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I would like to think that when Schmoker wrote this he was not speaking of teachers that I teach with, or even teachers like myself. There are days when I wake up and am so tired that I would love to roll the basketballs out and let my students shoot hoops, but this is the exact reason why I became a physical education teacher. I wanted to change the idea that some people have, that the "gym" teachers sit on the bleacher all day and read the paper while the kids shoot hoops. So even when I wake up and am tired, I go into school and teach lessons that I know are fun, exciting and worthwhile. I know that if I drove to Montclair on a Thursday night and was given busy work to do for a few hours, I would not be happy, so I would never give my students busy work.

Schmoker speaks about how schools will not improve until administrators begin to work with teachers to truly oversee and improve instructional quality. This I agree with. I do not teach a tested subject, therefore I get left alone by all the administrators. Of course this is great because I do not have to constantly explain why I am teaching a particular unit, but at the same time, administrators do not know what I am teaching. The only clue my principal has to what I am teaching is when she reads my lesson plans.

Fortunately I team teach so my colleague and I are able to bounce ideas off of each other. We though are isolated from the rest of the school, only seeing other teachers when they drop their classes off and pick them up. Not that we aren't motivated to change the phys. ed. curriculum, but I think if my principal visited the gym more and encouraged us to change our program, we would be more motivated to make changes at a faster rate.