Bright idea du jour

I hated high school gym class. A lot of this surely had to do with the fact that I was a clumsy nerd, so I was one of the last kids picked for most games, with the curious exception of basketball, which I ended up doing pretty OK at because I always scrambled to pull down rebounds. But another problem is that I just didn’t like most of the sports and activities that were foisted upon us. Naturally, most P.E. teachers are jocks themselves, so their lesson plans tend to be pretty jock-friendly. But then as now, I just didn’t enjoy dodgeball or soccer.

The funny thing is that I did enjoy taking P.E. classes in college. The big difference wasn’t just that the college courses were elective rather than mandatory, though that certainly didn’t hurt. No, what I really liked was the way I could handpick the sports I enjoyed or was curious about. I took everything from racquetball to ballroom dancing, and I enjoyed them all.

I’m wondering if an à la carte system might not also work at the high school level. Naturally, there would have to be some required stuff- a class focusing on fitness and nutrition, for example. But rather than making all students take the same P.E. curriculum, they would be able to choose from several different options every nine weeks or so. Give them a variety of choices- not just the obvious things like basketball and volleyball, but other stuff as well, like weightlifting or aerobics. Hell, I would’ve taken a quarter of aerobics in high school- not only would it have been good exercise, but it would’ve been crawling with girls, which would have appealed to me then as now.

Naturally, there would be some sports you couldn’t do, either due to insurance reasons (swimming), risk of injury (football, wrestling), or logistics (golf). And we could probably rule out ballroom dancing, due to parental complaints and awkwardness issues. But still, there are still plenty of sports out there for the students to enjoy. There could even be a points scale, based on the estimated level of impact.

For all the complaints that have been raised over kids getting fatter, most of the solutions have addressed diet, with very little proposed on the exercise end. I’m a firm believer in the idea that if you want people to get into good habits, you should make it fun for them. By allowing students to focus on sports they enjoy rather than slogging through ones they dislike, they’ll be able to get into a regular exercise routine as well as building a firm foundation for physical fitness in the future. After all, it wouldn’t be called "physical education" unless you were supposed to actually learn something.