"Gaming"

Although this is a blogged devoted to physical education, I would like to start this entry reflecting about a linguistic issue. It is very interesting how languages work and evolve along time. For instance this is the case of English which has the verb "play" for the Spanish word "jugar", however, it only has the substantive "game" for the words "juego" and "deporte". Therefore, the difference between these two words in English is not as clear as in other languages such as Spanish. This is an interesting event because before becoming a sports, all the sports were games. Nonetheless, nowadays it has been specified what can be considered a sport and not. Sports have fixed rules and are managed by institutions such as the FIFA. On the other hand, games have more freedom when playing them. Nevertheless, the main difference is that whilst the main goal in games is to have fun, in sports it is not and I think that this is also something to reflect. 

                   

Owing to the fact that sports are more complex than games, they have more goals than games. On the one hand we can find the one related to competition and trying to be the winner. However, there are also collateral benefits that have to do with having fun, willingness, personal satisfaction, team work, development of moral concern regarding fair play and so on. Therefore, it is obvious that sports are educative and really advantageous. The problem arises when "amateur" sport is compared with top-class sport. First of all, people should be concerned that whereas everyone can practice sport only a few can become elite athletes. Therefore, the level of exigency and the kind of activities that are required in the school and in a federated team are completely different. So it happens with the kind of objectives that are associated with both. In the school, the main goal is to learn and to allow children become better people giving them the tools that will facilitate their future years. Whilst in the top-class sport the main goal is to succeed. As an example of this idea, the professor showed us an extract of a shocking documentary about artistic gymnastics training in China.

                    

In addition, media is spreading the misconception that sport is either linked with fame, money and veneration or with corruption and cheating. This mistaken ideas have made that children consider sport players idols that have to be imitated, but players are not usually good models of behaviour. As a result, most of the parents want their children do sport but not because of the good reasons. This leads to the importance of the teacher's role, who has to deal with the parents' pressures and try to make that their children like doing sport and exercise because the benefit of just becoming physically educated people. 

            

I also realized that sports fit perfectly into the subject of physical education, because, as we learned the first day of class, the main goal of the subject is teach movement and through movement. Curiously enough, it happens the same with sports since students learn to play sports and through playing them. I would like to highlight that we can find again the underlying idea that attitudinal objectives are as important as motor and motor-cognitive ones.

Finally, the teacher has to have some knowledge about sports in order to plan the ones that he will develop in class. This is important because some of them are more complex or they have the same characteristics regarding tactics, for instance basketball and hockey. Therefore, the teacher should have a clear idea of what his context is and what sport fits better according to the characteristics of the class and the objectives that he wants to achieve.