Published on 12, July, 2020
I'm just watching this Yo Samdy Sam video and already noticing (in spite of her posh, private school education - privilege alert!) that many of the teachers' observations are almost exaclty the same as on my own. Almost eerily, in fact, although I went to a very rough comprehensive in the North East of England. My reports were, on the face of it, rather good, but there are some little asides which indicate constant high levels of anxiety combined with my supposed "giftedness" (I was actually terrified into appearing "gifted", I now think). When I look back, I'm getting more of a feeling of, "My goodness - what did they do to me?" Very interesting, I think, And I'll probably reflect some more on this as I watch the rest. My "giftedness" didn't exactly carry over into most of the workplaces I got myself trapped in and I then experienced decades of anxiety and fairly poor mental health. So... and if you care to share, how was it for you? www.youtube.com/watch
One more rant about something that probably applied to most of us, and may apply to our kids.Physical education, at least in Australia, doesn't seem very modern, and it sounds like the UK may not have advanced much in this area either. I would have thought that PE teachers would be trained to meet the needs of a range of children and that their skills would encompass a bit of physiotherapy, proprioception etc (I may not know all the technical terms) and they would have ideas for fun activities for kids who are either reluctant or physically challenged in some way or both. Well surely they are trained, but perhaps when it comes to the real life situation they don't do it. It's just such a missed opportunity - because physical fitness can help a lot with self-esteem, anxiety and autism as well obviously it would help with many conditions. I would have been quite happy to be in a separate stream for PE - like a fun fitness kind of thing as opposed to competitive sport. Though it's not compulsory beyond year 9 now over here, something my eldest is happy about.PS: I just realised I should have watched the video! Will watch later
On the topic of PE, I realised that my lessons during the two final GCSE years weren't all bad. There were two PE lessons a week, and every few weeks the activity would change. For example, 6 weeks of tennis and cross-country running, and then 6 weeks of trampolining and netball.
I remember one of the activities was orienteering in the Clent Hills (spectacular views). I and the majority of my peers enjoyed that because it provided us with an opportunity to be away from school and have an element of freedom.
One activity that I discovered I was actually rather good at was badminton, which I'm still in a state of shock about because I was absolutely hopeless at tennis. More often than not, I'd end up being paired with the PE teacher.
There was also swimming (at a leisure centre), although very little swimming was actually done due to the pool being the kind that has a wave machine, rapids, slides, etc. It worked out rather well for me because that particular lesson was the last one of the day, and so it made sense for those of us who lived local to the leisure centre to make our own way home, as opposed to returning to school. My school was not local to where I lived, so when I had swimming it meant I arrived home about an hour earlier than I normally would.
In hindsight, it would have been ideal if I had been able to pick and choose the physical activities I wanted to do and actually enjoyed.
Amen to that sentiment. I hated PE, but mostly because the 'syllabus' seemed to consist of forty weeks of dreaded football (sometimes last minute change from something more interesting suggested but put to the popular vote) with a couple of slightly more enjoyable things - a week of tennis, an annual 'beep' test where you ran in timed intervals, etc. But almost always, it would be 'lads, shall we just play football?' 'Yes sir!' (said with enthusiasm by the NT vast majority) and two hours of misery commenced. Felt more like four