Today I subbed for a physical education teacher at one of the junior high schools. They were taking their boating licence course so I mainly just watched the students as a highway patrol, water patrol officer taught the class. I wonder why we teach this and not other things, like CPR. I know that in order to drive a boat you need to have a licence now, but its not like we take time out of gym to get your drivers licence, a lot more of those students will be driving a car than driving a boat.
I also taught adaptive PE, a class for special education students. This was interesting because it was different from any PE class I ever had in middle and high school. The students worked the first half of the class on the treadmill or the elliptical, then they switched and worked on weights. The students were so supportive of each other while they were doing the weights, encouraging their peers to finish their reps. We need to find ways for students to encourage each other in mental tasks as well as physical tasks. Why is it that students only encourage their peers when they are running or lifting weights, when students need just as much encouragement to finish a chapter or write a personal narrative. I think that the journals Nancy Atwell talks about in “In the Middle” might be a way to do this. This is a way for students to encourage each other to read. If a student mentions that they are having a hard time getting into a book, maybe another student can encourage them to keep at it.
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