Florida’s Phantom Phys Ed
Florida, not a place to fret overmuch about incipient childhood obesity, now allows high schoolers to sail through their gym requirement by sitting in front of a computer.
Cyber-study is all well and good, but if virtual physical education really works, baby boomers can only hope Florida will patent it and market it in place of fen-phen.
In this bit of oxymoronic academia, students read up on nutrition and fitness via computer, lessons always more easily ingested between bites of a Big Mac.
The Florida gym teachers praise the program to the skies. And why not? They don’t have to see the kids all semester. They allege that their students actually exercise. That’s “allege” because this is an honors system that trusts teenagers to do their assigned work even though they can get full credit by faking it. Florida educators must have missed the recent UCLA study that found high school kids are geniuses at pulling A’s while doing less schoolwork than ever.
The students keep a log of miles run and weights lifted, but they could make the whole thing up and no one would know. At least they’re honing their fiction-writing talents.
The National Assn. for Sport and Physical Education, though, worries about online gym. These spoilsports fail to see the benefits to the nation’s youth. Sitting at the computer develops the postural muscles needed for -- more sitting. Keyboarding builds digital dexterity. Repetitive two-fisted lifting of Twinkies to the mouth between mouse clicks sculpts a set of long, lean biceps. Figuring out what numbers to log for the heart rate -- you think it’s easy to mimic steady gains in cardiovascular fitness? -- builds strong math skills and exercises the imagination.
The educational world awaits Florida’s next creative solution to the thorny problem of pretending to teach. Maybe kids could knock off physics labs by bowling (momentum equals the ball’s mass times the speed of the throw) or lifting weights (overcoming gravity).
Could this concept ever translate to the work world? Writers of opinion articles, for example, could watch TV shows about the importance of writing instead of actually doing it and then log imaginary editorials. Then they would never express their opinion again. As if.