High school gym class was interesting for me. I always liked gym class in elementary and middle school. I was never really a gifted athlete, though. I wasn’t the fastest or most skilled, and I certainly wasn’t the biggest. Still, I looked forward to gym class.
My favorite game, ironically, was always dodgeball, where everybody would split into two teams and try to pummel each other with rubber balls. I could dodge okay, but I couldn’t throw. Still, I accepted my small amount of athletic talent and had fun anyway.
But my high school, like many high schools across America, was undergoing a change in the physical education department. They began implementing a program called “Project Adventure,” where instead of playing sports or games, kids would solve puzzles and learn things like how to pitch a tent. Seriously, I’m not joking. This happened in gym class. There was also a shift toward less competitive, non-contact sports, like racquetball. Occasionally, we would get to play a flag football game, but that was about the extent of it.
It’s because of a shift in our society’s way of thinking. Anybody who has seen the movie “Dodgeball,” knows about the instructional video where the bigger kids gang up on the geeky kid with glasses. People view gym class as a place where bullies and jocks thrive and everybody else falls in line.
The answer to this is things like the aforementioned Project Adventure. We don’t want to glorify one kid over somebody else, so parents and school systems decide to level the playing field. The result is the end of competition.
It’s really a glimpse into a national pandemic. We have begun to celebrate mediocrity, especially in the school system. We fill kids with false hope and tell them lies from a very young age. The whole “you can be anything you want when you grow up” idea is just a blatant lie. Some people are simply better at things than other people. And some people are just not cut out for certain types of work. That’s the way of the world.
There are some stupid people out there. And there are some people who stink at sports. Or maybe there is somebody with no musical talent whatsoever. But putting everybody on equal footing doesn’t solve this problem. It only makes it worse. Then you get people who dream of going to the National Football League when they can’t make their high school team. Or people who show up and embarrass themselves on American Idol because nobody had the heart to sit them down and tell them they are terrible singers.
Sports in gym class are a way of doing this. At an early age, a kid should learn his strengths and weaknesses and come to accept them. Yeah, maybe he’ll always get picked last for his team. But life’s not fair. I’d rather have the experience of being picked last than always being the best at everything.
My school also had many award nights for nearly every subject. At award night, bar none, there was always some meaningless award that everybody had to sit through as every kid’s name in the auditorium was called up, so nobody would feel left out. The same thing happened in Little League. Everybody got a participation trophy, even if your sole contribution to the team was keeping the bench nice and toasty for your friends.
What is the point of these? If everybody gets a trophy, if everybody is a winner, then that defeats the point of winning. If we tell everybody that they’re special, then is anybody really special? No, because they’re just as special as everybody else. It’s a paradox, and it represents the world in a false light.
The elimination of dodgeball and other sports from high school is a travesty. Besides the fact that it sucks a lot of the fun out of gym, it also makes kids miss out on an important life lesson.
High school taught me a lot about life. It taught me social skills, it taught me that people were different and it taught me I’m not always going to be the best at everything. Those things are important. Getting hit in the face with a rubber ball may hurt at the time, but in the end it helps a lot more.
Somebody needs to show a kid where their strengths lie. And dodgeball is a form of this. Some kids aren’t great in the classroom, but they might be tremendous athletes. We shouldn’t take that away from them in the name of so-called “fairness.” I know if my strengths were never encouraged, I might not be here at BU. If my school didn’t have a newspaper, and I didn’t have teachers who encouraged my writing, then I might have never pursued it to begin with. Everybody has a niche, something they’re good at and like to do and high school should be about finding what that thing is before the whole college process begins.
Justin Marble, a freshman in the College of Communication, is a weekly columnist for The Daily Free Press. He can be reached at jmar@bu.edu.
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