Stop Blaming Gym Class

An article that ran in The Atlantic pointed to the ills of Gym Class.

Click here to check out the article.

We have to disagree; gym class is not bad. Gym class always has been great and always will be great.

What is bad is twofold. First too many physical education curriculums throughout the world fail to focus on teaching fundamental movement skills and fundamental sports skills. They are trying to teach children to throw, hit, kick, catch, run bases and pass when the child does not understand weight shift, posture and alignment and cannot skip, much less, sprint.

We are not giving our children an opportunity to be good at movement. Nobody wants to be bad at anything. Yet, the way physical education is run, we are setting up our children to be bad, at best, at many physical activities.

That brings us to the next point. Too often our schools have people who are not qualified or prepared to teach physical education. The football and soccer teams have won a dozen championships. That does not make the coaches good PE teachers. The softball team has won more than all of them combined. Likewise those accomplishments are not and should never be the prerequisite for being a PE teacher.

PE teachers should not have a sports-minded agenda. They should be there to teach the children how to move properly. They should teach them how to throw, how to kick, how to run, how to shoot a free throw, how to squat, how to segmentally roll from supine to prone and from prone to supine and how to hit a ball among other things.

That, I fear, is not going to happen because colleges no longer teach students how to be PE teachers. Many universities and colleges have conveniently, albeit wrongly, wrapped PE in with the kinesiology department, that is, if they even offer PE. By definition, kinesiology is the study of the mechanics of body movement. I believe universities fail at that, too. Odds are good that the next time you see a university professor giving tips to students on improving the gait of a 5-year-old's skip - it will be the first time you see it.

Spouting off about our PE experiences, be they good or bad, is pretty easy. A little more work is needed to figure out why the experience was good or bad. In both cases the why boils down to the curriculum or the person teaching it or both.