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I feel like the problem with "traditional" forms of Physical Education is that it wasn't so much "education about your body and how it moves and how you train it" as it was "sports". The two things are entirely different! Yoga or stretches, learning about the way your body feels during exertion, and how to move in it, how to improve the range of movement or the hands-eye co-ordination - these are all a different aspect of physical capability to 'sports'. And even 'sports' has different sections to it: primarily competition and pleasure, but also building up skill levels through training but not necessarily for competition purposes.

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Oof, this was a surprisingly rough read for me -- I guess I have more unexamined wounds from my long-ago PE classes than I reckoned! So often in my K-12 education, I encountered teachers who were very happy to fall in line with the bullies, and this was especially awful (for me) in gym classes. I remember being so terrified starting grade 10, because my assigned gym teacher that year was the locally-famous high-school football coach. If female gym teachers, and gym teachers who seemed to have little more physical prowess than I did myself as a scrawny and uncoordinated kid, were horrific bullies to me -- if they supported and encouraged the kid-bullies who tormented me -- how much worse was this muscular, male coach going to be??

Plot twist: he was great! He was incredibly supportive of all kinds of different body types, all levels of athletic ability. He managed our classes in such a way that I don't think the bullies ever got a toe-hold. He brought lots of guest "experts" to teach us about different sports and body-based activities, people of all ages and from all kinds of different backgrounds and with different body types and presentations, and really emphasized that there are so many different ways to be physically engaged, and that physical movement and activity is for everybody. He actively encouraged me to see all kinds of movement (walking or taking the stairs to get around, playing a musical instrument or singing, writing or drawing by hand, etc.) as valid and worthwhile parts of my physical activity.

I wish all kids could have PE teachers like Mr. Johnson, like Sherri Spelic, who have a holistic and inclusive approach to this facet of early education.

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Aug 10, 2022·edited Aug 10, 2022

Thank you, Sherri, for this great interview! I think the most troubling thing about Phys Ed being used to combat obesity and using BMI as the measure is that body weight does not equal athletic ability! We need to teach kids (and adults) how to move their bodies better no matter what size clothing they wear, and to show them role models that have larger percentages of body fat.

Growing up, I always heard the examples of muscular professional athletes who would fail the BMI test (like say, Michael Phelps or Peyton Manning), but none of people with more body fat while still being incredibly athletic (like Jessamyn Stanley or Mirna Valerio).

I never made the connection before how as a society we frame obesity like fighting a war! It certainly contributed to my disordered eating growing up. The first time I engaged in anorexic eating behaviors I was in 6th grade. I remember thinking that once I was thin I would be more popular, more athletic, and I wouldn't be picked last in gym class. Lo and behold, I lost weight but was still bullied, was no more athletic than before, and was still picked last in gym class. Instead of being overweight and unathletic I was skinny and unathletic.

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This was a really tough read. One thing that I really struggled with was that it wasn’t until I was an adult did anyone say that it’s okay to NOT enjoy moving your body. (Ragen Chastain has great things to say about this.)

Exercising and physical competence has always been presented as a moral obligation and this interview brought that up for me — that the job of an educator is to make sure every child knows and continues to move their bodies as much as possible, because that is a must for a well rounded individual. I am a very fat autistic person with complex trauma and I recognize that physical educators cannot address every kid who has these kind of challenges when it comes to spatial processing / feeling safe being in their body / being overstimulated in a gymnasium or on a playing field, but it very much colors how defensive I feel about going beyond “BMI shouldn’t be a measure we use” and going into “physical activity shouldn’t be an obligation”.

I think I wanted to see a more robust defense that children come in all different sizes and abilities and that even with many choices for physical activity there will be children who are still left out. I want to see a robust examination of anti-fatness that is explicit in physical education that acknowledges that it is not safe for fat kids in PE classes. We have to talk about fatness early on, because even if you aren’t pushing anti-obesity messaging in class, that is the water every child is swimming in in our culture, so kids are naturally going to be approaching PE from an anti-fat lens.

I learned as an adult that we all get different amounts of endorphins from physical exertion. Some of us get none! Learning that and divorcing physical movement from morality — not just from weight loss, but I mean from in a broader sense — actually opened up an autonomy about my body that I never had, even though I have had some “good” PE teachers. Now, physical activity is less about enjoyment and more about doing it as if I was cleaning...it is not fun, but it can be a kindness to my future self, and at the same time it’s not a moral failing if I don’t do it and I owe it to no one.

I know this isn’t a well thought out comment. I am hoping some other readers can help me see this interview from a less reactive way, not that anyone is obligated to! I know my own trauma of weight stigma is influencing my response.

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My one really stand-out PE memory (amid all the bullshit elementary/junior high PE stuff) was the year I was in Geneva as a sophomore, the PE teacher decided "Hey, we have this American student with us in class, and she's from Chicago (this was peak '90s Bulls era), so we should do basketball!" Plot twist: exactly nobody, teacher or students, knew the first thing about how to play basketball. I knew...vaguely, just from years of doing it in dumb PE classes. But my main memory of this was a kid would get the ball and just start full-out running to the basket, and the teacher and everyone else on their team would be all "Yay! Go!" and I was losing my mind like "You can't just grab the ball and run!" Vocabulary was a bit of a problem, as I did not (and still do not) know what "dribbling" is in French. I'm standing there trying to explain "No, you have to...keep bouncing the ball while you go" and everyone was kind of like "Ummm...but it's so much quicker to NOT do that?"

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It's the Culture Study/On The Commons crossover event of the summer!

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It’s so interesting to me that EVERYONE seems to have *some* kind of PE memory, for better or worse!

I remember juggling as one of the best PE units as an elementary kid! Pretty inclusive (also, nearly everyone struggles at first so there’s not a lot of hierarchy/shaming), especially when different materials are offered (starting with scarves on up to rubber balls). I can still do it (with scarves only lol)!

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I love the parts of this interview that touch on how visible you are in PE class so often. That was always the worst part of it for me - the parts that felt like a performance. I didn't mind team sports so much. The chaos sports like basketball or soccer or ultimate frisbee or even dodgeball were fine - I was nerdy and deeply uncoordinated (and often had a fuzzy understanding of the rules) but had a strategy of just moving around a lot and occasionally throwing myself at the ball or another player so I could blend in. The orderly sports like softball and football are the ones I know the most about so I could position myself to do the least damage. Thankfully I was not the kind of nerd that was hated, but the kind that was just ignored or forgotten. But that made the individual things nightmarish because everyone was looking at me. Literally half of the year in 6th grade was track & field (culminating in a several day "olympics") and that was the highlight of middle school for a lot of kids but I hated every bit of it. (A core memory is standing on the high jump mat with the bar in my hands and the entire class laughing hysterically. ) No one wanted to play me in tennis because I could not hit the ball anywhere in the vicinity of my opponent so they were always having to chase it down. There was a gymnastics unit during which I somersaulted into a wall because I was afraid to keep my eyes open. And then an aerobic dance unit (girls only) which I was dreading - the final was to choregraph your own aerobic dance and perform it for the class, I'd rather die thankyouverymuch. I rarely stood up for myself back then, but another girl felt the same way and we successfully lobbied to be allowed to skip and join the boys in over-the-line which was much much better.

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I loved this interview! I had never thought about PE as an entry point to these kinds of political and social questions.

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As someone who has failed PE several times in high school and a few times in university, this really hits home. Funnily enough, the only real PE classes I aced were dance (which I'm horrible at) and basketball (which I'm decent at).

No choice in dance; the teacher was a real hardass who required us to arrive an hour before class began. Even my rebellious self folded since his hardassness appeared to be genuine; he really thought that dancing, by any means necessary, was the key to life.

With basketball, I was the one of two boys who played in high school. Liberal arts kid, so the only jocks we had were soccer players. Our teacher was a woman (played in college) who didn't laugh at my 60s style of playing: no crossovers, bank shots, and looping layups from afar. She seemed genuinely happy that my cornball style of play was beating all the other boys more obsessed with form. I just wanted to get the baskets in every time. It was so freeing.

Obviously she knew how to play the "right" way but she was letting me do what my body could, as long as it was effective. She gave me pointers based on the things I was already doing. Such a change of pace from my basketball teachers in high school who chuckled along with my classmates when I would use bank shots, pantomiming stepping on a lizard on the floor (which they said fell out since I hit the board so often).

I don't know, just reminiscing, I guess. I used to think I hated PE; I love that kids today are starting to have more options with teachers like these.

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Aug 10, 2022·edited Aug 10, 2022

Nice goin' Antonia! PE class was oddly affirming to me, even though our teacher, Marv Liskie, was an ex-Marine and actually had us do a military lineup with that weird snap-turn of the head on his command every day — once we were changed into our tight whities of course. Yes, he liked discipline. I got a B one quarter because I got a single demerit for goofing off. But I also recall he really liked individual effort and didn't care if you were slow or uncoordinated, as I was, just so long as you gave it your all. We did a lot of dance and Presidential Fitness-grade activities, and of course dodgeball. There's about one third of PE class I wouldn't wish on my grandkids but the other two-thirds were great.

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I could have used her in Middle School. As a chubby, uncoordinated kid who was always slowest, couldn't climb the rope, couldn't throw worth a darn, I always just knew I was going to be the last pick. I dreaded PE--especially when we had the President's Physical Fitness Test and EVERYONE was assessed in front of the whole class, task by task. But I usually would just grit my teeth and endure. Until MS and the über-awful Ms. Foster. I will never forget when we were doing the horse. I could launch myself onto the horse, but (with super long legs and zilch arm strength) I could never get myself over it. Anyway, one day it was my turn and I started off at a run to try and make it over this time. Just as a I reached to plant my hands, I heard Ms. Foster yell, with the whole class standing there and waiting their turn, "Hurd, you run like a cow!" That was it for me. For the rest of MS PE, I gave up trying. It was a bit better in HS, but 50 years later, I still cringe at the idea of organized sport.

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I LOATHED phys ed class when I was in school. I never thought much about sports or PE one way or another until we moved when I was 8 to a town & school where sports were everything. I was thrust onto the baseball field with absolutely no clue about what I was supposed to do, what the rules were, nothing. No matter what the sport, everyone seemed to know what to do and had the ability to do it. I soon developed a strategy of putting as much distance as possible between me & the ball (whatever ball it was...!), but sometimes, the ball was hard to avoid. The disdain and sometimes downright hostility of my classmates was unbearable at times, and completely destroyed my self-confidence.

The heavy emphasis on team sports continued in junior and senior high. Occasionally, we would do gymnastics or play badminton for a few weeks. In high school, there was a man-made lake down the street. We had canoes and cross-country skis at the school, and took those out for a session occasionally. I enjoyed doing those sorts of things much more than team sports, because for the most part, there was only myself or perhaps one other person and not an entire team watching and relying on my every move. These days, I enjoy walking and yoga, but I still have very little interest in team sports, playing or watching.

In the first term of Grade 10, my phys ed teacher gave me a D. I was normally an A student in every other class and I was in tears. There was no clear criteria as to how I was being marked. I was a lousy athlete, but was that my fault? My mother met with the teacher and got her to agree that so long as I was trying, I should not be graded lower than a C. Thanks, Mom.

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I loved so much about this interview! One thing that really surprised me was the default position that PE should be about teaching kids what they can do with their amazing diverse bodies, and about giving them guided agency to discover that.

I'm from the standard catch-as-you-can American PE programs of multiple states; not one of them took this approach. That said, I wasn't traumatized by PE, either. I certainly "knew" I wasn't athletic, and PE confirmed that for me. In my middle-20s, I finally started the journey to identifying as someone who hikes, climbs, long-walks, dances, and lifts weights because those things feel good to do with my body. An athlete. Who knew. I sure wish PE classes like Sherri's had been there to help me find that path as a much younger human.

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So interesting! PE is in a weird position where my kids go to school. In middle and high school very few kids take traditional PE classes - most take it online (and have for years - pre-pandemic). The weight training class is the only one that seems somewhat popular to take but its not even during the traditional school day - you gotta get there at 7am which really limits who can take it! Online PE is a series of worksheets, quizzes, recording steps on a fitbit-like device and attesting that they do the assigned physical activities. Also you can take the high-school version of online PE in middle school and have it count for both so a huge number of kids take no PE at all after 8th grade. Because there is so much pressure to take advanced academic classes and lots of extra-curriculars, having PE online lets kids meet the requirement, but it seems like such a cheat - and it really gives kids the idea that physical education is not really very important. Like if its required, it should be real and if its not important enough to take seriously then it shouldn't be a requirement.

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Malcolm Gladwell recently addessed some of this as well.

https://www.runnersworld.com/news/a40818335/malcolm-gladwell-david-epstein-cross-country-debate/

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