Testing the Teachers
Kathy Stahlin has a traveling show.
A shopping cart stuffed to tottering, filled with toys--whiffle balls and scoops, jump ropes--and rugs the size of welcome mats.
She travels throughout the Westminster School District, an itinerant elementary school coach, patiently breaking down the basics of fitness as if they were elements of a dance.
Nothing is what it seems. Tag is a game called Heart Attack (get tapped twice by the evil Stress or Cholesterol, and you can be unfrozen only by a doctor). Crunches incorporate a spelling list of muscles or parts of the skeleton. No one ever keeps score. Everyone gets a ball. Every face opens with a smile.
“Hopefully,” says Stahlin, 38, “these little guys won’t have those old attitudes.”
While most elementary school officials ask classroom teachers to walk their herds through a daily dose of physical activity, this program on wheels, with an outside coach, is radical, rare and acutely important. Stahlin’s approach incorporates elements of the Physical Education Framework for California, issued in 1994 to help students establish a healthy lifestyle by moving away from drills and relays toward academics, new equipment and activities such as windsurfing and Jazzercise. Because it is a guide and not a mandate, the framework’s backers are uncertain how many schools have adopted portions of the strategy. But they do know that only a handful of Los Angeles County’s 1,678 campuses have fully implemented it.
Innovative as the framework may be, it’s just a piece of paper waiting for someone like Stahlin to pick it up and run. “The issue here,” says Gudrun Armanski, former women’s head track and field coach at Cal State Los Angeles and now a private fitness trainer, “is the teacher.”
Schools might provide a good curriculum and facilities, Armanski says, “but if you don’t have the money to pay a good coach, it won’t work. A teacher who can correct a mistake without doing damage to a kid’s psyche. A teacher who can apply all the tools properly, who can step in. You cannot just go out and roll out the ball.”
Teachers in general bump up against a range of detractors. Physical education instructors in particular find themselves the butt of old jokes and rousting: “Those who can’t, teach; those who can’t teach, teach P.E.”
At the middle- and high-school levels, where the pressure is on for administrators to shore up basic academics amid a swelling student population, staffing shortages might force a single P.E. teacher to preside over classes with 45, 60, even 75 students.
“In the mid-’60s, the thinking was [that] a great athlete makes a great coach,” says Jeanne Bartelt, physical education consultant to the state education department. “And that isn’t necessarily the truth. People think it’s easy to do. Just keep kids busy running. They have no idea how to play this game.”
Nowadays, the makeup of staff varies widely from campus to campus; pure P.E. teachers may share duties with the history teacher / coach. At the same time, teaching physical education has never been so multi-pronged and demanding. The new curriculum dictates age-appropriate programs, nontraditional sports and academic tie-ins. Cultural considerations add another layer of subtext.
At Belmont High School near downtown Los Angeles, for example, the largely immigrant student body has learned how to take their differences in stride. “When I was in the old country we had an itinerant P.E. [instructor],” explains Assistant Principal Ignacio Garcia, a native of Mexico. “So having this sort of formal class is unusual for some of our students. Especially the girls who’ve grown up with very traditional values and are not accustomed to undressing in front of others, or wearing shorts. . . .”
In the translation, says Principal Augustine Herrera, “there have been problems, but we’re surprised at how few.”
When working with such sensitive students, it’s important for a teacher to stay fresh, says Clayre Petray, professor of physical education and kinesiology at Cal State Long Beach, because that first-blush experience can make a stunning difference. Attitude and enthusiasm--before words or rules--are the first things students glimpse.
“I wanted to be a high school coach,” Petray recalls, “but I looked in the kids’ eyes, and by junior / senior high they have a lot of attitudes already formed, so I decided [we should] focus on [training teachers to instruct] children.”
As framework architects push the mind-body equation, schools must worry about attracting younger, vital, enthusiastic teachers to replace the old. Much damage has been done to the profession’s collective morale, from the last-hired / first-fired fallout of periodic district budget cuts to the influx of ill-prepared, procured-in-a-pinch teachers.
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Although the enrollment of P.E.-teachers-in-training has remained steady, Petray says, the number of jobs for them has dropped. So maintaining long-term interest in the discipline is yet another challenge for educators.
“My generation of teacher will be gone in the next five years,” says Donna Kimura, 53, former P.E. specialist for the Los Angeles Unified School District. “We’re an aging force. And we don’t have as many young people . . . coming in because they don’t want to be the first ones cut. They’re looking for something more secure. Who wants to put up with all the stuff you do with kids today? It overshadows the good, the benefits.”
Although she sympathizes with complaints about large class sizes and limited equipment, Kimura is often appalled by what masquerades as instruction. “They don’t even look at the kids. They take roll and let them go. We can teach kids in a different kind of way.”
A lot of it comes down to image. The stifled-giggle-worthy, sedentary P.E. teacher sends a message: “Why should I want to do this? He’s fat and he stands on the sidelines with a whistle around his neck,” explains Melva Irvin, chair of Cal State Los Angeles’ physical education program.
Change is awkward, she acknowledges. Teachers who had grown accustomed to setting up tournament charts must now explain the cardiovascular system--and that is threatening. In the past, Irvin explains, “basically we were trained on how to teach activities. Today, activities are only the medium in which we teach these other things.”
Framework supporters hope to spark not just interest but action among administrators, who are often distracted by more pressing campus dramas. “We have to get [them] . . . to see the importance of good programs,” Irvin says. “I’m hoping that students will say: ‘Why can’t we do that?’ as will parents and faculty members. I have to stay optimistic . . , “ she says. “The change in the standards, the change in the framework, it’s all been slow. I’ve been fighting for 30 years. It’s been slow, but it’s been sure.”
Donna Gunstream took the El Monte High School P.E. department through the obstacle course of retooling its program three years ago. “I just got so bored,” says Gunstream, just back from the pool and taking a seat behind her desk surrounded by ribbons, trophies and Post-it thank-yous written in loopy, broad strokes with hearts dotting i’s. “We were in a volleyball tournament and I was thinking, ‘This again!’ It’s neat for me to have more ways to present material. Some kids may learn by doing. Some by writing. Some by reading. And some are computer hackers, so they can pick it up that way.”
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The availability of soft equipment--Nerf balls, plastic bats and rackets--has provided some relief for other instructive headaches. It doesn’t hurt, so kids aren’t as likely to be afraid. It’s less expensive, so everyone gets a chance at bat, a ball to throw.
Paired with the plethora of new technology--videos, computer software and the like--Gunstream, a 27-year veteran, also finds new textbooks geared toward physical education quite heartening. “A few years ago you couldn’t find those sorts of things at all. There’s just a lot more things that you can do.”
Even with the cooperation of Gunstream’s staff and administration, El Monte’s transition wasn’t blemish-free. “It was a lot of work. We sat down and decided what we wanted to do. We adopted a nonthreatening environment so we could talk about these things, so that there wouldn’t be a whole lot of fear about, ‘Oh, no, you want me to explain bio-kinetics? How the angle of release affects where a ball goes? I’m just used to throwing out the ball!’ ”
From building locomotor and basic body management skills to orienteering (field trips that take students and their compasses into the great outdoors), “We like to give them a lot of experiences.”
Gunstream hopes this will translate into the still-lagging college curriculum as well--creating a grand sweep of fodder for the next generation of teacher.
“In college they’ve changed names of courses to something like ‘Exploring Kinesiology,’ but they are still doing things like telling the students to write lesson plans like: zero to two minutes, take roll; two to seven minutes, do warmups and drills. We need to rethink that and say it’s well worth the time to explain why and how.”
Gunstream would like to have more teachers so they could offer more classes. And like many teachers throughout the region, she looks for ways to enlist parents. As in a family mathematics program, or English tutoring, more teachers are assigning physical education activity homework to inspire those sedentary role models at home.
The whole point, explains Gunstream, propping open her office door to let in the crash of banging lockers, shrieking girls and the humidity of a too-hot shower, “is that we’re not just standing in a field. We’re just outstanding in our field.”
