<p>If schools had the money to spend on PE and do PE correctly, our healthcare costs would drop significantly! Time for Obama to find the money!</p>
<p>What subjects are taught and how, is usually a local decision or at the very least directed by the state.</p>
<p>I know I do not want the federal govt to decide what curriculum and how it is taught in schools- we already saw problems with " chastity" based sex education.</p>
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<p>I don’t see why there is any difference in what the students of Delaware and the students of Montana (just picking two very different states) should be expected to know to graduate high school. The inefficiency in having 50 different sets of rules and regulations bugs the heck out of me.</p>
<p>Here in VA the HS students take 2 years of PE. D is athletic and spent many hours per week on dance teams(school and studio) but hated PE. S is not at all athletic but has (so far) gotten A’s in middle school PE. I would not be happy if he got less than an A as it would keep him off of the top honor roll. </p>
<p>I agree with Pizzagirl that the skills in PE are mostly natural athletic skills. My memories of my own PE days included being laughed and made fun of in front of everyone by a very nasty PE teacher (she did this to others,too). I can not have imagined that say a math teacher would get away with doing this to a child who struggled in math. </p>
<p>I think PE should be pass/fail. I would also like to see other classes such as chorus, band, art, drama ,etc. also be graded pass/fail. In general, the colleges don’t count these grades for admission anyway and honor rolls, class ranks, etc. would not be affected.</p>
<p>I don’t see why there is any difference in what the students of Delaware and the students of Montana (just picking two very different states) should be expected to know to graduate high school. The inefficiency in having 50 different sets of rules and regulations bugs the heck out of me.</p>
<p>I see your point- but I think it should be up to the residents of the state to decide how the standards are taught.
I think things should be aligned, but at the same time- don’t have to be identical- although since we don’t even have curriculum in our own district that is aligned from school to school- it is hard for me to imagine nationwide standards being applied smoothly.</p>
<p>But surely stuff like math is pretty much the same everywhere. Even history - you can write the standards that everyone needs a year of local history in grade 4 or something similar (which seems to be pretty common already.)</p>
<p>Actually almost all students are subjected to a national test of their competence and incidentally a test of their school systems. Ever hear of the ACT, SAT I and the various SAT II subject tests?</p>
<p>PE is a detriment to school life because of aforementioned odor, sweat, as well as interfering with schedules for high performers. </p>
<p>I personally enjoy it only because it’s forced from the state, so I deal with it (and I’m athletic). It’d be nice if it was calculated because I’d have 4.0’s, but unfortunately it’s not in my NJ school.</p>
<p>I don’t think PE should be required, and health could be incorporated into biology. My daughter’s school requires one semester of swim-gym (which is hell on earth) in addition to the semesters of regular PE. In this particular school building, I think PE should be eliminated as a requirement.</p>
<p>NY State also does the weighing-in-front-of-everyone thing, which makes me crazy. I told my daughter that she could politely decline this year.</p>
<p>In my province only one semester of gym is required. Students must also take either a second gym credit or a second arts credit as well. I don’t really mind gym being graded because here a large percentage of the mark is based on a final project as well as the health parts of the class. Here gym counts in the high school average, but universities don’t count it in the average they use for admittance.
What I really like that our school offers in grades ten, eleven and twelve a choice between regular gym class and a fitness class for girls. The fitness class involves running, swimming, weights, cardio, yoga, pilates etc. It has definetely increased the number of girls who continue in some sort of gym class after the required grade nine class. Our school also offers an outdoor ed class that meets after school hours that also counts as a gym credit so I guess you could technically do outdoor ed instead of grade nine gym if you wanted to, but I only know of one girl who planned to do this and she ended up taking the fitness class after it started to be offer.
And I would not be happy at all if any sort of weigh in happend here, that is definetely not part of either the gym or fitness classes here.</p>
<p>*But surely stuff like math is pretty much the same everywhere. *</p>
<p>oh if only that were true.
[Seattle School board votes 4-3 for Discovery curriculumWhere’s The Math?](<a href=“http://www.wheresthemath.com/2009/05/07/seattle-school-board-votes-4-3-for-discovery-curriculum/”>http://www.wheresthemath.com/2009/05/07/seattle-school-board-votes-4-3-for-discovery-curriculum/</a>)</p>
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<p>Not just kids at school, adults in the workplace too!</p>
<p>And some military drill, and slogan shouting! Put some strength and moral fiber into the nation’s workers!</p>
<p>Emerald, it seems odd to me that you desire state/local gov to determine curricula, not the fed, but then you post a link about a presumably poor choice that Seattle made.</p>
<p>S2 took PE as an elective his junior and senior years. Virtually all of the boys (and they were all boys) in the class were athletes and the teacher treated them with kid gloves, particularly for those in season (i.e. be careful with your football players in the fall, your basketball players in winter, and your soccer players in spring, etc.). He told the parents the coaches would kill him if one of the boys got hurt in gym class and had to miss a game. In fact, in any given season a lot of the boys were nursing injuries from their sport, so couldn’t do much. But whatever they did, it was far and away S’s favorite class so the teacher entertained them somehow.</p>
<p>I don’t have any problem with it being an elective. Good health habits can be taught in elementary and middle school and presumably be ingrained as a personal responsibility by high school. A lot of high school girls take yoga at our YMCA and get a card signed giving them PE credit, so there must be some alternative choices available to the standard gym class. However, I prefer the school just make gym optional by high school. </p>
<p>As for a grade, S2 was happy to have those A’s. I’m sure selective colleges ignore the Advanced PE grade, but for the less selective colleges, the little boost to the GPA sure didn’t hurt. I used to joke that those were my son’s only AP classes.</p>
<p>My kids high school required Fitness every year - it meets either 2 or 3 times a week and grades are based on participation, skill level and written tests. Similar to how they grade band and chorus.
In the upper class years, students can sub Strength training and Personal Fitness for the regular Fitness class. These classes are very popular, esp with kids who are not very athletic or into games. They can more or less proceed at their own pace.
Funny how kids who didn’t like gym class because they didn’t like to sweat really go at it on DDR in personal fitness class!</p>
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<p>Atrocious. That would drive me crazy too. Completely inappropriate.</p>
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<p>I agree this should not happen. I remember when my dd was in middle school, they did this in health class, and also calculated percentage of body fat. My dd is not a tiny girl, and she probably weighed more than most of the girls in her class, so when she started telling me about this experience, I have to admit I was waiting for tears, and having to assure her that her weight was just fine, yada yada yada. But it turns out that while she weighed more, she had the lowest percentage of body fat in the class, which she was proud of, so I just let it go.</p>
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You’ve got a great girl there.</p>
<p>Mine is really tiny (genetically) and has never hit 100 pounds in her life. Learning that at the weigh-in has made her a target of some ugly bullying. She is the size she is because the women in our family are all really tiny (I’m less than 5 feet tall, and D just over), not because she’s better, prettier, more disciplined than anyone else and she never thinks so, but other people don’t know that.</p>
<p>Our upstate NY school system doesn’t weigh the kids, let alone announce the results aloud (gack!). It does attempt to quantify fitness: In high school, all the kids run a mile the first week of school and again at the end of the year, and receive a record of their individual results, which isn’t publicized. In the lower levels, there’s a series of fitness tests at the beginning and end of the year (how many pull-ups, situps, etc.), and that document is sent home to parents. Weight is recorded at the required physicals, which I think are in like 1st, 3rd, 5th, 8th, and 10th grades – yearly exams are only required for athletes. </p>
<p>I think there’s some leeway in New York state for individual school districts to administer their phys ed programs. Several districts in our area excuse team athletes from gym, and also dancers who take daily classes. I’d have loved for my kids, who danced, to have three extra free periods instead of gym class, but it wasn’t permitted at our high school. </p>
<p>My kids tolerated gym well enough. It was an easy A if you showed up prepared, didn’t mouth off to the teacher, and made a reasonable effort. I suppose the phys ed teachers need to have some kind of carrot (i.e., a grade the counts) to get kids to cooperate.</p>
<p>I only had 9 weeks of gym class because I got exempt from the rest with marching band (which is NOT that physical, but I’m not complaining). It happened to be at a time when I was in between swimming and track (training swimming at the time) so it wasn’t bad, but if I had it during swim season I wouldn’t have been happy. Especially during tapering before big meets, I would have opted out of most exercises. So to anyone lamenting about athletes being allowed to slack off during their season, there’s a reason for it. Not saying it’s right that we would get preferential treatment per se, but rather that performance in our sport might be as important as a grade especially if we’re trying to get recruited.</p>
<p>I’d like to see it required for four years, with a real variety of options. Flexibility and conditioning classes, yoga, DDR, Wii Sports, tennis for beginners/intermediate players, swimming, water aerobics, cycling, golf, ballroom dancing, whatever. Total pipe dream, especially in our totally cash-strapped district, but I’ve been having a heck of a time helping D1 find some kind of physical activity that she likes and that fits in her schedule. I came up with a long list of possibilities, then started looking for places that might offer a class in the late afternoon before her evening commitments start. It was pretty much impossible. She’s not athletic, and has no interest in doing something solitary where she has to motivate herself. We finally found a fitness boot camp right near us at 5:30 AM which she tried and did not hate, so she has committed to it though mid-October. </p>
<p>In college it’s much easier because there are so many interesting options, and fitness class times naturally fit with student schedules.</p>