I don’t know if it occurred to me until my thirties to think of exercise as an enjoyable thing. I was familiar with finding obscure corner-cases that were fun, such as Dance Dance Revolution. But the idea of it just often being a good time was alien.
I hesitate to blame anyone for anything, but school seems culpable here. I got the impression so firmly that PE class (‘physical education’ or ‘physed’) was a kind of horror, I’m not sure I would have treated this fact as on less solid ground than ‘you’re supposed to put a methods section in your lab report’. It just seemed like the way of things.
For children like me, anyway. Some children liked PE, but those were a totally different kind of creature. What the PE telos included was being awful for nerdy children, maybe to punish them for not being jocklike children. Since nerd children generally like not being jocks, they do not take this punishment as any serious feedback on their way of being, and just nobly withstand it. This is the way it is meant to be, and so it goes for every nerd until they break happily free and never play sports again. So was my rough picture of the situation, if I recall.
So this seems to mark a failure on the part of the schools: couldn’t they have at least got the message to me that this wasn’t the intended narrative, if it wasn’t?
But also, looking at the teaching methods, they don’t seem clearly distinguishable from what one might do if trying to traumatize non-athletic children:
Take all the children, with varying pre-existing levels of athletic skill and mortification about their bodies, and get them to change into different and skimpier outfits in front of each other.
Put them in ‘teams’. This ensures that when one of them does badly at the task, they are letting down half of their classmates (people whose social training so far consists largely of surviving and enacting schoolyard social dynamics, so their handling of this is unlikely to be ideally empathetic and graceful.)
Make multiple teams, so while half the class is disappointed by a child’s failure, the other half has a positive stake in it and may cheer the child on contemptuously. This might help teach the child to distrust positivity directed toward them, and respond to praise with stress and doubt rather than accepting it naively.
Traipse the group around outside shouting things and giving some people roles and authorities. Don’t clearly explain anything so that the whole class can hear it. Make reference to things that nerds won’t remember from previous sports classes.
Pick a task that is a) physically embarrassing to attempt in front of people if you are unathletic or overweight, b) at a level of difficulty that the least athletic classmates will find impossible and the most athletic will make look extremely easy, and c) allows for a chunk of the class to watch in real time and common knowledge as people fail
Do the activity for a vaguely disclosed period of time. If the nerds seem discouraged or confused, shout things they won’t understand.
Repeat at regular intervals.
(Not all of these elements were true in my own education, and probably few all of the time, but I think they are all recognizable.)
I’m guessing from the athletic child standpoint, this is a perfectly reasonable way to be taught that exercise is fun, and the teachers are mostly focused on maintaining that success rather than mitigating the losses with the children who are never going to excel there anyway. But I feel like they could have done so much better, especially if the purpose is in fact to educate the bulk of the students about physical activity, rather than for instance to scout out the student who might make it in professional sports. If it’s not, I think something like that would be cool to have in schools: a class that teaches all students about how to get exercise well and enjoyably.
OK, let’s design a physical education curriculum for nerds.
First, it should include some theory. Things like how the muscles work and grow, etc. To avoid spending the time reading rather than doing stuff, it could be a book given to kids to read at home, and then sometimes spend a few minutes during the class discussing it.
It should allow activities done individually or in small groups, ideally in some non-adversarial way. Provide a feedback on how you improved, as a motivation.
I think I have basically described weightlifting, if you read some theory first, and make logs of your progress.
My main issue is that kids’ brains and adults’ brains work differently. As a result, most kids, who aren’t nerds, could benefit less from theory-filled education in PE.
Yeah, I wouldn’t bother non-nerds with books about PE. They are motivated already, and if they are not, a book is probably not what is missing there.
But as a kid I would have appreciated less emphasis on how I am worse at sports than most of the class, and more focus on me-tomorrow vs me-yesterday with a decent roadmap.
I am and always have been a nerd. I enjoyed PE. I think it helped that there were several ‘nerd’ sports at my high school (particularly cross country & golf). I never saw a reason to believe sports & nerdiness were opposed, except from mass media.
Teaching the basics of team sports in PE has been helpful to me socially. I learned enough badminton that when a work friend asked me to join, I was the worst player in the group, but not by much (and improved rapidly). The difference between ‘worst player in the group’ and ‘so bad the game is unenjoyable’ is large.
When I look at the Cochrane studies on PE, it suggests that resistance/weight training & HIIT workout routines give better health outcomes. Since those are individual, I think they’d avoid a lot of the shame/embarrassment issues you found. Certainly weight training (since it is trivial to vary the weight for each person), but HIIT would need more careful design for different intensity levels.
I’m sorry your experience was negative, and it would be great if there were ways to make exercise more universally enjoyed.
Yeah. It’s similar to how math gets inflicted on non-mathy kids.
I think school should have very few mandatory subjects (maybe only reading, writing and arithmetic; definitely not PE or algebra). Almost all of school should be study groups freely chosen by kids.
Let me reiterate: I would prefer seeing claims that SOTA school is a malpractice accompanied with an experiment-based case for newer teaching methods to avoid failures like Whole Language. For example, if novel PE methods turn out not to inspire kids to be active, then novel methods should be rejected. Could anyone on LW present the new PE methods with the case, like, say, a reduction in percentage of obese teens in experimental schools as compared to the control group?
As for “a class that teaches all students about how to get exercise well and enjoyably”, I am not sure that kids, especially kids from uncultured/dysfunctional households will learn from the class unless it contains practice. Practice of exercises without constraints described in bullet points could require the world to devote more resources, e.g. because the methods without constraints are unscalable.
Maybe novel methods should be discussed with actual PE teachers?
I’m not sure how often my own PE teachers ever actually tried to teach… well, anything. In elementary school they had some non-sport-like games designed help us understand how the circulatory system worked, and basic stretching technique?
I’d write a lot about how Ultimate Frisbee’s “spirit of the game” concept could help the social dynamics of PE, but I’m feeling sick and not up to much writing. This is a sport I picked up in 2018 as an adult and am still enjoying a lot, even though I’m worse at it than most of the people I play with.