With the skyrocketing epidemic of obesity, we’re seeing more children who are not just chubby, not just overweight, not just fat, but morbidly obese. Children who can’t run the length of a city block much less 400 meter laps. Who couldn’t climb a rope if hyenas were snapping at their heels. That what remedial attention to fitness can be squeezed into 50 minutes a day, five days a week is going to have no impact whatsoever. So what’s the standard of dealing with this?
We eliminate or cut back the gym period. That is the standard because school is for turning out workers,not fully developed human beings.
I hope they’re better at dealing with this kind of thing than when I was in school. You wouldn’t jam kids who needed remedial arithmetic in with the ones studying calculus and give them the same subject matter; why then did they throw kids who knew nothing about playing baseball in with the ones who’d been playing it since they were three? I hope for their sake they have separate classes based on ability.
Physical Education was a mess when I was a kid.
I’ve substitute taught in more than a few P.E. classes. It varies by the school district, really. Some have ‘remedial P.E.’ where they walk, or do low impact stuff. Some are excused medically, and get a study hall instead of P.E. Some are just in the class, but sit out a lot.
ETA - How many Kcal/hr. does severe humilation burn off, I wonder?
They get to play a video game, Dance Dance Revolution to be exact.
West Virginia Adds ‘Dance Dance Revolution’ To Gym Class
http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1521605/20060125/index.jhtml?headlines=true
Bowling may be an option, if there’s an alley nearby.
A friend of mine was asthmatic as a child, so he and the other medically-excused kids were sent off to go bowling. He’s now a 200+ bowler and thanks to modern meds, no longer troubled by asthma.
Let’s try to keep it factual, ok?
Gfactor
General Questions Moderator
I was a skinny kid, not a fat kid, and gym still did the complete opposite of its intentions - created an aversion to physical activity that I retained until, like, this year. I’m almost 30. I still wouldn’t play a team sport. The idea makes me feel kind of nauseous.
Frankly, the kind of gym I got when I was a kid, the fat kids would be better off without.
I don’t know what you mean by “dealing with this”.
We had our share of obese kids in PE back in the 80s. You didn’t have to be a star athelete to particiapte in gym class. 1/4 mile run? You didn’t have to run it. Run what you can and walk the rest. They seemed to do fine in volleyball, swimming, soccer, etc. Maybe they moved slower but they could still hit, kick, and throw stuff decently.
A similar question would be “what’s the standard for dealing with kids with no coordination whatsoever?” There is no standard. You give it an effort and are graded on that.
I second this.
My memories of gym classes in middle school are being hit with balls so hard that it left marks, being forced to miserably run around a track, being one of the last person picked for most teams, and generally trying to avoid gym altogether as much as possible. And I was a skinny kid who was relatively popular outside of gym class.
I was an obese kid who went through 5 years of middle school and high school gym class in the 90s, always with an A.
I walked the required mile, along with the asthmatic kid. Girls did not have to climb the ropes so that wasn’t a problem for me. I actually did not fit into the required gym shorts so my teachers approved a pair of sweat shorts of the correct color.
I was better at every single sport and activity than most of the rest of the girls, save for running and gymnastics. I did every thing that was required by the state to pass phys ed. I got high marks because I was clearly giving it 100%, and the gym teachers weren’t stupid - they knew I deserved an A.
I don’t think the problem with “kids today” and gym class is obesity, it’s laziness. You can be thin and lazy (like a lot of teens) or fat and extremely willing and eager to participate.
Heh. I remember playing softball and the other boys always yelling at me to “tag up” but never telling me what the hell that meant because I “should know that”. Sorry, I never played Little League Baseball (and in fact I didn’t even become a baseball fan until I was 26). More dramatically, junior high gym class is the reason I’ve always hated basketball. When I was in 7th grade there was a much bigger 9th-grader on the opposing team who kept knocking me down and threatening to kick my ass if I didn’t stop fouling him. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing that he considered to be “fouling” him, and when I asked (repeatedly) he’d say, again, “you should know!” No, sorry. The gym teachers explained traveling and double-dribbling, and that’s pretty much it. I also grew up without a TV, so I didn’t even have the benefit of learning by watching. To this day if I happen to watch a BB game on TV, all I see is a bunch of guys milling about followed by a ref blowing a whistle — I can never identify what happened to cause a foul to be called (I’m only slightly better with football, and then only because the players are virutally motionless before the play starts so things like “offsides” and “false start” are pretty obvious).
Wow… just wow. Shared memory here.
What the hell does it mean?
Me too. Gym consisted of never having a basketball passed to me, never having a football thrown to me, and never being picked for a baseball team. The very few times that I found something dextrous and active that I enjoyed, pickle ball and badminton, it wouldn’t be played for more than a week, and then it was back to getting overshadowed by the athletic favorites.
A separate section of choices could have given me a youthhood of love for activity, instead of a hatred of sports and athletics in general.
We were all in the same class for gym, but for outdoor sports each year was divided into about three groups for team sports - mainly rugby in the winter and cricket in the summer - so the class klutz didn’t have to be humiliated by the star winger, fast bowler or slogger.
Fifty minutes five days a week would be extremely good for the obese - it was about half of what enabled me to shift eighty-plus pounds in well under a year.
Or, you can be ignorant and willing to learn but not actually taught.
That’s what was wrong for me. How the &^%$ was I supposed to play baseball when I didn’t know what to do and no-one was willing to teach me? It’s no wonder I escaped gym when I could. I would have been perfectly-happy with aerobics and weight training (such as I now pay to do voluntarily), and no team sports at all, but they did things like restrict the use of the weight machines to people on the wrestling team instead of letting everyone who needed them use them.
Ideally, I would have needed about a year of general strength and endurance training before they could start to teach me the basics of particular team sports. And there would have had to be an actual class on how to play baseball.
Being a year younger than everyone else also made a huge difference. Thinking about it now, for physical education, they should have put me with kids who were physically at the same stage of development. You’d think that might have been obvious, but no. True, something else would have to have been done in grade nine, when I went across town to the high school.
I think it means you need to touch the base you’re on after a fly ball has been caught, or you can be thrown out at it.
Almost. When a fly ball is hit (usually far out in the outfield) you have the option of waiting until the ball is caught, tagging the base you’re currently on and proceeding on to the next base before the fielder can get the ball to where you are. You don’t HAVE to do it (“it” being “tagging up”) - you can just hang tight on your present base. But if there’s a player tagging up behind you you’re going to cause all sorts of mess if you do not tag up.
Wassa matter? Doncha know how to play…?
Oh, sorry.
If you are on base and a fly ball is hit you can’t leave the base until the fly is caught by the other team.
You can take a chance and leave early if you think the other team isn’t going to catch the ball but if they do you do need to go back and touch the base you started from or else you can be thrown out there.
I don’t remember any actual instruction in gym either, they just threw a ball at us and told us to play. I think we only had it three times a week though, not five.
Yep, that was exactly my Phys Ed experience! I was kind of average in every way, but clumsy (I actually have no 3D vision… makes sports tough!). I had no real ability like my siblings have, but I was willing to learn (especially volleyball), but I was treated like shit by the same teacher every year.
I never quite understood how a female phys ed teacher could say thing like “girls can’t serve volleyball overhand, so I’m not going to show you” (and then she’d go serve overhand as she played a game with the jock boys!), or “girls don’t know how to play baseball, so we won’t ever play that”. I mean, seriously, if I a guy had said that, I’d almost let it slide (well, I’d still be pissed, but I’ve heard shit like that before from some men), but she was a woman!, kind of disproving her own point, huh?!?