Physical Education: Grades and Injuries

As a child, I hated sports. The reason for that was physical education. Each lesson is 40 minutes of shame. Jumping over the bar, throwing the ball, running at speed – everywhere I was the last. Once I sprained my leg while jumping over a goat, and this shell became my main nightmare.

But I got off easy. For example, here is the case in Chita, which happened a week ago. A third grader broke her spine while rolling. Later, the girl admitted: she did not want to do this exercise, but the teacher made her, threatening to put a two. On pain of a shameful assessment, the excellent girl risked a somersault. Now she is bedridden for several months.

And here are the figures from official statistics: over the past year in our country, 211 children died in physical education lessons. There are so many people for the whole village school. And if we take into account that there are 175 days in the school year, it turns out that every day somewhere in Russia, one or two children died in a physical education lesson.

Social activists from St. Petersburg decided: the approach to physical education in schools needs to be urgently changed. They asked the Minister of Education of Russia Olga Vasilyeva to revise the grading system.

– No twos and threes, – says the head of the public movement “For Security” Dmitry Kurdesov, as well as the father of two schoolchildren. – Children are different, if one child can fulfill the standards, the other – for different reasons – cannot. In our opinion, every child who goes to physical education lessons and tries, already deserves an A. And if the student is unable or afraid to do some exercises, the teacher should not insist.

It is not worth comparing children who grew up in Soviet times and today’s schoolchildren, Kurdesov is sure. Then all the sections were free, and then they did not know about computers. Therefore, children spent all their free time not at the monitor screens, but at stadiums and sports grounds.

– If the muscles are not prepared, there is no muscle memory, and the child is forced to pass some standards once a month, the body can fail and the physical education lesson will end with injuries, – says Dmitry Kurdesov.

The social activist asks to revise the standards. Too much is demanded from the students today.

– In secondary school, children must undergo general physical training. Easy, in a playful way, so that students can relieve the brain after mental stress, says Kurdesov. – And let the standards remain in schools with a sports bias, including Olympic reserve schools.

In accidents that happen in physical education lessons, one cannot blame only the teachers, Kurdesov said.

“Every year, teachers need to be sent for retraining,” says the social activist. – And, perhaps, it is worth completely abandoning grades in physical education lessons, so that so many demands are not made on children.