Posted in ParentingTeaching on Mar 01, 2010 - 04:42 PM
I live in a pretty relaxed neighborhood in Tempe, AZ. For most of the houses throughout my neighborhood, to walk out the back yard and into the alley is to come face to face with someone else's backyard, or usually their 6-foot cinder-block wall. Past my back gate, however, is the school yard of a middle school. The yard is used for Physical Education, and recess at lunch, mainly.Every day, I hear the school bells chime, and multiple times a day, big groups of children come out for P.E. and once for recess. During P.E. the kids usually begin by running laps around their rather large yard. They will holler and run, walk and talk, and some eventually begin to drag their feet and pant. Boy, let me tell you, those kids who drag their feet at P.E.... they got it rough.
After living here for a year, I'm pretty sure that I could identify the nearby middle school's P.E. teacher in any group of people just from hearing his voice. Talk about authoritarian!
The man, whose name I do not know, seemingly loves to scream orders at his students. Some kids really seem to get a kick out of it, and the teacher's commands seem to inspire competition among them. Others will keep a simple jog going along the perimeter of the yard, and occasionally talk smack about their instructor. But there are a few kids who just don't enjoy running laps. Some of them aren't in the best of shape, and others just don't seem motivated to run. But no matter their reason for not running, they usually get a damn hard time from the P.E. teacher.
Keep in mind, I live in Arizona, where our temperatures commonly reach over 100 degrees Fahrenheit near the summer. Regardless of the heat, the P.E. instructor can often be heard shouting things like,
"Pick up your legs, this is not a walk in the park!"
"Do not make me have to come over there!"
"Run! Run! Run!"
"Can't you understand what I am saying, boy?!"
"You better get going faster, or get ready for another lap around the field!"
His tone is what is most frightening. He kind of reminds me of Matilda's principal, The Trunchbull, from the book and movie "Matilda." You know, the one who puts naughty kids in the Chokey?
Some of the kids struggling will be nearly a half lap or more behind the next closest kid running laps. Some refuse to run out of what seems to be defiance, and other kids just have a hard time running around the field. In the hottest times of the year, they will be soaking with sweat, and you can hear their feet shuffling along the ground, and their heavy breathing as they run for fear of paying whatever penalty their frightening teacher may have for them if they don't finish. And it's sad. But the kids have no choice, it seems.
Though I'm sure the teacher would help if one of the kids seemed to be in danger of suffering some serious health issue, it has got to suck to come to school every day knowing that you're going to have to run those laps and that you can't do anything to avoid it. So they run, and they get screamed at, and they get all sweaty, and probably feel uncomfortable afterwards, and that sounds like the kind of stuff that might just result in a pretty sucky day. It just doesn't seem right.
I get to see and hear those kids running almost every single weekday. They are supervised by one man alone, and his tactics to maintain order on the field are effective, but so unnecessary. I just want to walk out to him and tell him how at the farthest corner of the field, I can hear the kids panting, and wincing, and that they hate running and that screaming at them probably hurts their feelings, and also leaves them as the odd men out in the class. Every once in a while, some of the kids who run the laps with ease will start making fun of the kids struggling as they pass them by and call them names. I just want their teacher to know that he enables it. He is the person out there setting the stage, and he's doing a pretty poor job of making sure everyone is having an all right time.
But you know, it was the same at my middle school. Our P.E. teacher was pretty mean and demanding, too. But what can you do when you're a kid just trying to get through 6 classes a day while trying to have an okay time? I was always terrified to talk to any school staff about my problems with teachers. I thought I would be targeted and given more work, or get a phone call home to my parents, or something unpleasant. It's not like kids in public school have a lot of right to speak up for themselves. I mean, when you raise your hand to go the bathroom and your teacher tells you "no," many more questions or concerns get stifled. And that's the kind of school setting that I am familiar with, as I'm sure many others are.
So just like me and other kids around the nation, the kids struggling to finish at my backyard middle school do their best, and eventually do reach the finish line. Just in time to be ridiculed by schoolmates after being humiliated by their teacher who can be heard from a quarter-mile away.
Nowadays, all I get to witness is the within earshot and eyesight P.E. class. That alone makes me afraid to see what goes on behind the walls of the other classrooms when students struggle in front of their classmates. Obviously, a good environment can be set by a good teacher, but talking about the way our teachers are trained nowadays is an entirely different topic. However, even with suffering standards for training our teachers, some really good people with great intentions do become educators. It's such a shame, though, that the great teachers are great because of their passion and not their training. If we only trained people to teach to every student's ability and interests, so many problems would be side-stepped.
In due time, I suppose.
If you feel inclined to share instances of troubling times you or others have experienced in a school setting, I invite you to share them here. To know what is wrong is often the first step to turning any wrong into a right. At least in identifying what is wrong, we can find what not to do, and what not to teach.
Tags for this entry:
bullying,
middle school,
physical education
Comments
Mar 05, 2010 - 12:39 AM
Shawn, I can completely empathize with these kids and your post overall. I was constantly ridiculed by gym teachers, made fun of (along with several of my classmates) for not being able to keep up, and even singled out sometimes by very vindictive gym teachers. They sometimes encouraged other kids to pick on me, as well as other students, who weren’t keeping up. Once I had my “A” honor roll taken away from a “B” in gym as well, which was very important to me at the time.
Like Melia, I was asthmatic, but I was also a little overweight, tall, and physically maturing much more quickly than my peers. All of these equaled a very awkward, even painful, time in PE. I hated to run, even as a child, and though I found a few sports I enjoyed and eventually joined a team with a supportive coach at the helm, it was a sweet peer who introduced me to the sports; playing them in school, on the rare occasions that we did, was anything but fun. I usually just sat on the bench during those times.
Like Melia, I also had several very out-of-shape gym teachers who definitely could not have managed many of the activities they demanded of us, which also seemed very unfair.
The teachers loved giving us “suicides” to run (can you believe they were called that?!), playing “bombardment” which was essentially dodge ball, where they would watch us get hit by our classmates with smirks on their faces, that sort of thing. Oh, and of course the daily laps, the mile, and all of that hell on earth. Talk about a way to alienate kids!
I really wonder if PE teachers really know what they’re doing to kids. I hope not, because if they do know and they continue, that’s even more sadistic. Many of us didn’t want to come to school because of them and/or their classes.
I did have one or two nice teachers who thoughtfully put together classes that mixed cardiovascular health with fun activities but out of the 8 or 9 I had, most were not very child-friendly. I always felt like they may have been better suited for military training rather than “teaching” kids and teens.
Melia Dicker
Mar 04, 2010 - 06:53 PM
Interesting, and disturbing, to be a fly on the wall by this middle school. I hated middle school P.E. with a passion. I had asthma and had to carry around two inhalers when we did the “20-minute run” every week. What I despised most was tumbling, where my very large gym teacher kept pushing me to do a cartwheel, and I kept thinking, “I’d like to see YOU do a cartwheel!”
As you probably know, Shawn, I did a writing project in the fall of 2008 called Reschool Yourself. I went back to all my childhood schools, did what the kids did, and wrote about it. Here’s a post about doing sixth-grade P.E. (in my old uniform) and unexpectedly having to run a mile.