Link blog: school, education, physical-education, PE

Alex Gabriel // P.E. lessons ruined how I felt about myself
“P.E. lessons made me feel that my body belonged to someone else.” “I don’t believe [fitness] is really the motivation. If it were, why object, as Cameron does, to ‘Indian dance, or whatever’?” Obviously it’s worse if you’re out as gay, as Alex was, but this all sounds a bit familiar. PE certainly put me off exercise, and were it not for dancing restoring my confidence, I’d probably be in a much worse physical state.
(tags: health fitness sport school education physical-education PE)

3 Comments on "Link blog: school, education, physical-education, PE"


  1. I was shit at and hated PE at school. Looking back I realise that the education part was non existant. In cross country running at no point did they actually attempt to teach you how to run. Nothing in the whole thing improved your fitness. In the winter we did rugby (stand in shorts and t-shirt in a cold field attempting not to be hit by other people), football (similar with less punching), hockey (similar but we armed them with sticks) etc. At least in the summer you could lie on the grass and fail to play cricket.

    At no point did I learn about any of the things you need to know about in order to actually get fit, interval training, threshold running, endurance, cross training etc.

    Reply

    1. At no point did I learn about any of the things you need to know about in order to actually get fit, interval training, threshold running, endurance, cross training etc.

      Yeah, exactly that. In fact, surely it would be easier to teach people across a broad range of abilities in PE, where you could plausibly say “ok, do what you can comfortably manage, and then next week, see if you can do better” instead of “everyone should be at this standard and if you’re not you should devote all your effort to faking it because there’s no point trying to improve until you’re already at this point”, than, say, maths, where you often need radically different teaching to people of different abilities.

      Reply

      1. This is what’s so frustrating. Running clubs do mixed ability interval training all the time. I do a serious running training session with my nephews (aged 5 and 6) when I go and meet them and they love it. It’s called the rock game, the rules are,

        Start at the finish line. Race outwards for about 20-30s until someone calls stop.
        Place your rock on the ground here.
        Wait 30s then race back to the finish line clapping the winner.
        Jog back to your rock, the winner of the race picks theirs up and moves it five paces further away from the finish line.
        Repeat 20 times.

        The overall winner is the person who wins the most races.

        You get an approximately fair spread of wins, in order to win more than 1/n of the races you have to run really very hard. Once you’ve done the first five everyone is competitive, by race 15 people are dying from exhaustion.

        Reply

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