don't sweat it

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Amazon Music Stream millions of songs. Amazon Advertising Find, attract, and engage customers. Amazon Drive Cloud storage from Amazon. The title of the basic physical education class at Chesapeake High School in Pasadena, Maryland, at least acknowledges the importance of what happens after the course is over. But he often feels a bit like a preacher trying to get his flock into Sunday school on a day when the circus is in town.

Lee begins the class by directing his students to take a five-minute warm-up jog around the perimeter of the gym. Fitness for Life is a standardized PE curriculum used by all the high schools in the county. It is a combination of calisthenics and games, with an emphasis on explaining to kids how the exercises and activities burn calories and contribute to a healthy life. Some kids look hulking. Some bound around the gym at a good pace, some jog, some walk. After two or three laps, the cluster of walkers gets larger. After five minutes, Lee blows a whistle and leads the class through four minutes of stretching.

He would normally have moved to calisthenics, but this was a day for setting a benchmark for each student in the curl-up, a version of the abdominal crunch, which is a variation on the sit-up. The kids form a circle on the floor and begin raising their upper bodies off the floor, touching their lower legs with their hands, lying prone again, then repeating the movement, all to the beat from the boom box, for two and a half minutes.

Lee, carrying a clipboard, asks each student how many curl-ups he or she performed. More than half the class reported doing all He leads the class back across the hall and puts them through 20 minutes of an indoor game called speedball, akin to soccer.

12 - Don't Sweat It

The class divides into three teams and each team splits time between playing and watching. It is early in the semester, and the curl-up benchmark is one of several Lee is establishing for skills ranging from the mile run to pull-ups. But there are limits to what he can do, limits imposed primarily by the culture the kids re-enter when they leave class.

Lee introduces me to a slender, black-haired girl named Paige Gardener, who is Last year, in middle school, she says, her beginning time for the mile run was By the end of the semester it was down to 9: Pasadena, Maryland, is a suburb of modest houses and apartments about ten miles south of Baltimore. Not every family has the wherewithal to permit a child to spend her leisure time on exercise and sports. And many students opt for a part-time job to finance a car.

The kids tend to end up like that, too. When a kid turns 16, he gets a job so he can get a car. Lee sees two distinct categories of students at Chesapeake: Lee, who is 41, feels the varsity athletes are just as fit as, if not fitter than, the athletes of his own high-school days.

He has coached the track team for the past seven years, and in that time his athletes have broken 13 school records. But he works them hard—two hours a day, five days a week. But the nonathletes get much less daily exercise than their peers of two or three decades ago, and Lee sees the consequences in his classes.


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He expects to have all the class members doing military push-ups by the end of the semester. Skip Lee is not sanguine about the future. He thinks that standards of fitness are dropping and that the state should require at least two courses of PE. The countervailing pressures against increasing the physical education requirements are strong and widespread, and in plain view at Yorktown High, in Arlington, Virginia, a school that prides itself on producing high achievers. The student population at Yorktown is 69 percent white, 16 percent Hispanic, 9 percent Asian, and 7 percent African American, and only 17 percent of its students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches.

PE class of freshmen and sophomores begins to assemble one recent morning. Not only is there an ethnic mix, there are also goths and prepsters, nerds and jocks, fat kids and thin ones. Some students walk, chatting with friends. Bonzano reads the standings after two weeks of volleyball competition. Students at Yorktown take a semester of PE and a semester of health in their first year. In the second year, they get three quarters of PE and a quarter of health.

Each PE course consists of three-week units on different sports. Though physical exercise, known previously as gymnasium, has been a common part of American schooling since the 19th century, recreational games like basketball, flag or touch football, soccer, and softball were not introduced into the PE curriculum until the s. The idea now is that if students learn sports, they will have a pleasant way to exercise after class and after graduation. Bonzano opens a bag of volleyballs, and at The teams are co-ed, each game lasts about five minutes, and the level of play is spotty. There are few rallies, few spikes, few sets, no digs.

At any given moment, 1 student is attempting to play the ball and 11 stand and watch. In seconds, the students are in their locker rooms. They had been on the gym floor for 34 minutes. None had broken a sweat. Bonzano, in her 15th year of teaching, is unhappy with the role of PE at Yorktown.

We just pass them and promote them.

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But Bonzano does not expect this situation to change, because it satisfies the desires of too many constituencies. PE has no role in that. Moser, who is 31, came to PE teaching by a nontraditional route. A certified personal trainer, she got into teaching on a provisional license.

When she looked at the way most physical education classes were run, she saw one thing she thought she could improve immediately: Moser has to adapt her personal training techniques to a class where she and another teacher handle as many as 80 students at a time.

And on a recent Monday afternoon, that was what she and fellow teacher Meghan Doran do. At another there are homemade low platforms, constructed of wood, for step drills. Other stations have only the walls of the gym or the first row of bleachers. But there is a station for every student. Within minutes, Moser and Doran have all 80 students at a station and exercise begins. For 40 seconds, one row of students might be required to do as many arm curls as possible with the elastic band.


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  • Then a whistle blows, and that group of students runs to the wooden platforms, where they do 40 seconds of step drills while another group takes its place with the bands. Some stations are simple calisthenics, push-ups, or squats with backs pressed to the gym wall. Every seven minutes a round ends, and Doran and Moser demonstrate new drills to be performed at each station.