Alice Bradley (of Finslippy fame) has a column online in Redbook.
When I was in second grade, my gym teacher told me I was uncoordinated. I was lying on the ground when she said this. All activity in the room had stopped, and the other kids were staring, and I didn't know what uncoordinated meant, but it sounded ominous, like I could die at any moment.
"What's 'uncoordinated'?" I asked her.
"Uncoordinated," she replied, "means that you cannot move your body parts correctly."
Well, she should know, I thought, while my classmates stared at me and my nonworking parts. After all, she's a trained professional.
Worth a read. Alice is a funny woman.
Solitary pursuits like running, swimming, and the weightlifting that Alice took up at age 40something, are ideal for the physically and socially self-conscious. Why, then, do they take such a back seat to team sports and games in our nation's school gyms? Only last weekend, as I went for my morning run on the sidewalks of the town I was visiting, I was designing an alternative national elementary physical education program in my head. It went like this: Instead of every kid in the country being forced to pick teams and play dodgeball, kids could choose instead to simply run around the edge of the gym or field for the entire period. This option would begin in, oh, fourth grade or so. Older kids could be issued stopwatches and logbooks, and thereby watch themselves improve, or design their own running programs. And it could all happen without any extra work on the part of the teachers. Mark was skeptical, but I think it could work.
Ideally the gym teachers would be willing to enact rules against hurling sporting equipment at the running children, too, but we won't quibble.
bearing blog 