PE/Recess time mandates

"toto" wrote in message
...
On Sat, 27 Sep 2003 07:22:25 -0500, "Donna Metler"

wrote:

It really depends on the curriculum. My district uses the SPARK
curriculum
for PE, which emphasizes life skills, and includes quite a bit of dance.
In
fact, since I am an Orff specialist, PE and I plan together, because
often
her movement objectives and mine match, so they may learn some of the
steps
in PE, then use them with a song they're singing with me, to create a new
line dance (which both classes would do in the gym, where they have some
space).

And my son who loves team sports would have hated this.

Why can't they have a choice instead of trying to make all
kids do the same things?

I object to PE on the grounds that different kids have different
interests and abilities and should be able to choose the
activity that suits them best after elementary school when they
have been exposed to all the different choices.

Should they also have the choice about whether to learn math or reading, on
the grounds that different kids have different interests and abilities?
After all, some kids are never going to be that great at math and many will
never enjoy it, so why bother with that part of the curriculum at all?

I'm actually *stunned* that some people think kids ought to have the
*choice* of whether or not to engage in certain types of physical education
because "they might not be good at it, they might not like it, and they
might be ridiculed". That's true of EVERY, SINGLE academic subject we
require children to learn in school, yet I don't hear ANYONE suggesting that
kids be given the choice of whether or not to learn those subjects.

Physical education is just as important as academic education. Exposure to
many different types of physical activity gives children the best
opportunity to find a sport/athletic activity they enjoy and can engage in
for the rest of their lives. Especially for children of poor families who
cannot afford to enroll them in extracurricular programs, school-based PE
programs are the *only* place they can learn about and experience
sports/athetic activities. And for them,

My dd would have chosen dance. I would have chosen
swimming and perhaps soccer or basketball. My son would
have chosen any team sports other than swimming. Others
might choose marching band or individual sports like tennis
or ice skating or karate or aerobics. All of these require a
good level of physical activity and can be used to promote
healthy bodies.

But you can't choose *any* of these without knowing which one you like. And
you can't know which one you like without trying it.
--
Be well, Barbara
(Julian [6], Aurora [4], and Vernon's [18mo] mom)

This week's special at the English Language Butcher Shop:
"She rose her eyebrows at Toby" -- from "O' Artful Death", by Sarah Stewart
Taylor

Daddy: You're up with the chickens this morning.
Aurora: No, I'm up with my dolls!

All opinions expressed in this post are well-reasoned and insightful.
Needless to say, they are not those of my Internet Service Provider, its
other subscribers or lackeys. Anyone who says otherwise is itchin' for a
fight. -- with apologies to Michael Feldman

"toto" wrote in message
...
On 29 Sep 2003 04:32:08 GMT, OSPAM (Naomi Pardue)
wrote:

Speaking as a non-athletic sort, this would have been even worse! It's
bad enough to be shuffled to a position where your inadequacies will do
as little damage to your team as possible. If you are stuck in a key

position, where everyone can REALLY see and concentrate on how bad you
are -- and where you have a higher chance of making an error that will
cost points for your team -- it is downright humiliating. A

Which is yet another important purpose of team sports in PE. Teaching
about
fair play. Teaching about NOT laughing at your team mates who may be
less
talented than you are. (When I took vocal music classes in high school
the
teacher had a standing rule that any student who laughed at another
student's
performance automatically got an F for the marking period.) About
encouraging
and helping one another. About doing your best being more important than
winning.

Perhaps, but in a gym class where the number of students is far too
high for the teacher to really watch and see what is happening, this
is unlikely to happen.

In my son's gym classes, the dominant mentality was of kids who hated
anyone who excelled. He was a good athlete and even in sports he was
not very good at he loved to try his hardest. He ended up being
tripped, being called names, etc. The gym teachers never saw any of
it. I don't think that these classes contribute to learning about
fair play at all.

They didn't for me and they certainly didn't for my son or my dd.

Our PE classes at the elementary level are one class at a time, so there are
never more students in PE than there would be in the classroom (usually
15-25, depending on grade, possibly as many as 30). The PE teachers can do a
much better job of teaching social skills in this sort of setting. This is a
change from when I was in elementary school and the whole grade went to PE
at one time.

In TN, there are class size limits for each grade, and while team sports (if
considered a class) are excempt, PE classes are not. This continues into
high school, as well.



There is no sound, no cry in all the world
that can be heard unless someone listens ..

The Outer Limits

"dragonlady" wrote in message
...
By high school, most kids know what they want and enjoy. In my kids'
schools there have been 4 to 6 PE classes going on at a time each
period; these schools are huge, with between 1500 and 2000 kids in each
grade level. Still, everyone has to take exactly the same PE, with
exactly the same mix of activities.

Interesting. By the time I got to high school, if you were engaged in a
competitive sport outside of school hours, you didn't have to take PE. I
didn't take PE in the 11th or 12th grades because I was on the high school
swim team for one semester and swam with an AAU team during the high school
off-season.

Are the kids on the high school football or baseball team at your school
required to take PE *in addition to* their team practices and games?
--
Be well, Barbara
(Julian [6], Aurora [4], and Vernon's [18mo] mom)

This week's special at the English Language Butcher Shop:
"She rose her eyebrows at Toby" -- from "O' Artful Death", by Sarah Stewart
Taylor

Daddy: You're up with the chickens this morning.
Aurora: No, I'm up with my dolls!

All opinions expressed in this post are well-reasoned and insightful.
Needless to say, they are not those of my Internet Service Provider, its
other subscribers or lackeys. Anyone who says otherwise is itchin' for a
fight. -- with apologies to Michael Feldman

In article _9Ydb.4350$hp5.3504@fed1read04, Circe says...

"Banty" wrote in message
...
In article zFHdb.4204$hp5.1888@fed1read04, Circe says...

"toto" wrote in message
.. .
On 27 Sep 2003 12:36:09 GMT, OSPAM (Naomi Pardue)
wrote:
Uhhh... so you don't think that it might be, in some way, helpful for
kids to
learn how to play soccer/softball/baseketball/volleyball/ etc.

Frankly, no. I see no reason to learn these games unless you like to
play
them.

But how would you ever know whether you like to play them if you don't
ever
learn to play them?

OK - Barbara - let's go parachute jumping TOMORROW. Then we'll go visit
Stever
Irwin and wrestle snakes. What?? Why not?? - how would you know if you
don't
try :-)

Well, actually, I'd be willing to try either one of those things, assuming I
could do them for free and the risks could be shown to be very low because,
frankly, I really don't think I can opine as to whether I like them or not
unless I try them.

I might try the parachute jumping - I'd pass on the snakes :-)

If I tried skiing, and being way up in the lift scared the bejesus out of me, I
think I could safely conclude that my recreational bliss isn't to be found in
parachute jumping without some PE teacher making me try first :-)


You know, my kids think they know *on sight* whether they like particular
foods or not, but I try to get them to try things they're *sure* they'll
hate and, many times, I am rewarded for pushing because they turn out to
enjoy them. Personally, I think sports are the same way--you can't know from
watching other people play soccer whether you will like playing soccer any
more than you can know from watching other people eat sushi whether you'll
like sushi.

But, for example, if you tried and hate soccer, then what would be the reason
to try rugby??

Doing this in PE is like telling the kid who hates algebra - "but you haven't
really tried calculus yet"!

That's what PE tends to do. This week (or session) it's tennis. I hated
tennis. This week we're going to try - badmiton. Oh joy!

The thing is - what's dislikable about team sports oftentimes is that you're not
valued by the team unless you perform well, and if you're not a natural at
athletics, you're going to pick it all up slower than the next kid no matter how
you try, and you won't be valued as much. Another thing is being coached - more
independant sorts don't take to that.

So, being coached by a soccer coach and hating that then being coached by a tag
football coach - oh joy.


While I've allowed that a legit purpose of PE would be to expose kids to
various
sports, I can perfectly well understand that many people who don't like
athletics much, and/or dont' like team sports much, could reasonably
conclude
that they won't much like yet another team sport.

Ah, but how did people who don't like athletics or team sports much conclude
they didn't like them? By just *watching* other people play them or by
playing them themselves?

Believe me - they've figured it out by second grade.


See, I was one of those kids who was always chosen last for team sports
because I wasn't very good at them. Then, as an adolescent, I discovered I
was quite good at the individual sport of competitive swimming. I was on the
swim team in high school, but didn't think I'd be very good at water polo
because it was a team sport, so I didn't bother to try to play. Then, in
college, I hung out with a bunch of people who played innertube water polo.
I finally decided to try it. It was a hoot. I then graduated to playing
"real" water polo and *loved* it. So I cheated myself of a lot of fun times
by being afraid I wouldn't like something without trying it. And for that
reason, I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for the "I don't like team
sports and I never will so I won't even try" mentality.

Also - unless PE is set up for a substantially long time on a single sport
with
a substantial amount of coaching - the kids will not be learning how to
play the
sport anyway.

Nonsense. If the kids play a single soccer game once every other week or
over an entire school year, they'll get pretty good at soccer.

PE classes aren't organized that way though!

By way of
comparison, our AYSO and NYS soccer teams usually practice once a week
before the games start, then taper off to playing only games towards the end
of the season. Most of the kids learn quite a lot about soccer in one hour
of playing/practicing per week over the course of three months. Surely over
the course of an entire year, even a bi-weekly game would go a long way
towards teaching the rudiments of the sport.

What is it about team sports where everyone is supposed to like it, and if they
don't that THAT one they're supposded to like THIS one?? Like just everybody
just HAS to like athletic activity of some sort, let alone do it with a bunch
of other people all the time. We don't do that to the poor kids regarding, say,
fiber arts.

"Say - scruffy active kid, so you didn't like knitting, but have you tried
weaving? C'mon, don't know until you try. Don't give up! We have a really good
embroidery teacher, and the sewing club in high school would keep you off the
streets too...."

Ya think the kid might know that, if he don't like weaving, he might apply
certain observations to embroidery and draw a reasonable conclusion about it?

It's that team sports gets put on this pedestal.

Banty

PE is where you get 'unintentionally' bumped, the ball 'misses' and hits your
shoulder, stuff is 'lost' from the locker room, and you're a Big Baby if you
say
boo about it.

In elementary school (where I went, and where Shaina goes) there are no locker
rooms. You don't disrobe at all. (When I was in grade school, and we wore
skirts/dresses to school, we would wear skirts on gym days, with shorts
underneith them, and just remove our skirts for PE. (w called it gym back
then...) Shaina just knows that she has to wear appropriate clothes (no
dresses/skirts, and sneakers rather than sandals or dress shoes) on the days
she has PE.

And in high school, our lockers had locks on them.

I was hardly one of the most popular kids in school (at any grade -- I was way
too smart, not very attractive, painfully shy), but PE/gym class was far from
the worst part of my life.




Naomi
CAPPA Certified Lactation Educator

(either remove spamblock or change address to to e-mail
reply.)

"Circe" wrote:

"Rosalie B." wrote in message
.. .
Well Dorothy did say - after elementary school that they should ought to
have a choice.

Should middle school children also have the choice of whether or not to take
English or Algebra?

They did have a choice on Algebra when I was there. Or rather - only the
mathematically able got to be able to take it.

English classes were tracked - when I was teaching, the English and math
teachers on our team split the classes up between them and the SS and
myself (science) took them in the groups that they were put into that way.
I think the English teachers did it pretty much by reading ability. At
least one English teacher I worked with had different spelling words for
the different classes.

And all the students took reading for one period a day and all the teachers
taught it - including the PE and other special subject teachers.

grandma Rosalie

Naomi Pardue wrote:
Still, everyone has to take exactly the same PE, with
exactly the same mix of activities.


In my high school, for freshman and sophomore years, you cycled through a
variety of activities through the year (i.e., 6 weeks of swimming, 6 weeks of
track and field, 6 weeks of basketball and so on.) Jr and sr years you got
choices of, typically, 3 activities each section. I typically chose track or
swimming or softball. There was one period of time,during my senior year, I
don't recall why now, when we did not get a choice. We HAD to all play
volleyball. I loathe volleyball. Am utterly horrible at it (it's by far my
worst team sport...). And I rebelled. I said "I'm a senior. Seniors are
supposed to get choices in PE. I REFUSE to play volleyball!" And sat out the
class for two class sessions. And got F's for both those sessions. I wish I
could remember what happened after that... I don't *think* I caved, but I know
I didn't flunk PE either. ('cause if you flunk PE, you don't graduate, and I
obviously graduated.)


Wow - you had to take PE for 4 years in high school? We were only
required to take it for freshman year. Which I consider to be A Good
Thing. I can't remember any class as worthless as PE. Unless it was
study hall.

Clisby

"Rosalie B." wrote in message
...
"Circe" wrote:
"Rosalie B." wrote in message
.. .
Well Dorothy did say - after elementary school that they should ought
to
have a choice.

Should middle school children also have the choice of whether or not to
take
English or Algebra?

They did have a choice on Algebra when I was there. Or rather - only the
mathematically able got to be able to take it.

English classes were tracked - when I was teaching, the English and math
teachers on our team split the classes up between them and the SS and
myself (science) took them in the groups that they were put into that
way.
I think the English teachers did it pretty much by reading ability. At
least one English teacher I worked with had different spelling words for
the different classes.

And all the students took reading for one period a day and all the
teachers
taught it - including the PE and other special subject teachers.

You're deliberately missing the point. If a kid knows he doesn't like math
or reading (whether he can pass the test to take the course or not), should
he be able to skip math or reading altogether? Why should anyone have to
take a course to learn something that doesn't particularly interest him/her
or that he/she isn't very good at? Why should kids have to learn history,
social sciences, natural sciences or anything else unless they WANT to?

The argument people seem to be making here is that physical education is the
ONE area in school where the child's preferences must be absolutely
respected and there should be no expectation for the kid to just buckle down
and learn something he/she may not much enjoy.

In an ideal world, all children would love every aspect of school and enjoy
learning every subject. But the fact is that everyone has likes and dislikes
and no one is going to enjoy *everything* she studies or learns in school. I
wasn't particularly fond of math, but I took them and passed them. I wasn't
particularly fond of PE, either, but I took it and passed it, too. I
survived. I'm not damaged for life because I barely pulled a C in algebra
and got C's in PE. It doesn't BOTHER me that I'm not good at most sports
because I'm good at other things. And I was just as good at those other
things when I was in school as I am today, and I knew it.

I don't understand why it is considered so horribly unfair for some kids to
suffer through PE because they don't have good athletic skills when some of
the kids who excel at athletics are not very good at academic subjects but
are expected to suffer through them anyway. I don't believe it hurts
children to recognize that we all have different talents and excel at
different things. If a child doesn't excel in PE, chances are that he excels
in something else. It all balances out. The TRICK is in ensuring that each
child's talents are RECOGNIZED and EXPRESSED in some way in school. And THAT
may well be the part that's missing for a lot of kids: school gives them no
reason to believe they're good at anything.
--
Be well, Barbara
(Julian [6], Aurora [4], and Vernon's [18mo] mom)

This week's special at the English Language Butcher Shop:
"She rose her eyebrows at Toby" -- from "O' Artful Death", by Sarah Stewart
Taylor

Daddy: You're up with the chickens this morning.
Aurora: No, I'm up with my dolls!

All opinions expressed in this post are well-reasoned and insightful.
Needless to say, they are not those of my Internet Service Provider, its
other subscribers or lackeys. Anyone who says otherwise is itchin' for a
fight. -- with apologies to Michael Feldman

"Circe" wrote:

snip

Should they also have the choice about whether to learn math or reading, on
the grounds that different kids have different interests and abilities?
After all, some kids are never going to be that great at math and many will
never enjoy it, so why bother with that part of the curriculum at all?

I'm actually *stunned* that some people think kids ought to have the
*choice* of whether or not to engage in certain types of physical education
because "they might not be good at it, they might not like it, and they
might be ridiculed". That's true of EVERY, SINGLE academic subject we
require children to learn in school, yet I don't hear ANYONE suggesting that
kids be given the choice of whether or not to learn those subjects.

Not really true.

a) Children are more uniform in their abilities in academic subjects and
usually the ones that are good at academics are not the ones that make fun
of others IME.

b) Plus we do, at the HS level and sometimes at the MS level and even in
elementary school, give them some choices. Band and chorus are almost
always voluntary. And I think music education is more important than PE
because sports can pretty easily be done out of school, and music is hard
to get unless you consider the church choir sufficient.

c) Our kids got to chose the special subjects they wanted - whether sewing
or woodshop.

Physical education is just as important as academic education. Exposure to

No it's not. I disagree with you here. People can be perfectly happy
without sports, if by sports you mean team sports. But schools are for
academic education primarily - one cannot get on with life successfully
without the three Rs.

many different types of physical activity gives children the best
opportunity to find a sport/athletic activity they enjoy and can engage in
for the rest of their lives. Especially for children of poor families who
cannot afford to enroll them in extracurricular programs, school-based PE
programs are the *only* place they can learn about and experience
sports/athetic activities. And for them,

My dd would have chosen dance. I would have chosen
swimming and perhaps soccer or basketball. My son would
have chosen any team sports other than swimming. Others
might choose marching band or individual sports like tennis
or ice skating or karate or aerobics. All of these require a
good level of physical activity and can be used to promote
healthy bodies.

But you can't choose *any* of these without knowing which one you like. And
you can't know which one you like without trying it.

Yes, but the trying doesn't have to be in PE class. Yes poor kids ought to
have chances. But here we have Parks and Rec departments where swimming
lessons and basketball etc are available for extremely low cost or free for
the disadvantaged families just as free breakfasts and lunches are.


grandma Rosalie

In article , Rosalie B. says...

"Circe" wrote:

"Rosalie B." wrote in message
. ..
Well Dorothy did say - after elementary school that they should ought to
have a choice.

Should middle school children also have the choice of whether or not to take
English or Algebra?

They did have a choice on Algebra when I was there. Or rather - only the
mathematically able got to be able to take it.

Ah - ha! Right! :-)

If sports is so important, why isn't it taught as Advanced Sports, and Remedial
Sports - huh? huh? :-)

Banty