always seemed to be the ones who were the least mean and most relaxed about dealing with players who weren’t as good as they were.

Should all of those issues be ignored just because some talented athletes enjoy themselves in gym class and don’t want to be bothered by people pointing out problems with the system? Isn’t that attitude just reinforcing the unfortunate “mean dumb insensitive jock” stereotype?

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Marc: *I’ve not seen many sharp criticisms of PE in this thread. Just that it made some kids miserable. *

Lordy, you big dumb jock, :wink: try reading the posts! Yes, there have been quite a few generic “PE just sucked” comments that don’t necessarily imply there was a real problem with the system, but how about the many descriptions of PE classes that were completely lousy? Take a look at these examples, and then tell me that you don’t think that these people are seriously criticizing the approach their school took to PE instead of just whining that they didn’t have enough fun.

Anti Pro: When my sons were in public school that time was spent ‘playing around.’ There were no calisthenics like when I was in school […] ‘playing around’ that my sons did usually ended up in fights too…not a good thing.

Guinastasia: And [the PE teacher] made fun of you because you couldn’t run or swim that well…she told me I was dumb because I couldn’t tell the difference between two different types of golf clubs. […] But I think too much emphasis is placed on sports and competitiveness in gym, instead of learning about health and simple basic fitness. Instead of pressuring kids to be little jocks.

Ben: To wit, basically our schools right now (at least in the South) are institutions of football, not learning. Since they’re institutions of football, it’s natural that they will put a big priority on hiring a good football coach. However, they can’t justify hiring someone just as a coach, so they set him to teaching math, English, and other subjects which are more or less foreign to him. Even within PE, the coach doesn’t care about anyone but the football players. The best PE days for me were the days when the coach just didn’t hold PE at all, because he decided that he had to spend time coaching the football team. (Some of my friends tell me that their coaches did the same thing to math class!) On the days when I did do PE, I learned nothing whatsoever- the nerds just sat in the middle of the basketball court while the jocks played basketball around us. What’s the educational value in that? Plus, there’s the whole ordeal of picking teams. Invariably the coach would pick his two favorite students (the best jocks, naturally, and IME the most brutally sadistic of the bullies) and appoint them as team captains for the day’s sports. They, in turn, pick the best jocks for their teams, randomly pick a few middling sorts, and openly argue, in front of the coach, about who will get shafted with the nerds on their team.

lee: The coach found it amusing when I puked up all the phlegm from the asthma or collapsed from the attack.

even sven: It is badly taught. I remember just being expected to know the rules and techniques of games. They throw us out there and say “play flag football”, a hard thing to do when you don’t know the rules. Inevitably the large guys in the class would go “you, girl, go over there and do this”, and I would go over there, not knowing what was happening, and screw up. […] I could handle the name calling. When they stole my clothes and soaked them in the shower, I was okay. I could even handle the humiliation of always getting picked last and that sort of thing. What did it was when they started throwing rocks.

Falcon: I managed to FINALLY squeeze PE in my senior year. And once again, it was pointless. We sat around and did nothing in an “Aerobics” class. Basically, it was sitting on the mats and gossiping. Yeah, THAT helped my physical fitness.

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Every single non-jock present in this discussion: “PE sucked for me- it was a sadistic hell of gratuitous torment at the hands of troglodytes.”

A wrestler: “Sure, it was bad for you, but that’s just an isolated case.”

-Ben

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what about those presidential physical fitness tests? anyone remember those?

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I’m taking my ball and going home.

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You certainly went through a lot of effort to show that I was wrong. Ok, I admit it there have been many valid critcisms of PE.

Marc

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How many jocks do we have posting here?

Marc

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And, anecdotally speaking, in PE the kids are most exposed to the ones responsible for most of the picking on outside of PE. I refer, of course, to the jocks.

Well, that is of course your opinion. Mine is that I’m seeing a pretty common element of sharp criticism in most posts that are either anti-PE or for strong reforming of PE.

You know, I must be getting intolerant in my old age. I never thought after the hell of being in a HS that was ruled by a Klan of Jocks that intelligent people would go to the wall to defend that sort of culture, and say things like “Boo hoo a tiny fraction of kids were miserable in PE”. A tiny fraction? How tiny? How large does it have to be before you take it seriously?

[hijack]
I guess I can be thankful now that no jock is ever going to be able to slam me into a locker, laugh in my face, and just walk away unharmed. So maybe it’s time I just let go of aaaallll the anger and being tormented and tortured. Hmmm, nope, can’t do it.[/hijack]

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Sorry Ben, you’re off by one. I’m the one who described the scool where everything from yoga to dance to CPR counted for gym, and it was almost impossible to fail unless you didn’t show up. I’m no jock and neither were my friends. I’m starting to wonder if part of it was because my high school was very large. There were about 4000 students, which no doubt makes it easier to offer a larger variety of classes.Another function of the largeness was we weren’t constantly in the same classes with the same people (except for honors classes),so that if someone didn’t like me and was going to torment me, I might have had gym with them one or two quarters in four years.It also might be because I went to high school in NYC, which is not as sports oriented as other parts of the country ( when I was in HS, even parents didn’t go to the football games, much less the whole town)

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Marc: “Lordy, you big dumb jock, ;)”…*I’m taking my ball and going home. *

No, I take it back! Don’t take the ball home! :slight_smile:

*How many jocks do we have posting here? *

Yo? High school varsity soccer (coed) and basketball (girls), college varsity basketball, cross-country team. (Although note my previous post to the effect that innate jockishness wasn’t what brought me to it.) Currently training up to Women’s Masters’ (ahem, that’s anybody over 27) crew.

And yeah, Ben overstated: there have been several comments from non-jocks here that they had good PE classes.

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Overstated, yes, but I think that we have enough people describing similar experiences for this to be more than just isolated incidents.

-Ben

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Oddly enough, I only ever had to do those in Haiti. They seem like a good idea to me, for the same reason that I endorse mandatory PE class - you need to be taught how to care for your body just as much as you need to be taught math.

A good PE program should devote a fair portion of time (.5 year) to 1st aid, nutrition, and teaching a basic understanding of how physical activity impacts your body. The rest of the program (at least a full year, in my opinion) should consist of exposure to different forms of physical activity. Yes, this means making the fat kid run; it doesn’t mean making him complete the Cooper test. It should also include weight training, stretching, classic sports (baseball, etc.) and more obscure ones (fencing to simplified team handball, depending on the school’s resources). At the end of the year, a student should have been exposed to at least one form of physical activity that he enjoyed and can continue to practice during the rest of his life.

I’d like to address a couple of points that others have made in this thread that I disagree with.

  1. Mandatory PE is torture.
    No more so than mandatory math is to some jocks. No one should be forced to do something in PE that would harm them. But there is a difference between hurting and harming. Physical activity can be painful; take a look at the guys at the end of the marathon. But I believe that learning to keep your body healthy is just as important as learning to keep your mind healthy. Furthermore, I think that writing reports on sports instead of engaging in them is akin to writing reports on dead mathematicians instead of doing the math - you ain’t gonna learn jack about what you’re supposed to be learning about.
  2. PE won’t fit into a college-prep schedule.
    I believe that the year of actual physical activity I outlined above should be replaceable with documented ‘outside’ activity, whether it be a school sports team or karate or tae-bo. However, unless my high school (which had basically the PE program I’ve outlined and ran on a semester schedule) is a radical anomaly, it’s b.s. to say that PE can’t be fit into a college-prep schedule. I managed to take enough academic classes to get into a fine college while still taking more PE and many more art classes than were required. pepperlandgirl has an excuse due to switching schools, but the rest of you should be able to do it.

-ellis

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No, mandatory PE is not necessarily torture. It is the way it is taught, and implimented that can make it torture.

As I mentioned before, I had one quarter of good PE. If all PE could be simular to that one quarter, then I am ALL for PE. I don’t think it’s a waste of time to try to get kids more fit. I do think it’s a waste of time to torment the geeks/losers. I am against the teachers and administration looking the other way when the geeks are tormented by the jocks. And believe me, it does happen.

I’ll add my own antecdote of torture - I didn’t before, but I will now.

Every team sport we played, I sucked at. Or, at least I had the stigma of being sucky, so all the “jock” types would groan when they saw me play, and were contemptuous. It was in no way “healthy competition” - it was all about winning for the kids. And since I was such an albatross, you can imagine the treatment I got. (And of course the teacher looked the other way. Completely oblivious. No help there.) The crowning glory of my PE experience was when we were playing softball, and I was way out in left or right field, supposedly “catching”. As luck would have it, a ball came flying towards me. I didn’t catch it, it smacked me hard in the face, stunning me and leaving a bruise. The only reaction I got from anyone was from another girl, who angrily yelled at me to catch the ball and throw it to her. Because of course, silly me, I was holding up the game by being stunned and bruised. The nerve of me.

Now, was there any excuse for that? Did I ask for it? Oh yeah, I guess I did. I was a loser, and didn’t catch the ball. So I deserved it, right? I don’t think so.

I did not enjoy school all that much, but I had friends, I got along, I didn’t get picked on all that much. I wasn’t a complete leper. Yet the most harrowing and miserable experiences I can remember from high school all happened in PE.

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Premise #1: All students have the right to be educated in a safe, inclusive environment. (Subpremise: safety includes physical, emotional, and intellectual aspects of the environment.)

Premise #2: Physical Education or Kinesiology is an important aspect of education and essential in helping equip a person with the tools necessary to live a successful life.

Premise #3: Kinesiology, like other required subjects, will inevitably have a wide range of students - some who are gifted and talented, some who possess mid-range skills, and some who require assistance to meet basic benchmarks.

Premise #4: All required subject curricula school have the capability of being centered around educational equity - giving each student what he or she needs to succeed.

Premise #5: Not to require curricula, teachers, administration, students, and all other aspects of physical education courses to meet the basic principles of educational equity is an abject failure that harms students and cannot be accepted or tolerated.

The point of the matter is that if teachers do not do their best to meet the needs of all their students, they are in violation of their job requirements and professional ethics. Unfortunately, there is a long history of allowing just that in physical education.

A school atmosphere that encourages favoritism towards one group - like jocks - at the expense of another - like pale, overweight, uncoordinated nerds - breeds an atmosphere where no student is guaranteed a safe, inclusive environment or educational equity. And it isn’t just the clutzy students who are negatively effected. Believe it or not, the bullies suffer profound consequences later in life. They fail to learn how to socialize in a heterogenous group. They fail to learn how to get what they need without resorting to intimidation or violence. They fail to build the skills they’ll need to be successful off the field, out of school, and on the job.

My stance is this:

  1. Physical education should be required through high school at a rate of one semester a year.

  2. Alternative equivalents of PE should be allowed and even encouraged. A student working on attaining her brown belt in Tae Kwon Do is certainly facing just as rigorous a curricula as one in basic PE. A student playing trombone in the marching band gets more than enough exercise to fulfill the requirements.

  3. A “no tolerance” policy towards violence, bullying, and harrassment should be publicized and enforced throughout the school. A grievance process should be in place for students to turn to.

  4. GATE (or GT, AP, or “honors”) courses in PE should be available for the excelling athelete just as they are for the excelling academic.

  5. Coaches and other PE teachers should be held to the same high standards as other teachers regarding inclusion, diversity, and intervention.

  6. Students with difficulties completing the minimum requirements of PE should be mentored and given the assistance available to students encountering difficulties with academic subjects.

  7. Curricula should focus on teaching the essentials of living a physically healthy life, not on who scores the most points.

The investment required to pull off this reform is enormous. However, in the long run, it will pay off a hundred-fold. When students are given what they need to succeed in a safe, inclusive environment, they thrive. All of the energy that used to be put towards deflecting the slings and arrows or outrageous gym class can be funnelled towards succeeding in gym class.

MGibson, I am disturbed at the lack of empathy you show. Maybe you didn’t suffer that much in gym class, or maybe you did and now you’ve distanced yourself from the pain by blaming the victims. The end result is that you’re satisfied to allow more children to be traumatized when there are alternatives, and that is reprehensible.

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I’m sorry my heart isn’t bleeding enough to satisfy you. Believe me when I tell you that I’ll be enduring sleepless nights as I ponder just how much I have disturbed you. What I am trying to figure out is when I said it was ok to purposely traumatize students. But then I seriously doubt a signifigant portion of students who took PE were traumatized by it.

Ok, bleeding heart time. I don’t like it when kids are picked on for any reason. Well, I think it is ok to pick on Communist, but that’s another topic. Unfortunatly most young people do not realize the damage that their words can cause. All the suggestions I read in this thread were pretty good. Given the chance almost every one has the potential to make PE a better class.

But I don’t think any of them would stop people from being picked on. I think most of those kids were picked on outside of PE as well as inside. That shows me that the specific problem of being picked on is far larger then making improvements to PE.

As it stands I still don’t think PE was hell for the vast majority of students.

Marc

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A quote from my last post:

PE was the source of most of my school torment. I dreaded it every day. I don’t doubt it was the same for many others.

You obviously think that because PE was a positive experience for you, it was the same for almost everyone else. It wasn’t. I seriously doubt that the “vast majority” of students had no problem with PE.

And even if that were true, does it make it OK that some kids (even a minority) are made miserable? Is it OK that the school system is set up to make some kids miserable, when there is a viable alternative? Why not use the viable alternative, rather than just shrug and say “Well, that’s part of life?”

I mentioned the torment of minorities and gay kids previously, and you didn’t see the connection. But there is one. It’s the apathy and the looking the other way while these kids are tormented. Let’s say a small amount of gay and minority kids are made miserable in school, by their peers. They are “picked on”. And the school administration looks the other way. Is that OK? But, hey! “That’s Life” Just shrug and look the other way. Don’t try to improve things. After all, they are in the minority. Most of the kids aren’t being picked on, so no problem.

Would it be OK to look the other way, and not try to change policy when a minority kid, or a gay kid is being picked on? Would it be OK to shrug your shoulders and say “That’s part of life?” Or to say “They probably have problems elsewhere anyway”? When an alternative is available, that could remedy the suffering of these kids, would it be OK to NOT use the alternative? To just let things stay the same? If it wouldn’t be OK to allow other groups of kids to be targeted for torment, why should it be allowable to continue to let the nerds to be tormented in PE?

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[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by MGibson *
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Ummm...It wasn't the words that hurt me. It was the large freaking rocks hurled at me. It when I told my PE teacher "Mr. A, could you please tell them not to throw rocks at me?" and being told "I didn't see them throw rocks so I cant do anything" while I pointed to the silver dollar sized bruise that was developeing on my leg. It was marching out of class and into the principles office and being told "I can't do anything about it" while my friends explained in detail how getting pelted with stones was a near daily occurance. I didn't even want the kids that assaulted me to get in trouble! I just wanted to it to understood that throwing rocks at geeks was not an acceptable physical activity!
 Yes, that is anecdotle. But a lot of anecdotes from a lot of people eventually lead to a truth. PE, the way it usually run now, is a bad thing. I can't say "scrap it entirely" just cos I don't like it, but I can say "change is sorely needed right now". If that's a bleeding heart it's only cos a rock hit that, too.
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Silly me, screwing up and making my whole thing bold again. My sincere apologies, please don’t hurl that rock at me!

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yosemitebabe: *As luck would have it, a ball came flying towards me. I didn’t catch it, it smacked me hard in the face, stunning me and leaving a bruise. The only reaction I got from anyone was from another girl, who angrily yelled at me to catch the ball and throw it to her. *

y-babe, I hope I won’t come across as being as insensitive as that girl was if I say that actually, I think that the ethos of ignoring minor pains and injuries in the pursuit of the game is one of the best things that team sports teaches. I could definitely see one of my teammates even at my “strawberry-shortcake-care-bear-smurfy”* Quaker high school yelling at me to throw her the ball after I had just been whacked in the face with it. Where your teammates and coach were at fault was in continuing to demand that after it was obvious that you were really hurt and stunned. (And even if you had managed to carry on, they should have shown concern and attention about the incident afterwards.) Being tough about pain is definitely a good thing to learn (and will be occasionally indispensable in any athletic endeavors in later life, says the limping idiot who wore too-short shorts to rowing class yesterday and had to row for an hour with her legs getting pinched in the sliding seat), and PE class is a good place to teach it. The problem is that so many PE teachers and jock-type students think that learning to be tough about pain justifies open brutality.

  • a Byzantine original! (I think it was Byz.)