The school I work in is 3rd grade through 8th grade, and being one of two physical education teachers, I teach the entire school. There are days when there is an assembly for the lower grades (3rd-5th grade) scheduled to take place in the gym during one of my upper grade classes (6th-8th grade), which means that unless I am outside with the classes, I can not go along with the originally planned lesson. Although my principal is careful not to use the gym too often for assemblies, it does happen.
Picture day is also a day in which it is difficult for my colleague and I to have a "normal" day. This is not because pictures are taken in the gym, but because my students can not be sweaty and messy for their pictures. If the homerooms are scheduled for their pictures after p.e. class, we have to plan activities that do not require the students to move too much, which takes away from the unit I am working on.
We also loose days when the marking period changes. The first and second marking periods we get new 5th-8th grade students, so the first days of marking periods 1 and 2 are spent going over the rules of the gym, the locker room, etc.
I completely agree with the idea that teachers truly only have 67 days or so for instructional time. I don't know, though, if making the school year longer would help to solve this problem. Extending the school year may only give more days to plan activities and take away from instructional time. If the school year was extended, it would have to be done under the idea that those extra days would be spent on instruction and not on activities.
There is a lot of pressure put on teachers to get their students to learn the information needed to not just pass the state tests, but to also get the students ready for the next grade. Extending the school year may take some of this pressure off teachers, however, I've never met a teacher who was unable to teach their students the necessary information in the time allotted. Before activities are scheduled, principals and teachers need to ensure that the activity is educational, and not to plan a lot of activities in one time frame.
3 comments:
It is pretty frustating! What you go through makes you feel as if your course is not as important as others. It also sends a message to the kids. I believe that too many activities are scheduled during PE. Why is that?
Also, I agree with the final figure of 65-67 days of actual instruction. How sad is that? Are the activities getting in the way of school or is school getting in the way of the activities.
I just wanted to say that I also came to the same conclusion as you did that no matter how much we extend the school day/year, there will always be more non-educational activities put in place to take up yet more time.
It seems as though every year, teachers in the district I worked, had more and more "paper work". The beginning of the year is just madness with the amount of pretesting, pre/pre testing, rules, assemblies, events, etc..that went on so that by the time you actually got to teach a full lesson, it was already October!
Besides English, PE is the only other subject that is mandated for every year of school. However, as you said, because of space, it is the first to get pre-empted. The value of PE isn't always seen, yet childhood obesity is at an all-time high. How much of it is the "traditional" stereotype of the PE teacher as the "here's the ball, go play" teacher?
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