Opinions about phys ed in elementary school

In My Humble Opinion
1

When I was a kid I hated phys ed. I never followed major league sports, so I thought playing sports was boring, excercises pointless and boring, Swimming would have been okay except for the chlorine fumes and bleary eyes and the stink of the locker room.
And part of it was having to deal with the coarser kids who weren’t in, or were silent in, my academic classes. The ones who snapped towels and thought holding your head under water was hilarious.
Phys ed was uncontested as the worst part of every day.

We hear now about obese kids, but there were plenty of fatties in my school, and I never noticed phys ed helping them either.

If I ran a school, and had to supply some physical activity, it would be doing something useful. Digging a moat and building a play castle come to mind. Nothing like laying brick to build up the arms. :smiley:

2

I think phys ed is useful in elementary school. It seems these days kids spend a lot more time indoors, playing computer games, D&D, posting on message boards :wink: and whatnot.

I do agree that what you have them do is a big factor in the enjoyment. I think its necessary to really integrate the attitude of good sportsmanship/finding something active you can enjoy. A school that had students go on a short, scenic hike, bike rides or something active and organized but not hypercompetitive would probably get a lot more participants than the ‘dodge ball nightmare’ people whine about.

I can’t help but wonder, though, that a lot of people that bitch about their horrible PE experience are basically having to deal with something where they aren’t the best at it. Maybe they are a real math/science whiz, but on the basketball court they are on the bottom of the heap.

You know what? I was considered a ‘geek/nerd’ in school and I NEVER had a problem with PE. To me it seemed like an easy A. Follow directions and you’ll do well. Somebody beaned me with a dodgeball, I’d bean him back, even as puny-armed as I was. Through wrestling, water polo, track, flag football, softball, etc even when I sucked at them I still went along with it.

(Being a big video game dweeb when I was a kid I used to simply pretend everyone was a playable character in some video game and I was a character with a steep learning curve to master. This delusion actually helped me cope with the fact that I was not the strongest/fastest/etc at any given activity.

3

The problem isn’t with PE itself-it’s about how it’s taught. A lot of times, all it teachs kids is to hate sports. More attention is paid to the jocks, rather than the kids who really need the activity.

Playing dodgeball-the kids who aren’t that good are the ones who get out and have to sit on the sidelines. How is that helping?

And I’ve said this a million times, but my friends and I just used to get out on purpose.

4

No, not really. I was a fair to middlin’ student who didn’t pull noticeably good grades until high school, when I no longer had to take PE (thank the gods for marching band).

I hated PE because:

  • I was often chosen last or next to last for teams based on popularity, not skill.
  • the coaches never actually explained skills or allowed us to practice so I might get good enough to enjoy a sport.
  • the coaches often favored the kids who behaved atrociously towards others, or at least they never noticed the atrocious behaviors.
  • in any given class, I was likely to be belittled, excluded, ignored, and sometimes assaulted.

Behavior that would get an adult arrested and prosecuted in any sane society was tolerated in my schools’ PE classes.

5

Bolding mine. The bolded parts I can understand. I guess I gotta wonder what goes on in someone’s head to go to college to be a PE teacher. These days (at least in California) you have to have a valid teacher’s credential in order to teach PE, and in a volleyball class I took in college there were students who were aspiring to be a PE teacher for kids. My guess is that the sadistic PE teachers were jocks in high school, but peaked early and couldn’t cut it when they did sports in college to amount to anything significant, so they went on to teach it since they couldn’t do it well on even an amateur level.

I actually had pretty good PE teachers who explained the rules to sports and actually had us do drills.

By the way, as a substitute teacher now, I HATE subbing PE. Damn kids don’t listen, usually just goof off. Very stressful.

6

Way to go, bbi. Now we are going to hear from every candy-assed crybaby who got picked last for dodgeball, or couldn’t get the basketball within 10 yards of the hoop, or was too delicate to rough-house with everybody else. Wonderful.

No sympathy from me, people. I was always the pale, portly kid in PE. I survived. I figured I’d better get good at something or get crushed, so I got good at something. Spent my secondary years wrestling, and on the Swim and Water Polo teams. I also picked up enough PE units in college to almost have a Minor in it.

But all we will hear here is the whining.

7

Besides whining, perhaps we’ll hear about how to improve it.
I know in the 70’s there were anti-cometitive sports advocates, where to get kids to exercise they had activities without teams and without scores, but yet not as boring as sit-ups.
I wonder where all those programs are today- in the dustbin or just no longer newsworthy.

8

As the saying goes:

Those that can, do;
Those that can’t, teach;
Those that can’t teach, teach PE…

9

I hated PE up until around high school. Before that, it emphasized basketball, which I was not good at (I’m short and fairly stocky). When they started to let us choose the weight room over basketball, I was fine, later taking third place in my university’s bodybuilding competition.

One thing, though, that would have made basketball more bearable: explaining the effing rules. Most of the other kids seemed to have been taught the rules by their fathers or brothers, but a few of us were clueless. The gym teachers seemed to think that everyone was born knowing what ‘walking’ and ‘three-seconds’ were.

10

I had PE from grades 1-10 and in grade 12 (Health in 11th). I hated it and every male PE teacher I had after elementary school. You could tell they were all jocks in school/college and looked upon boys who had zero-interest and/or knowledge of sports with a mixture of bafflement and contempt. Unless it was made-up-for-PE-only game they assumed we understood how to play. I hated being told crap like “You’re 14-18 year old boys, you should know how to play baseball/basketball/etc. I shouldn’t have to teach you!”. :mad: The only thing 11 years of PE did for me is develope a hatred of sports (even as a spectator). In high school once in a blue moon we were allowed to use the exercise equipment and weight room instead of playing a sport, but that was rare because we weren’t “learning anything” :rolleyes: .

11

Generally speaking the problem with phys ed is that it often doesn’t get ENOUGH attention; it’s the bastard child of education disciplines, which most teachers don’t understand and don’t want to do.

A good teacher can make phys ed class challenging, fun, and highly educational.

12

PE when I was a little kid, say grades 1 - 4, was fun. It was more like an activity time, we played active games and more or less ran around to burn off energy. We couldn’t just sit around, but it was the kind of thing where there would be a group game, and if you didn’t want to play, you could jump rope or something on your own.

In grade 5, the organized team sports started, and it quickly turned into a Lord of the Flies scenario, the emotional scars of which I still carry.

13

I was a PE teacher, mainly in the elementary grades. Although very physically capable, I was not an athlete in school for the most part. More of a theatre kid.

Many people don’t realize that a good PE training program includes a great deal of science. We took the same biology, anatomy/physiology as the pre-med students. Then within our own department we did biomechanics and exercise physiology, which were very rigorous. These were largely the classes which weeded out the jocks who had never read a book.

That’s not to say morons don’t enter the field. Morons enter all fields, of course, and we have our share. Some are the failed athletes as previously mentioned. And I definitely agree that PE was and is often taught very, VERY badly. But things are changing for the better.

Good PE programs train teachers to never:

  • Allow kids to choose up teams themselves
  • Play games where kids are eliminated and have to stand around waiting
  • Play dodge ball, as we usually think of it
  • “Throw out the ball” and do no teaching

There is an emphasis these days on “lifetime fitness” rather than team sports. For instance, I commonly taught fitness walking, juggling/unicycling, mountain biking and a number of other activities one probably wouldn’t associate with traditional PE.

Although I was something of a maverick in the field, I wasn’t a freak. I felt a kinship with the forward thinkers in PE, and disdain for the old guard that were there mostly to coach the basketball or football teams. And I’d say people appreciated my philosophy of the “new PE” to my school.

My favorite comment from parents was always, “Wow, gym class wasn’t like this when I was a kid!”

One last point about the team sports. Yes, PE teachers have historically placed far too great an emphasis there. But to some extent this is a reaction to what many people want.

We live in a country where parents often think (quite wrongly*) that ther kids are likely to get a scholarship and maybe even turn pro if they’re good at a sport. So they tend to pay more attention to what a school’s basketball or football team is doing than what happens in PE.

  • Will provide a cite as soon as I unearth the article. University of Maine, I think, did research on this that was very interesting.
14

RickJay wrote:

I’m a trainee Primary School teacher atm. Australian primary schools tend to have 1 teacher per class for ALL subjects from K-6. So I’ll teach everything from Science to PE to Art.

The good thing about this is that we are taught to bring the same attitude to learning to all classes. As someone ambivelant to PE in primaray school and actively hating it in High School, I know the importance of an enthusiastic teacher. And it’s more than a ‘suck it up and get good at something’. I was a great medium distance runner in high school. I was totally ignored by frustrated and favouritist PE teachers who emphasised their favourite sports.

I’ve just had to write a major assignment on why PE is important. The big reasons: kids are getting bigger. They’re exercising less. Their parents are more overprotective than ever and kids are less likely to be told ‘go outside and play’. And parents are, according to at least one study I found, pretty crappy at telling that their kids are unhealthily big. And bad foods tend to be cheap. And team sports are often expensive. And parents of lower socioeconomic status have no time, no money and, usually through no fault of their own, don’t know how to get their kids active. And about a billion other reasons.

School is one of the few places we can teach with any effectiveness the skills needed not to die at 50 years old, 300 kilos and with a vestigial pancreas.

And, on completely anecdotal evidence, there’s a worrying trend I’ve seen during school visits, for parents to write ‘My child doesn’t have to do PE’ notes for no particualr medical reason beyond the kid doesn’t like PE and the parents don’t want a fight. I wonder how willing they’d be to write ‘My son/daughter doesn’t have to do math.’?
Mach Tuck wrote:

I came to this thread to make those points exactly. In PE ( in NSW, Australian schools, anyway) we actually divide PE into the theory strands of interpersonal development, healthy habits etc and Active Learning, which includes games and sports with an emphasis on skills, but also has an entire strand of dance (male and female), one of gymnastics, one of basic movement skill etc. The sucky teaching practices and boring and fruitless-for-all-but-the-gifted curriculum are dead or dying. Now we try to give variety, basic skills and try to make it fun (of course a little bit of competition isn’t bad, but as Mach Tuck said, we try to avoid elimination games especially. And the teacher picks the teams).

15

My daughter is in fifth grade now, and I have to say that her PE experience has been much more enjoyable and useful than mine was. She’s learned things like rollerblading and cross-country skiing. She has never played traditional dodgeball. She loves PE…probably the first person in my entire family who has.

16

What Mach Tuck said. My P.E. instructor, who was also the football coach, was an idiot who coddled the athletic kids and ignored everybody else. All we did was play football, softball, or soccer while he stood around with his thumb up is ass. (Can you tell I’m bitter?)

One week, for whatever reason, the coach allowed some of us to play tennis – that was the best week of P.E. in my life. No picking teams, no yelling and screaming, no standing around watching other kids chase a ball. I actually worked up a sweat a few times that week. And just when I was starting to develop a few basic tennis skills, the coach decided we needed to go back to the old routine. A couple of us asked if we could continue playing tennis, and he gave some bullshit excuse. I suspect he just wanted to keep us all in one place to make his job easier.

So when I think of an ideal P.E. course, I imagine a P.E. in which kids have a choice of several activities. Tennis, weight lifting, running, calisthenics, swimming – even team sports for those that enjoy them. The only requirement should be that they stay active and don’t get into trouble.

17

Staying busy and out of trouble is good, but I’d say they should also be learning.

Some choice of activities is good, especially in the upper grades. But only to a point - many people will only choose things they already know instead of things they could learn.

The trick is to have teachers and classes that are actually capable of teaching people something. This is where PE as a whole has shot itself in the foot. Far too much emphasis on athletics and coaching, and not enough on teaching. That’s still a big problem.

18

PE in elementary school? What happened to just plain ol’ recess?

We didn’t have organized PE until junior high in the school district I went to.

19

I think phys ed is probably poorly implemented but it’s a very good general concept that could serve an extremely valuable purpose if the general quality of PE classes was higher. It sounds like things are improving as far as PE goes from posts in this thread, so maybe it isn’t the total waste of time it used to be when I was in school.

I thought PE was easy but I never particularly “liked” any of my PE classes, and from 7th to 12th grade I was always on the school’s football, baseball, and wrestling teams. So I wasn’t remotely the “pale kid who got picked last” but in my PE classes all we pretty much ever did was play kickball or some variation of basketball. I’m pretty bad at basketball and playing it every day in PE for 5 years sadly didn’t make me much better. I was an average football player and wrestler and a pretty good baseball player, but basketball was just not a skill I ever got very good at. We also used to play a lot of volleyball, usually they would bring the boys and girls gym classes together for this and have it be boys versus girls. Typically most of the guys had no idea how to play volleyball, were never taught to serve or anything else. This was always pretty funny because there were always at least a few girls from the volleyball team around and the boys almost always lost these games because we’d knock the ball out of bounds or et cetera.

20

I received early acceptance into university and had the credits to graduate after Junior year. All except the mandatory PE classes. I was forced to go to the first semester of 12th grade and take PE twice per day. 25 years later and I still do not understand the logic in that.