Adding Fun to P.E. : O.C. Teacher Focuses on Fitness, Rather Than Competition, to Help Kids Get Healthy

Kathy Stahlin has a traveling show--a shopping cart stuffed-to-tottering with toys like whiffle balls and scoops, jump ropes and rugs the size of welcome mats.

She travels within the Westminster School District as an itinerant coach who gracefully shares the basics of fitness with elementary school students.

Nothing is mere play. The game of tag is instead “Heart Attack.” If tagged by the evils Stress or Cholesterol, you are frozen and can only be freed by a Doctor.

No one keeps score. Everyone has a ball. There are smiles on all faces. “Hopefully,” says Stahlin, “these little guys won’t have those old attitudes.”

What Stahlin does is radical and unique, and it earned her the title of top elementary-school physical education teacher in Orange County this year.

It is also acutely important, for that first-blush experience with physical education can make a life-altering difference.

Her approach incorporates elements of the Physical Education Framework for California, a guideline published in 1994 for helping students develop and maintain an active, healthy lifestyle.

While contributing to a child’s academic experience, the underlying message of the new physical education is more than simply survival of the fit. It’s quality of life.

Within the last 10 years, P.E. has transformed from drills and relays and round-robin teams to incorporating new sports, from windsurfing to Jazzercize, and new technology, from heart-rate meters to computer software.

Except for music and the visual arts, no discipline has fought as long and hard for respect as P.E.--it’s not required after 10th grade, and few students take it as an elective. Some educators believe the framework will provide some long-needed PR. By focusing on fun and self-improvement rather than competition, this academically holistic approach could prove the biggest boon to youth fitness since Title IX. Only problem, say its most fervent supporters, is that even after two years, few know it exists.

For teacher Carolyn Thompson of Bell Gardens High School, P.E. stands for “pretty exciting.” Her goal is to motivate children to become physically active for a lifetime. The P.E. of old, she says, feels irritatingly irrelevant to students.

“They don’t value the role of fitness in their day-to-day. They don’t understand how fitness helps them to be productive. We are such a spectator society now.” And, Thompson stresses, “we want them to be participatory.”

Southern California schools in the ‘50s and early ‘60s were a model for physical education. School officials across the country stopped in to take a peek at hardy boys in strict battalion formation braving 100 jumping jacks despite the smog and white-hot sun.

By the mid-’60s, though, that reputation began to fade, says Jeanne Bartelt, physical education consultant to the state Education Department. “The great emphasis on competition changed. Everybody was doing their own thing. Kids didn’t want to fool around on a team. People were involved with substance abuse. They were rootless.”

Flooded with baby boomers, the schools hastily recruited instructors, many of them ill-qualified, Bartelt says. “At the same time, the [Vietnam] War had demonstrated the fact that we weren’t sending over our fittest people.”

President Kennedy responded by creating the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports. In subsequent years, on the federal and state levels, other administrations carried the torch.

Despite their efforts, phys ed never returned to its glory days. “Most of the country thinks California has a great physical education program,” says Melva Irvin, chair of Cal State Los Angeles’ physical education program, “but they get here and go, ‘yuuuuck!’ ”

Now faced with daunting challenges--language gaps, cultural differences, overcrowded classes, co-instructional (nee coed) sports--many campuses are attempting to help students find joy in movement and build self-confidence and self-awareness through physical achievements. Bell Gardens High has introduced a “Health Career Academy.” El Monte High offers “Prides”--innovative programs linking academic studies and P.E.

Underscoring the mind-body equation makes P.E. far more humane, supporters say, and emphasizes the importance of fitness in an age where children often mirror the actions (or lack thereof) of their sedentary parents.

A generation ago, parents could at least count on the schools to provide five hours per week of physical activity as part of the overall curriculum. But “Proposition 13 did terrible damage in the ‘70s,” Bartelt recalls.

The 1978 initiative that slashed property taxes meant government funding cuts across the board. “L.A. had the most extraordinary youth services organizations,” from physical education to intramural and after-school programs, Bartelt says, “and I have to give the county and city credit for hanging on to it as much as they could.”

But the money woes had a slow, deteriorating effect, not just on curriculum but on the student body--figuratively and literally. “By the ‘80s we’re really alarmed,” Bartelt says. “The information age has given us the knowledge that we are killing ourselves--cancer, heart disease, obesity. By the ‘90s, we understand the problem, but we have decimated physical education because of stresses on academics--telling people in a way that it isn’t important.”

After 10th grade, P.E. may be taken as an elective, but some districts don’t even factor the grades into GPAs.

The students most affected are not the potential athletes. They very often find their way onto school teams, plucked by eager coaches off asphalt courts or baseball diamonds.

“The greatest area of harm is the average student who is unfit,” says Donna Kimura, LAUSD Valley Youth Services field coordinator, “[one] who hasn’t developed social skills, doesn’t know how to work as part of a team or problem-solve with a group.”

The fallout of inactivity extends to everything from campus tension to the rise in obesity. Betty F. Hennessy, physical education consultant and a guiding hand in the creation of P.E. textbooks, believes the framework can make P.E. viable again.

One of its salient tenets is a reassessment of competition. “It tends to squash the personality of other children who are not the elite athlete,” Hennessy explains. “We’re getting away from the ‘good sport’ philosophy lip-service: ‘Shake hands. Don’t cry.’ ”

Respect, responsibility and a realistic attitude about personal accomplishments have shifted upward in the health paradigm; achieving one’s personal best is the goal for the day.

“We’d always had a framework for [academic] curricula, but P.E. was never on that cycle,” Hennessy explains. Finally, in 1986, educators put it on par with other subjects and issued a handbook with guidelines for integrating physical education instruction with other disciplines. Calculating batting averages, for example, requires math skills. “The more they can connect, the more they will retain,” Hennessy says. “So instead of just running track they have to understand why.”

The overriding message: “Regardless of skill level, there’s more to physical education than playing games.”

*

Jim Clemmensen carts out a plastic tub of rubber jump ropes. He pours them on the floor and out they wiggle like worms, curling tangled wires--in greens, lilacs, pink fluorescents.

His sixth-graders chatter, giggle, wiggle like the ropes on the wooden floor.

“What are we not doing?” Clemmensen asks in a strong voice barely tinged with sternness.

“Listening,” comes the answer from a small voice in the back.

Textbook coach: Tall, tan, mustachioed, Clemmensen favors Mark Spitz (sans medals) with a ‘90s twist. Loading a student-dubbed tape into the deck, the teacher admits, “They don’t always like my idea of funky.”

The boombox thuds alive. The students stand, jump into place.

The gym vibrates--whirring air and a thick bass make the floor tremble. His own rope in hands, Clemmensen makes his rounds, trying a few steps of his own, crossovers, fancy footwork.

“We’re learning how to keep our rhythm and balance,” explains Chris Cain. “We’re learning about muscle endurance and exercise. The science part is pretty fun too.”

Itching for a change, Clemmensen decided three years ago to reconfigure Van Nuys Middle School’s P.E. program. He wrote a grant proposal for a curriculum based on the framework, and the state decided to gamble.

“The legacy we’ve had to live down,” Clemmensen says, shaking his head at the thought of the not-so-distant past.

Back in the ‘80s, he taught classes of 75 students. “You get used to it. But you could be taking roll and when you get to squad 11, squads 1 and 2 have disappeared and you don’t know where they got to.”

Now, with 40 kids and a chalkboard rolled onto the blacktop, student monitors trot out with crates full of equipment and folders, passing out materials to their peers assembled in manageable pods (circles), not lines--a classroom without walls.

This age group is vital. This is the time when kids feel most awkward in their bodies and are most likely to develop a lifelong disdain for exercise, says Principal Tony Delgado. “Kids in middle school can be very cruel to one another.”

Consequently, the Van Nuys students do not touch a piece of equipment for the first three weeks. Instead, the focus is on building bonds. Falls and levitations that put students at the mercy of their peers to catch or lift them foster trust and teamwork. Most kids, Clemmensen says, are open to the idea, but some just say, “forget it.”

Homework? Written assignments?

Please.

Other innovations have been viewed far more favorably. For gym clothes, Clemmensen took the revolutionary step of asking the kids what they wanted. “They picked the color and the style,” Delgado says. “A longer short. Sweat pants. It looks good and now they dress all the time.”

But perhaps the most radical shift is in how students are graded. Alumni of state public schools should remember the California Fitness Test. One ill-executed pull-up could mean a fat F, despite all your wide-eyed effort, pressed gym clothes and sterling attendance. Now, Clemmensen and his staff factor in the results of written and performance tests, reports, self- and group assessments, teacher evaluations and running logs.

In other words, students get more chances. “We try and reinforce the good things,” Clemmensen says. “They still call each other names. Tease. The problem is the me-me-me mentality of this age.”

But it is a step toward acknowledging strengths and weaknesses and shades of difference in learning styles.

Delgado looks at the whole process as a culture.

“Our only fear is that we make this child-centered program interesting now, then what’s going to happen when they get into high school and that very regimented 60-to-1 setting?”

*

This kinder, gentler P.E. hasn’t been implemented as quickly as its supporters would like. Administrators have been too involved in more pressing campus issues to stamp it a priority. And in the places where the framework is in place, it has not been without critics.

“Some traditional parents don’t like that self-competition is stressed,” says Clayre Petray, professor of kinesiology and physical education at Cal State Long Beach. “They don’t think that it prepares [children] for the competition of life.”

There are other roadblocks. Philosophical differences. Dogged traditionalism. Budget crunching. “Most people,” says Donna Gunstream, head of girls athletics at El Monte High School, “have a hard time understanding the difference between being physically fit and athletic, and not everybody is both.”

As long as the male players of competitive sports dominate the locker rooms on high school campuses that attitude will be hard to change.

“It’s very difficult to get the male to buy into physical education,” because, Gunstream explains, many male coaches view phys ed as superfluous, not complementary, to athletics.

Institutional wranglings aside, the framework has kicked up weighty discussions, forcing administrators to take a long, critical look at how their campuses are metamorphosing, from the complexion and gender of the participants to the profile of the truly physically educated person.

These guidelines help define the concept of fitness, which has become hazy amid the ‘80s and ‘90s cult-of-the-health-spa fury: “It brought the adult notion of fitness to school,” Bartelt explains. “Every kid every day does not need to run a damn mile or do crunches and all that crap. What they need to do is activities developmentally appropriate for their age group.”

At the same time, the cultural makeup of campuses dictates that those old standby activities change. In schools where track and field and football events once filled the bleachers to sagging, soccer and badminton might be the rage--reflecting the interests of Latino and Asian students, respectively.

“You just can’t offer those traditional sports anymore,” explains Kimura. “They just aren’t being chosen.”

At least not by the boys. “Little girls and women have made the biggest step forward,” says Gudrun Armanski, former head coach of Cal State Los Angeles’ women’s track team. “Ten to 20 years ago it wasn’t OK to be aggressive. You could not exhibit behavior that was considered male.”

These past 20 post-Title IX years have broadened the definition of the campus jock. With the NCAA’s influence and involvement beginning in the early ‘80s, women’s athletics moved from infrequent play days to lucrative sports scholarships for the elite. That nod had a trickle-down effect to the P.E. playing fields. Everyone had to pay notice.

“Interest was always there,” Armanski explains. “It was like a dam holding water, a woman could finally be an athlete and not be stamped a freak.”

Exposure certainly helped. But looking back, across-the-board support in the schools was most critical. It will take the same thrust, framework supporters realize, to jump-start their own grass-roots campaign. Despite cuts, swelling class rosters and faculty inertia, they can only hope that history just might repeat itself. Because, says Thompson, bottom line, “We are the health insurance of the future.”