For those of you who don't know Governor Bob McDonnell recently vetoed a bill that would have required elementary and middle schools here in Virginia to have 150 minutes of physical education per week. Me being a Health and Physical Education major, I have a slight bias towards this topic so I was wondering how others felt related to this topic. I know some people do not have fond memories of physical education class while in elementary school or middle school, but with childhood obesity on the rise I thought that increasing physical education while in school could help this problem.
I know that some people are going to say, in my school we did not do that much physical activity in physical education class. Given the fact that youth today would much rather sit around on the computer or play video games, any amount of physical activity is better than none at all. This sedentary lifestyle in addition to poor eating is the prime reason for childhood obesity. If children are not going to be active on their own, then requiring more physical activity in school appears to be a valid solution. I believe their is only one reason that Governor McDonnell rejected this bill and it is funding. Physical Education has no Standard of Learning testing, therefore it has no ties to the amount of Federal funding that Virginia schools are going to receive. This just shows that until the Federal Government puts a mandate on Physical Education, state funded public education is going to turn a blind eye to the growing problem.
More physical education would seem like it would be a good idea, except that my memories of PE weren't exactly ones of intense activity that would be along the lines of changing the obesity trend. I hardly ever broke a sweat until I was rec and wellness in high school which was a PE class for juniors and seniors. I also noticed that any of the other big kids in PE never really did anything or tried very hard. They did the bare minimum to get a passing grade and very rarely did they pass PT tests. That is until they started lowering the passing scores. That also brings up the point that also explains why teachers aren't going to get everyone they teach to pass, they don't take into account that they can't make these kids really do anything they don't want to. If a kid doesn't want to run around the gym then he won't he'll just walk. Yes it's better than nothing but it's hardly going to improve his condition.
ReplyDeleteA kid walking for 40-45 minutes is better than them sitting on their butts in a study hall sleeping. In addition, just because a persons not sweating in Physical Education class does not mean they are not burning calories or improving your overall health.
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