A smarter approach to teaching PE might work some unexpected wonders.
There’s a rather unkind saying which goes: “Those can, do. Those who can’t, teach.”
To which your Back Page correspondent’s teacher friends like to add: “And those who can’t teach, teach PE.”
Which is not only a little cruel, it may well be quite unfair as well, if an analysis published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine is to be believed.
Turns out, the right kind of physical education classes can do more than just improve the bodily fitness of our kids, it can help boost their mental and academic abilities as well, especially for mathematics.
The study involved a systematic pooling and reviewing of data from 19 studies, across 11 nations, including Australia, covering close to 9000 children and teenagers. The aim was to tease out the effects of specific PE interventions on brainpower and academic prowess.
The key word is this analysis is “quality”. High quality PE classes, the researchers say, are those which include “cognitively challenging activities like dance or martial arts” and are led by a PE specialist, and/or include high-intensity fitness activities, sports, and team games.
“The findings from our meta-analysis suggest that improving the quality of PE classes is a worthwhile investment in education that may lead to improvements in cognition and academic performance,” the study authors wrote.
By contrast, simply boosting the number (by two to four a week) or length of PE lessons only had a marginal and insignificant impact on academic performance.
So the type of PE classes your humble scribe recalls from his distant youth, involving ritual humiliation of the less co-ordinated classmates, joyless calisthenics, or simply being sent off for a 40-minute jog around the neighbourhood (including a 10-minute sneaky cigarette break where possible), probably don’t qualify.
It may also go some way to explaining the lack of facility with quadratic equations and other such numerical jiggery-pokery.
If you see something that takes your breath away, email felicity@medicalrepublic.com.au.
