Physical education classes are developing a new focus.
Forty minutes have ticked by on the gym clock at Blue Valley Northwest High School in Overland Park, Kan., and freshmen Robyn Jacobs and Aubrey Franco have yet to stop dancing.
Around them, the rest of the class is shooting baskets, slapping volleyballs, speed-walking and pedaling stationary bikes, but the two girls ignore it all. With music piped from the gym’s public-address system, they shake it up at midcourt, pumping their arms and rocking their hips like Madonna’s backup singers.
Sweat sops their hair. It soaks their gym suits.
As with everyone else in class, electronic heart monitors strapped to their chests instantaneously transmit data to their digital wristwatches displaying exactly how fast their hearts are pounding . . . 150 . . . 160 . . . 170 beats per minute.
“This is awesome,” said Jacobs, 14, smiling and breathless, as she stopped dancing to check her watch, with numbers pulsing at 162. “PE used to be so boring.”
Remember the days of being forced to climb the rope?
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Remember being judged on situps and layups?
Remember the humiliation of being picked for teams?
Well, phys ed has a new face.
To be sure, in most schools, militaristic grunt-and-groan programs–in which students are demanded to snap to, run laps and hit the floor for 20–are still as standard as tube socks. But increasingly, around Kansas City and across the country, physical education is developing a new focus.
That focus–to promote fun fitness for life, rather than mastery of select sports skills–not only allows Jacobs and Franco to gyrate in their gym as freely as if they were at a dance club but also joyously encourages it.
It’s why 4th graders at Harmony Elementary School in Overland Park are playing in-line hockey, why kids in Colorado are mountain biking and students at Wichita South High School sweat to western line dancing.
“I just took 20 kids into the woods for 15 miles of backpacking,” said Ben McCracken of Cabell Midland High School in Ona, W.Va., where the PE curriculum offers camping, fly-fishing, survival orienteering and white-water rafting in the Appalachians.
Throughout the United States, even schools that run the most traditional PE classes have been steadily pumping up the appeal of their programs by running coed classes, letting kids wear their own workout clothes rather than ill-fitting gym uniforms and, most notably, by offering a variety of novel electives.
But why all the change?
According to physical educators, several trends are colliding to make PE a national necessity.
– America’s kids are flabbier than ever.
Twelve percent of teenagers and 14 percent of children are overweight. Only one out of three kids exercises 30 minutes a day. According to a 1996 surgeon general’s report, only a third of young people in the United States between the ages of 12 and 21 reported engaging in regular and vigorous physical activity. A fourth engaged in none.
– Kids aren’t taking gym.
According to a 1996 Harris poll, a fourth of students between Grades 4 and 12 take no gym at all. Twenty years ago, if high schoolers wanted to graduate, many were required to take PE all four years. Today, most schools require only one credit of gym, meaning two semesters, over four years.
The result, according to a 1995 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report, has been plummeting PE enrollment. Among 9th graders, PE enrollment is close to 80 percent. By 12th grade, it drops to 42 percent.
– The old system just wasn’t working.
PE may have offered gifted athletes a chance to shine, but other students frequently found it to be a class in frustration, even humiliation.
Tim Serbousek, chairman of Blue Valley Northwest’s phys ed department, said that for many kids, the only thing they learned was how much they hated gym and how completely immaterial many of the tasks were to their lives.
“Think about the President’s Physical Fitness Test,” Serbousek said. “I mean, how is it going to prolong my life to throw a softball as far as I can?”
Although many schools still gear their programs toward old “skill-related” fitness, Serbousek said, in more and more schools “that’s out the door.”
Variety is in–and even has its own language.
Judy Young, director of the National Association for Sport & Physical Education in Reston, Va., said many gym teachers no longer even think in terms of sports skills.
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