And while I’m all for stirring the kids up throughout the day, I wonder if we’re not finally taking advantage of Mr. Bush’s apparent lack of competence and foresight and flicking blame for our growing children on him along with their ever-shortening life-expectancies, rather than looking at what they’re doing in the time they’re not at school?
Any other reasons our kids might be collowing in their parents’ ever-widening footsteps? Certainly not the healthy snack available to them in school vending machines?
While I’m in favor of bashing NCLB on general principles, this argument is weak. Schools have been trimming the time devoted to physical education for quite a while. Why? Because parents care more about the academic side and less about fitness. When you have Mom and Dad convinced that Junior won’t get into Harvard if he doesn’t take algebra in sixth grade, there’s pressure to create more math classes, and something has to get cut. Schools respond to demand.
The bigger fundamental problem for all age groups is less exercise in daily life. There’s more driving and less walking than there used to be. Recreation is now TV and video games, not outdoor activity. And the decline of recess, of course.
If any president EVER stood up and said, “Hey, American voters, you need to get your shit together, make your idiot kids do their homework, and send 'em out to play and quit feeding them all that high-fat, high-sugar shit, and take responsibility for your own lives!”
…he’d be de-elected so fast it’d make your head spin. Impeached, even. Nothing can ever be the voters’ fault.
I dunno about you guys, but PE was a waste of time when I was in school. They don’t make the kids exercise. We played wall-ball and if we didn’t feel like it we could walk around the playground a few times. Lame.
Schools shouldn’t have to take on the burden of making kids exercise. That’s all about good parenting. And if you’re a bad parent, of course, you’d expect the schools to cover your back. I’m sick of that crap.
Gawd! I got it twice a week and I hated it every minute! Never had a problem playing tag, though, other than my feet hurting.
(Mind you, the asshole teacher I got for my first 5 years of it may somehow have a causation relationship. As well as the 6 years I had ingrown warts in my feet but my complaints about “my feet hurt” were disregarded because, well, I didn’t like Phys Ed)
Phys Ed with Rosa every day would have been reason for suicide. Better make that murder-suicide, jump off the bridge into the river and take the bitch with me.
While Spanish athletes are generally worse than US athletes (not so bad once you take into account that there’s also 5x more of you guys than of us guys, though), if there was a relationship between formal Phys Ed twice a week and obesity, Spain would have needed to move to double-wide doors ages ago. Doesn’t seem to me like such a big freaking deal so long as the kids get to move.
In jr. high in San Diego did stretching and calesthenics to start, then a lap around the (fairly large) field, and then played a sport (soccer, flag football, basketball, volleyball, handball, or softball on a rotating schedule) afterward. In high school in Quartz Hill (LAUSD) we got to choose a sport.
My youngest son spent 2 years in high school in the the US, and 4 years (the first 2 and the last 2) in high school in Australia. One of the diferences he found was that in Australia, the kids are sent out into the playground at lunch, where they might talk to their friends, or run around (perhps playing a bit of cricket or football). In the US, they spent their lunch break in the cafeteria, sitting down, and not alowed to make too much noise. Is this generally true? If so, it seems to be part of a general pattern.
(One other difference was that he used to ride his skateboard to school in Australia, a distance of over a mile. In the US, he’d have caught the school bus over that distance),
IME lunch was for lunch, and PE was for sports. PE was compulsory.
I rode my skateboard to jr. high (about a mile), and rode the bus to high school (about four miles – although I did walk a few times) and rode my motorcycle when I was old enough.
I hated PE. Maybe if the intructors weren’t so obsessed with making us play team sports and allowed us to use the weight room and fitness machines more ofter. Their main concern seemed to be the student athletes and by high school none of the could concieve that not all teenage boys are into sports or have any idea what the rules are. As much as I hated PE I do think that, properly done, it should be mandatory at least every other day grades 1-12.
My HS PE class was a waste of time. It was great if you were on a sports team, or a talented physical mutant, but if you weren’t a good athlete, all it did was help increase bullying, teasing, and hate while lowering self-esteem of many. It would be differnt if there really was team building exercises or “fun” things to do, but standing against a wall waiting to be pelted with a ball from the pitcher of the baseball team or the first string QB wasn’t my idea of fun.
We wonder why Columbine happened.
“Dodge Ball” ? Huh. Hated it. It was just a chance for the jocks to sadiscally pelt us nerds legally. And the coaches made sure the basketballs were overfilled with air so they would hurt more.
PE? Hated every second of it.
It was that way for me in middle school, but the high school here has an open campus. I don’t understand why there’s so many fat kids at that school (myself included…) since the school building itself is HUGE and it takes fully ten minutes to get from one end to the other. There’s also two other buildings, one for high-tech classes and one for the ROTC unit.
There’s damn near 3,000 students going to that school right now, so they NEED an open campus.
For those of you who don’t know what an open campus is, it means that the kids can leave on their breaks so long as they come back afterwards. That didn’t get abused NEARLY as much as you’d think it would.
Here, there was an increasing number of kids who hated school busses (overcrowding and bullies…for me it was the stench of 30+kids crammed into a metal stinkroom) who would wake up two hours early and walk or bike to school, and do the same home. I was in that camp; in middle school I walked to and from school every day, four plus miles. Usually I was carrying my trombone.
I didn’t take PE in middle and high school. I was in marching band in middle school, which was tons more fun than PE and gave me more exercise than the PE students got, and I took ROTC in high school and therefore got LOADS more exercise than they did because we had a Marine drilling us.
Pretty much. When I was in elementary-junior high (I went to a K-8 Catholic school), most of the time, we just played dodge ball. My friends and I would arrange to get hit with the ball so we could go sit on the sides and gab. How is THAT exercise?
And when we didn’t, a lot of it included the typical bullying shit that usually goes on. (I don’t want so and so on OUR team-you guys get him/her!)
High school was a bit better, because I was in “jerry gym”, basically gym for kids who aren’t so athletic. But it still sucked most of the time.
I think the problem is that the way many PE classes are taught, all they teach kids is to hate exercise and physical activity.
It took a minute for me to process this because I couldn’t figure out what building you meant. And then I realized that some schools are contained in a single building, which is a completely foreign concept to me. (I’ve never gone to a school, for example, where you didn’t have to go outdoors to get from one class to another.)
I liked parts of P.E. in high school, because for 6 weeks we got to do swimming, which was awesome. But when you live in southern Arizona and have P.E. at 1pm right after lunch and it’s 110 outside and you’re running laps on the blacktop or playing some sort of outdoor sport… well it’s torture. We only had to take 2 years of P.E. in high school. The first one was the one I already mentioned, which all freshmen had to take and did a little bit of everything. The other year you could choose a specific class, like tennis or weight training.
I’ve had the opposite experiance. Elementary, middle, and high schools were all in a single building (well 3 seperate buildings) with the middle and high schools right next to eachother and connected by an enclosed walkway. The large state university I went to (for a year) had multiple building on a very small urban campus. The junior college I’m at now has one main building (a former high school) where all the classrooms and offices are plus a student union/athletic center a block away and 2 dormitories.
We had to take PE class in grades 1-10 and grade 12. In 11th grade we had health instead, but you could get special permission to take PE as an elective (you’d still need to take it in 12th). From 1-8th grades our classes were coed and we started changing in 6th. In high school each class was taught by a male PE teacher and the female PE teacher. After warmups each teacher usually taught a seperate activity and we were allowed to pick.
I hated the male teachers and never picked their activities when I had a choice. They never bothered to teach us the rules for the games unless it was a made-up-for-PE sport and even they’d explain it as being like basketball, tennis, football etc. They’d constantly say that we weren’t in grade school and that they "shouldn’t have to explain all the rules because we should know them already. :mad: They all did double-duty as coachs and athletes had favoured status. The worst was when they decided to have all the boys play tackle football.
In jr. high one thing I hated about PE was how Coach Larson would sit on the wall between the lockers and the showers to ‘make sure we were really showering’. Creepy, that.
