Friday, May 12, 2006

P.E. classes

As I think about my experiences with P.E. classes as a student, my middle school and my high school had different approaches.

At my middle school, all students had to participate in the same team sports as everyone else. The P.E. curriculum is only team sports (ie basketball, flag football, soccer, volleyball, baseball).

At my high school, there was a very different approach. Every other week, the students get to choose from 3 different sports. The choices include basketball, football, soccer, badmintion, lawn bowling, indoor hockey, aerobics, weight training, archery, frisbee, bowling, and even fishing and billiards (I'm not making that up :)!

McKinley High School gave the students more options, and obviously, I liked that school's approach to PE a lot better than my middle school's lame approach to P.E.

I sucked at most team sports, so I didn't like being stuck with playing them at middle school. Plus, the other students are such sore losers, getting mad if I made a bad play, or even blaming me if the team lost the game. However, NONE of them made it to the pros, in fact most of them weren't even high school all-stars! So, if I see them again, I will tell that to their faces!

If I ran my own school, students would fulfill their PE choices, by choosing from different courses. They choose courses like 1) team sports, 2) martial arts, 3) bike riding, 4) weight lifting, 5) aerobics, 6) cultural dances (ie. Polynesian, Latin, Asian, and from the rest of the world), 7) hip-hop dance, 8) etc.

That way, students can get their fitness from whatever they enjoy, instead of being forced into activities that they hate!

That is an approach Mililani Middle School takes in their PE curriculum. Their PE teacher even won an award recently. Check out the article at http://www.midweek.com/content/story/Print_Story/the_best_pe_teacher_in_america/

One more thing, the students need to have their own private stalls to change clothes and showering. I hated changing and showering in front of others!