First contact

On Monday, we started unit 1 which deals with main concepts related to physical education. First of all we have to wonder, what is exactly physical education? Is a subject whose main goal is raising high ranking players? In which students have to learn all the theoretical rules of games and sports? As far as I understood, none of these questions can be answered with a “yes”. Nevertheless, many people misunderstand the main goal of physical education.

The main aim of this subject is teaching to move and through movement. The first part is needed in order to have a complete education. People, and specially children, have to develop their intellectual capacity but we can’t forget the physical one as well. As the ancients said “mens sana in corpore sano”. That’s why physical education is compulsory in Primary and Secondary Education, because we want active and healthy people. 

             

As we want healthy people, physical education is focused on health related fitness and not on performance related fitness. The most important thing is that pupils learn healthy habits instead of becoming great athletes. Moreover, due to medical reasons, young students shouldn’t be trained for a specific sport. In order to achieve these objectives, Physical Education should offer positive movement experiences, but do children have them? We made a little debate so as to answer this question.

People in groups had to remember their memories of PE and talk with their partners about them. Afterwards, the whole class talked about their memories highlighting the good and the bad points of them. As a PE student, my memories are quite positive towards the classes I attended when I was younger. Nevertheless, physical education was completely different from primary education to secondary education. What I remember about school is having fun with my classmates, playing lots of games and using a wide range of materials. However, when I started secondary education a new word appeared: assessment. Suddenly the aim of the activities we did on class was not having fun but learning enough in order to pass the course. Curiously enough, most of my mates had the same experience towards their PE classes. After sharing and discussing our experiences we finally sum up the positive and negative points of PE classes:

Positive

- Fun

- Group cohesion

- Different activities

- Personal goals instead of social comparison

Negative

- Teacher not specialised

- Theory part = book and exam

- Less for girls

- Repetition of traditional sports

- Testing

              

As we can see, physical education provides bad experiences when it does not develop self-steem, when activities are repetitive and when fun is not taken into account. In addition, this brought more issues to be discussed, for instance, that physical education is underrated when is fun and that could be an explanation for the existence of tests.

In conclusion, PE is a necessary subject so as to have healthy and active people, not high ranking players. Students achieve this by the learning of movement and also learning through movement. Notwithstanding, the only way to promote physical activity is giving the right activities that can provide good experiences. Therefore, exercise should be fun and the teacher should avoid comparisons that can make people feel demotivated and left aside.