NO!
Of course PE grades should count. They counted my math grades. If they are gonna’ do that, they can By God count Elmo Egghead’s PE grades.
YES!
Well, my college had P.E. as a requirement and it counted towards your GPA so there are colleges out there that you could still tell after college. You are correct that many years after you’re out of school your grades don’t reflect who you still are and are therefore worthless but I don’t think that is a reason to stop giving grades.
As for the handicapped thing I see no reason we can’t have remedial PE just like we have remedial math it wouldn’t hurt people to drop to an appropriate level but just because the system isn’t optimal doesn’t mean that we need to stop counting it instead we need to fix it.
In Georgia, GPA is used to determine eligibility for the state-paid Hope scholarship. They already exclude soft options, though, so I am sure PE would be excluded even if the high school used it.
WHether it counts as nontrivial or not is a matter of opinion, but students get a discount on car insurance if they maintain a B average or better.
I’m not saying they’re worthless. I’m saying that they are worthless as a way to tell who can and who can’t work outside without dropping dead.
I think we definitely need, if not necessarily remedial PE, definitely PE classes divided by ability levels, just like math and English classes are.
I’d also like to see PE classes available that put less emphasis on team sports. Things like running, basic stretches, or weight lifting might be more useful to more people.
I’ve never even heard of anyone getting a mark/grade for PE.
My sister (PhD/MD) never graduated from HS because she was missing a unit of PE. I feel that regular physical activity is a great thing, but giving it a grade? Nah.
This is what I’ve been saying. There are kids who can run forever, kids who can lift a lot of weight, and then there are the kids who have been confined in their houses after school because there’s no safe place for them to play. These kids need to learn how to move, how to take care of themselves, and how to avoid hurting themselves. They need remedial PE, in other words. And the problem’s worse now than it was when I was a kid.
Just because a kid is active in a sport doesn’t mean that he knows how to warm up and cool down, for instance. Kids can get away with abusing their bodies in ways that adults really need to avoid. Warming up and cooling down are really things that have to be taught, it’s not intuitive by any means. This is what PE should be teaching. I had to learn about warming up and cooling down on my own, by searching it out. It was never taught in PE.
PE should be education, especially if it’s going to count in the GPA.
Why even worry about GPA at all? These days, the only important thing is how you feel about your grades. The children are all unique and beautiful snowflakes.
You know what some of this thread sounds like? Like a bunch of scrawny nerds crying because their perfect 4.0 GPA got boffed (by which I mean slightly reduced) because they couldn’t do any push ups.
I think it can count towards GPA–it did at my school. I got a B, because sometimes I wormed my way into the computer lab instead of participating in the class.
That being said, I think they should offer different kinds of PE, and should cut some of the areas. There were sports I liked, and sports I absolutely hated. Weight training was good. Soccer was okay. Softball was horrible. Football was even worse. Ditto volleyball. And the section on gymnastics was a lesson in humiliation. Ditto square dancing; whoever thought having middle school kids do that would be a good idea ought to be kicked in the groin.
I think the reason that people have a lot of problems with gym class is that it’s hard to mask it if you suck at sports. You might be able to hide that you’re not great at math, but everyone sees it if you miss a pop fly. Gym classes are generally huge (and spread out, and therefore poorly monitored), and kids are cruel. If you suck at sports, everyone knows it, and you catch hell. And, worse–you only get at the most three weeks to play any given sport (and that’s just for the biggies, usually). And that’s only for maybe half an hour, max, given time for changing and warm-ups.
So, for a lot of people, it gets equated with humiliation. But, honestly? I wish I’d had a good gym class growing up, 'cause now I hate exercise. It’s just. . .unpleasant. Totally unpleasant. Even if it’s a sport. I’m so self-conscious that it’s painful. And that’s the result of associating it with gym class.
Count it in the GPA, but grade on personal improvement. And offer different levels and specialities. Treat it, in other words, like shop or art or psychology–let people choose what they’re most suited for.
When I was in HS, PE grades did count, but gym class wasn’t the only PE option. I did one year of PE (and maybe one semester later, can’t remember), the rest of my PE classes were things like health, CPR/First Aid, stuff like that. IIRC, we also had some more focused physical exercise classes, like you could take a semester of weight-lifting.
We had a Health class that was separate from PE and covered things like CPR, nutrition, etc. Everybody had to take four semesters of PE (freshman and sophomore year) and the semester of Health (usually taken during sophomore year).
This is the problem with the way PE is taught today. The kids who need the most help get the least benefit. For the well-coordinated kids PE is like an hour of recess. But the uncoordinated kids get an hour of being mocked. They get mocked in the individual sports because they’re last. And they get mocked in the group sports because their lack of skill causes their team to lose. There is never any serious training advice given on how to get better. As a result, they never learn that exercise can actually be enjoyable and anyone can get benefits from it.
Maybe they could have different types of PE classes:
[ul]
[li]Team sports – football, volleyball, basketball, etc.[/li][li]Individual sports – Weightlifting, running, gymnastics, etc[/li][li]Coordination activities – Juggling, hoola-hoop, balance board, etc.[/li][li]Kinesiology – The study of human anatomy.[/li][/ul]
If they were split up like that, I could see having grades count. But when it’s a generic ‘PE’, it doesn’t make sense to give grades. That’s like having one class called ‘math’ where everything from 1+1=2 to calculus is taught.
And AotL, please don’t let other people’s opinion of you prevent you from exercising. To be honest, I do notice when a newbie is exercising. However, I don’t think ill of them. Rather, I admire that they are making an effort because I know how hard it can be to start out. It’s easy to work out when you go every day. The real willpower is in getting yourself to go the first time.
My high school had mandatory PE (which I support) and Pass/Fail. There were about 3500 kids in my school, so each PE class had well over 100 kids. Pass fail was necessary to make people show up, but how are a few teachers supposed to know anyone enough to give a grade with that many kids? Given the time required to change, how much class time is available for the wonderful stuff Lynn wants? We did exercises, and some minor sports, and a lot of running around the track. Grade seem stupid. An A for participation is just grade inflation, and I don’t think how well you do on tests is much of an indicator of how fit you are. Those really good at athletics will be on a team and get a college bump anyhow, so they don’t need the GPA bump.
Yep.
I loved PE. I was no uber-jock, but i loved playing sports and was pretty coordinated and fit.
But looking back, PE must have been miserable for the non-athletic kids in some of my classes. And it wasn’t just the students who made their lives miserable; the teachers were often no better.
One of our teachers loved playing touch football (rugby), to the exclusion of everything else. That’s basically all we did in his PE classes. We would pick two teams, including the teacher, and play a game. If you liked touch football, as i and some of my mates did, it was awesome; if you didn’t, or were slow and uncoordinated, it was 40 minutes of sheer misery as you were marginalized and laughed at, not only by the other students, but also sometimes by the teacher.
That sounds very like my school experience. I loathed every second of PE. I have poor hand/eye co-ordination. I wasn’t so bad at running and swimming, because that was just a matter of getting to other end as quickly as possible. But instead it was always bloody rugby, which I also had to play at weekends.
In a way it was amusing too, because the stated aim was to “instil in the boys a love of sport”. Instead it turned us non-sporty types off sport permanently. I decided very early on that once I was no longer required to do PE I would never play a sport again. And I haven’t.
Of course it shouldn’t count. At least not until they actually weed out all the sadists that wind up as PE teachers.
The big problem with PE is how it is taught (or not taught). There are a lot of physical activities out there, but PE tends to focus on team sports as many of them are easier and more economical to teach (e.g., soccer ball + field).
I have seen high schools with three levels of mathematics within each grade. The lowest level teaches things such as balancing a check book and filling out a tax return. The highest level teaches calculus. A similar approach to PE would be useful, and would probably help a lot of “athletically challenged” kids learn a little about fitness, and maybe find an activity that they would like to continue with into adulthood.