Gym classes don't work
Sep. 20th, 2006 03:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
teleribGasp! Most kids spend gym class standing around.
News flash, folks. If you're teaching sports, the kids are going to want to win at the sport they're playing. They're not there for fitness. If they want to win, the kids who are already fit and coordinated will spend most of the time running around with the ball. Kids who are slow and uncoordinated will be ignored as much as possible, because sending the ball their way is a sure way to ensure a turnover/missed out/something bad for your team.
Even with something like volleyball, where you rotate positions, when you suck, you cause more rotations, so you rotate quickly out of the active position you had and into a less active one, while a sporty person will anchor a position for a longer time.
When all you do in a softball game is swing and miss, swing and miss, and then stand in the far right outfield doing nothing, you don't get much exercise. And you learn to hate softball.
Nobody sees a problem with having History and History Honors classes, and some schools even offer Remedial levels. We need Remedial Gym. I would have loved Remedial Gym.
News flash, folks. If you're teaching sports, the kids are going to want to win at the sport they're playing. They're not there for fitness. If they want to win, the kids who are already fit and coordinated will spend most of the time running around with the ball. Kids who are slow and uncoordinated will be ignored as much as possible, because sending the ball their way is a sure way to ensure a turnover/missed out/something bad for your team.
Even with something like volleyball, where you rotate positions, when you suck, you cause more rotations, so you rotate quickly out of the active position you had and into a less active one, while a sporty person will anchor a position for a longer time.
When all you do in a softball game is swing and miss, swing and miss, and then stand in the far right outfield doing nothing, you don't get much exercise. And you learn to hate softball.
Nobody sees a problem with having History and History Honors classes, and some schools even offer Remedial levels. We need Remedial Gym. I would have loved Remedial Gym.
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no subject
Date: 2006-09-20 08:01 pm (UTC)I think it's a matter of educating the teachers. There are plenty of sports that challenge only yourself, or challenge everyone equally, without making the folks not as able feel horrible about themselves. Avoid things like Volleyball and Soccer, leave those for after hours clubs.
We were never allowed to just stand by and do nothing. Heck, I had swimming lessons in school. Most of us knew already how, but those that did not, learned. No standing around... just doesn't work well in the deep end of the pool. *grin* We also did gymnastics, a sport where it doesn't matter if your buddy is great and you are well.. not so great. We did various crosscountry events... running, jumping, etc.
Ps: I sucked at running.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-20 08:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-21 10:58 am (UTC)Americans tend to really, really believe that team sports are an Important Learning Experience. And they can teach teamwork and discipline and all kinds of good stuff. But the team needs to be relatively close in skill level for that to work well, IMO. I give my old grammar school gym teacher credit - she'd split the class into boys and girls (which was roughly athletic/non-athletic in my class) and let the boys go play while she did skill drills with the girls. After a few classes of that, we'd play all together, with some rules like "A girl must touch the ball before you can score with it." It wasn't perfect, but it was an improvment.
There's also this notion that if you expose a kid to enough sports in gym class, they will find one they love and be on rec teams for the rest of their adult life, keeping in shape. I doubt that anyone has ever developed a lifelong love of a sport they played for 6-8 weeks in gym. It's the games you played on rec teams as a kid, or with your family, or that you fell in love with watching the Olympics and begged for lessons, that you keep up with.
If instead, we want to teach kids about general fitness and actually get them moving for 30 minutes a day to burn off some of their energy... well, that's going to be an entirely different program, more like the one you had growing up.