How often you have heard your classmates complaining about their sports lessons? Very often, I guess. Adults would maybe say all this complaining is stupid and the youth is just becoming lazier. Why they always bring up the “when I was young…” card? For example: “When I was young, we skied at least 10 kilometres - and nobody whined about it!” Well, really?
Roughly speaking, students seem to divide into two groups. There are those sporty athletes who really enjoy sport classes and prefer them to theoretical subjects like geography and French. They’re the ones who very seldom complain about sport classes and are enthusiastic to try any new sports. Doing sports is a very nice hobby but they tend to take it very seriously and are determined to win. Then there are students who aren’t so happy about sport classes at all. And the winners’ eagerness to win maybe scares them a little. Sport classes are something simply horrible and in the future they will speak about their traumatic experiences at school on some magazine or on television.
These two groups of course are roughly generalised and there’re many students who take sport classes just the way there are; maybe they complain but for them it also is supposedly okay to have sport classes at school. But it seems that these two groups still exist and want very different things from their PE classes.
So the main problem seems to be; how can we make sports lessons comfortable for everyone? Especially when people are so different and have very different opinions of sport classes?
Well, if I were a PE teacher, I would try to give something nice to everyone and make sport classes more comfortable for everyone. Surely teachers also try to do so today by changing sports all the time; for example, in the winter there is hockey, skiing, ice skating and in the autumn orienteering, baseball, football and so on. That’s one way to solve the problem and teachers always say that it helps student get to know and find new sports.
But, I have to ask, what “new”? When you have done the same sports at school year after year, you sure have found out what interests you and what really doesn’t. And the cycle always stays the same; you do these sports at this time of a year and these others at the other time. And you know exactly what to wait from your sports classes. And ability groups wouldn’t work very well, I think. They would just create more tension and stamp some students as “good at sports” and vice versa, even if it’s just about who wants to make the sports more relaxing and who are more competitive.
What’s my solution, then? I think it is okay that kids get a chance to try all kinds of sports at school. The present system would work well at comprehensive school, at least during the first years of it. But at upper secondary school the sports lessons would at the latest become more diverse. It would be good if students could choose what kind of sports they want to do - I’m sure they have already tried everything a school can offer. There would be different emphasises; dance, swimming, ball games, skiing and winter games etc. In upper secondary school - and maybe already in the last years of comprehensive school - students sure know what kind of sports they like and they would get a chance to do those. If someone liked everything or more than one of those emphases, they would choose something for one year and then something else for another year.
In this way, nobody could complain anymore about how they hate baseball or swimming or skiing. I’m sure everybody would also be ready to pay a little to get a chance to try something special since schools usually don’t have enough money for anything new and interesting... This would make sports lessons nicer. Because when someone feels they have to do sports they positively hate, it’s anything but fun. Let’s make sports lessons a bit more suitable for everyone’s individual tastes!
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