I am of two minds on this. I was a kid who was good at endeavors that required hand eye coordination…anything that required a stick and ball and good at balance and horrific at things that required upper body strength. The dreaded rope climb for the Presidents Fitness program still gives me nightmares and yes I was the kid who skidded to a halt in front of the horse in gymnastics phys ed and got chosen last for flag football because I have endurance but not speediness and no one wanted me on their team. I hated it and it was demoralizing. It just think it made me resilient and self aware but I can feel sorry for kids where it eats away at them. I don’t think avoiding these situations all together is necessarily good either since resilience and self awareness are healthy traits. I will say there is a giant chasm between being bullied, truly being bullied and being the target in dodgeball because you are the obvious target. I think most teachers can recognize the difference.
I have a nephew who, as en elementary and middle school student, was the biggest klutz on the planet. However he was also very tall and broad shouldered, popular, a good musician, and witty, so it was easy to be resilient about his lack of athleticism. When he missed a ball or tripped over his own feet kids laughed with him, not at him.
These comments are bringing back memories and making my heart beat fast. I was always the slowest, weakest, and least coordinated. I was also usually the new kid (we moved a lot). I was always picked last, which I could tolerate based on my abilities, although it galled me to be so bad at gym in front of everyone (for me, the worst was that physical activity is such a public performance). My parents didn’t help; my dad put me in tumbling classes in an effort to make me better at sports, not realizing that those classes were for kids who enjoyed gymnastics and were good at it. Unfortunately, those experiences have made me avoid most physical activity from the time that I first could. I don’t think I was bullied because of my lack of ability, probably more pitied and disdained. I was only ever really bullied in 8th grade, when I moved to a very different kind of environment in the middle of the year. It is no understatement to say that half a school year of bullying at a vulnerable age had a huge negative effect on my life for decades afterward. I may have recovered now, in my late 50s. I assume that many people who are bullied worse and/or longer never recover. Thus I applaud any effort, however minimal, anywhere in schools or society, to reduce institutionally approved cruelty toward children.
All the bullying between kids and adults notwithstanding, we still live in a much easier, gentler world than 500 or even 50 years ago. This didn’t happen because everybody was prepared to endure poverty, racism, humiliation and violence in their life, it happened because there were people who thought these things were not OK and nobody should endure them.
When I was in 7th grade, our PE teachers apparently thought it would be splendid if we learned to square dance. Being the early 70’s, of course we all thought this was embarrassingly corny. That aside, they would marshall the entire 7th grade class into the gym and pair us off. They devised two methods for doing this - either we lined up in two alphabetic groups and paired in order, or they put all the boys on one side and all the girls on the other and told the boys to go pick a girl. There were generally a few more boys than girls, so some boys would hang back in the hopes of not having to participate for lack of a partner.
Since I was an ugly duckling, poor, unpopular, and taller than most of the boys by that time, I was one of the unpicked girls who would be forcibly paired up with some recalcitrant boy at the end. His only recourse to saving face would be to moan and complain loudly. Even when we lined up and paired, my unfortunate partner would generally muster a look of horror and a moan at seeing who he would be stuck with. This tortuous activity went on for what must have been months, and still makes me shudder to think about. I don’t know what life lessons I was supposed to learn from all that.
@twinsmama you were bullied for half a school year. I was bullied relentlessly from 5th grade through high school. And we were still “picking teams” through high school, so I don’t know why people are only referencing elementary and middle school. The only times I wasn’t last was when we played volleyball, which I had some advantage in by virtue of being the tallest.
Amazingly enough, in this thread all the people who were bullied relentlessly for a long period of time in their school years failed to discern the pedagogical value in it, yet some of those who do not report being bullied think it’s dandy.
PE at least exposes kids to some sports they might otherwise not have tried, and a break during the day may be helpful. And physical fitness is super important. Obesity and obesity-related diseases are a real issue. Not convinces PE is a waste of time, but its not the best in its current format. Could benefit from a revamping - maybe focus on strengthening, endurance, swimming (need more pools if possible, so should be considered in a budget for new HSs). Just musing…
I think PE has value. Kids who are kinesthetic learners need the activity to think , kids who are good at athletics deserve a chance to excel as much as a kid who is great at math or science. Sometimes we discover skills we didn’t know we had. But ugh, those shuttle runs? I just threw up all morning, dreading the public display of klutz.
I am remembering middle school gym, where we learned partner dances and some boy moaned when partnered with me. Our enormous, athletic, famous PE teacher pointed and announced " This, boys and girls, is what a rude young man does when given the chance to dance with a fine lady." and he sent him back to homeroom. That was 40+ years ago and I still feel that immense relief that some adult was on my side.Gym teacher danced with me, and handed me off to another boy.
“You are not required to stand there when a cut list goes up orally and have everybody hear that happen”
Well some people are, even outside the obvious case of awards ceremonies (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senior_Wrangler_(University_of_Cambridge) ):
“The annual ceremony in which the Senior Wrangler becomes known was first held in the 18th century. Standing on the balcony of the University’s Senate House, the examiner reads out the class results for mathematics, and printed copies of the results are then thrown to the audience below.”
However, I do have a lot of sympathy for the challenges associated with gym class games (nothing compares to having a cricket ball bowled at you at high speed), though I don’t think there are easy answers. I was usually picked last for a lot of sports in school and bullied for being nerdy (even in a selective school), and while I wouldn’t say it was great, it did help me in life to be able to just ignore what others think and say/do what I believe. So large parts of my career have been spent telling other people they were wrong. It’s interesting to wonder whether I didn’t fit in at school because I was internally referenced or I became more internally referenced because I didn’t fit it.
There is a big difference between being bullied and being uncomfortable in class. And nobody liked the climbing rope.
I wasn’t all that thrilled about standing at the board working thru a math problem while people snickered at my stupidity. Or being petrified when called on in class to explain something I had no clue. And we did the square dancing too in gym class – what a treat. 
Gym class has changed. At the kids high school they did three days of exercise type activities and two days of games. The kids generally got to pick from various choices what they did each day.
And as I said before, dodgeball is different these days. Getting rid of the rubber ball makes a big difference. I really don’t know a kid, athletic or not, who doesn’t like it (I am sure there are some).
Where I live, PE can be taken on line with heart monitors, graphs and exercise reports.
OP here. My kids school which outlawed dodgeball etc now focuses on giving kids a choice between team sports ( captains pick teams but not in front of everyone) or “lifetime sports” which includes yoga, Pilates,golf and running.
Not all cross country is (or has been) no-cut. My daughter had finally developed the desire to be on a team, and trained a little bit in the summer before sophomore year in high school to be able to run cross country. My husband and I and her brother were very accomplished competitive runners, so we were excited for her and willing to support her at whatever level she attained. We thought she would really benefit from being on a team. She had been a good swimmer and swam USS, but it got to be too time intensive with her music. Anyway, she walked a little in a two mile time trial the first week because it was 112 degrees and I told her walking some would be safer, and she was cut. I am not a tiger mom, but you better believe I was up at the elite private girls’ school and in their collective faces. The boys’ school team did not even practice that day due to the heat. It was, literally, life changing for her and a disappointment beyond belief. It took many years before she realized she did have some running talent and has gone on (now 34) to run a number of marathons and compete in triathlons up to half Ironman distance. Most schools do NOT cut from cross country- your weakest sophomore might be your senior star, so this was a big screw up, but the damage was done. Not what an emotionally fragile 16 year old needed…
That said, I think there is a lot of value in gym class, if structured properly. I, too, screeched to a halt in front of the horse, and I was a pretty decent athlete. And interpretive dance and synchronized swimming were simply hilarious when I had to do them. I think the message needs to be conveyed that physical activity and fitness are important, and taking them out of the school curriculum would not promote that.
If you assume that the goal of Phys Ed classes is to get the student to be physically active, then it is odd to grade on the basis of skill rather than of the goal, being active. We want our students to grow up and do some kind of physical activity, but we don’t care if they’re good at it. A person who swims, runs or hikes slowly is still swimming, running or hiking.
So, PE classes get some kids interested in fitness, while other kids get discouraged from the abuse they suffer. Who knows whether the kids who do get interested would have gotten interested anyway without the classes, or whether the kids who were actually discouraged would have otherwise gone on to be interested in fitness had they not suffered the abuse.
PE classes have been mandatory for years and years. Judging by the increasing obesity epidemic, I would say they have failed in a broad, macro sense in inculcating a desire for fitness in the general public. I think, on balance, PE is a total waste of time. The teachers should be fired, and the money reallocated to other priorities. Just my two cents.
Very bad logic here, because there are a lot of societal forces acting on the obesity epidemic. Maybe if PE classes had not been mandatory, the obesity epidemic would have been worse. We can’t know from your logic. If we wanted to know whether PE classes made a difference, we’d do something like a diff-in-diff comparing school districts that have PE with ones that don’t.
Even in no cut sports you don’t necessarily get to “compete.” You may run, but your time may not count if you’re not one of the best.
Yes, typically the top seven runners in XC races are scored, but you might have an awesome day and score when you don’t expect to - that happened to my D. And you’re always trying to improve your time, so not scoring is not a big deal. Some big races have JV divisions, too, so more kids’ scores count.
As someone who always disliked the traditional structure of PE I have always felt that schools do a great disservice to students by focusing so much on team sports for physical fitness when really they don’t encourage a lifetime of personal fitness. My talents were in music and I always thought imagine if schools treated music classes in the same way as PE. Kids would be forced to sing or play an instrument and would get ridiculed and demeaned daily for their natural lack of talent. They would be picked last for choirs and told they just need to “work harder” to improve. Those who wanted to quit would be deemed students who weren’t “team players” or supportive of their classmates. Many athletes from my high school are now obese and never adopted any daily fitness routine after their team sports years ended.
Add me to the list of those who hated gym and was always amongst the last to be picked. But that said, I think it needs to be revamped, not completely scrapped. The level of stress in teens today is extreme, and some physical outlet is healthy.