To believe sports day should be optional?

[SafeHeaven]

Dd is starting to worry about sports day, she hates it every year and always comes last.

She hates all the parents watching her whilst she struggles with the sack etc and always has tears when everyone has finished and she still has a way to go.

Ive asked the school if sports day can be optional as it’s not worth the anxiety leading up to it and the humiliation of it. I’ve been told they have never been asked this before and they will need to discuss it with SLT.

Listening to the radio the other day, many people have bad memories of it.

AIBU to request sports day is optional?

Yes I’m with @sophiasnail - and as others have pointed out, feeling stressed or humiliated at sports day is likely to be turning large numbers of people away from participating in sport as they get older. I would just ensure your child has an appointment OP.

Nothing else at school is optional. What about children who always do badly academically? They don’t get to opt out, and probably feel bad about themselves every day.

This. In life we don't get to opt out of things we don't enjoy. Also, there's value in learning to enjoy the taking part even where you don't stand a chance at winning.

Most schools manage it all really well with team relays to even it out and a few races where its not always the fastest who win (bean bag on your head etc!)

That's a teaching failure, which wouldn't be remedied by having a one-off sports day.

If children are feeling stressed or humiliated either the school or their parents are managing it wrong.

DS is a terrible runner. His sports day was fun anyway.

The worst sorts of 'sports day' aren't 'sports' days anyway, they're 'running races' days, and lots of people suck at that.

But it is relatively easy to organise of course.

If sports days involved a number of sports, and kids could pick or be selected from earlier heats.. OR they could pick to be involved in organisation, refreshments, set up...

I'd be all for that - those who enjoy running can run, those who are good at or enjoy throwing can throw, those who hate every second of sports can still be involved and do something else. Great.

But forcing kids to do things they're awful at or really hate... in front of the whole school. No that doesn't teach anything useful at all. Kids already have to do loads of things they don't like (I mean, GO to school for a start!). Adding 'public spectacle' isn't beneficial.

I wasn't shit at all sports when I was at school - I could ride, I could do archery, I could throw and catch well, I climbed, I skied, I canoed, I swam very well, I dived well...

I could not run. Sports day was.. running day. Thats it, that is all. Nothing else.

So i went through primary and then secondary with a label of 'is bad at sports' - when in fact not only was I not bad at sports I probably did MORE sports activities during evenings and weekends than the fast running kids at school did all bloody year.

Doesn't matter though does it.. because that public humiliation of wheezing in last with a twisted ankle gasssssssping for breath AGAIN in front of 1000 of your peers... that wipes out the value of anything you did out of school when you're somewhere between 5 and 16.

I wouldn't have any problem at all with that, if it is non-competitive. If children are simply encouraged to spend 30 minutes running around the playground at their own pace, or doing an exercise class, swimming or a gym work-out, that's absolutely fine: I wish something like that had been in place at my school. Instead we had compulsory netball and lacrosse which no-one bothered to supervise properly if you weren't in a school team, so we spent around 4 hours a week standing around bored to death doing bugger all.

Because if there is less kids competitng if it was option, it devalues the achievement because there is less competition to win said race.

Seriously? The achievement is greater if everyone in the year group is made to run, including the no-hopers, the dyspraxics etc, than if the race is restricted to sporty types?

Surely all that achieves is that the person who won can say they beat, say, 100 people instead of 20 people. But they and everyone else know that it isn't any greater achievement, because the extra 80 people weren't athletes and were simply there to add to the numbers. We don't value the achievements of Mo Farah any less because there are only 6 people in an Olympic final, after all. Having the entire year group in a race doesn't increase the competition to win it by one iota.

So are you saying me being humilated in front of your peers (whom you spend five days a week with) for every week in juniors when we had to stand up to spell out words or recite the times tables (and failing miserably) is not as bad compared to your child having to compete in the annual sports day?

In my view, that shouldn't happen any more than compulsory sports days should happen. Two wrongs don't make a right. But humiliating children in public for not knowing their times tables or spell is generally accepted as bad teaching practice and certainly never happened in any school my children have attended.

My main concern with opting out is that many of the opting-outers will ultimately be girls, because sport is unfeminine and makes you dirty and sweaty etc. And it would be pretty demoralising and isolating to be a girl who perhaps isn’t very academic but is good at athletics or sports to be competing among very few other girls. And then next year those girls ask to opt out too because they felt conspicuous the previous year as the odd ones out among the boys; and thus inadvertently the school has created a situation where entire school years of girls don’t participate and the idea that sport and exercise is for boys reinforced even further.

As soon as you use the word "snowflake" you demonstrate that you can't put together a respectable argument and you lose.

This is why we need inclusive models of PE and exercise in schools.

My main concern with opting out is that many of the opting-outers will ultimately be girls, because sport is unfeminine and makes you dirty and sweaty etc. And it would be pretty demoralising and isolating to be a girl who perhaps isn’t very academic but is good at athletics or sports to be competing among very few other girls

I think you are talking nonsense here.

Kids who are shit at sports are not there to validate kids who aren't academic.

The kid who owns academic, is not expected to recite 12 x tables in front of the whole school and their mums, dad's and grandparents. It's a crap argiement.

If we made everything that some kids don’t like optional then we’d never do anything.

It is good for kids to stretch themselves- that includes emotionally. They need the resilience to try difficult things and fail without feeling worthless. Constant failure is a part of life. The most well rounded people can have a go, fail and keep going.

Talk to the teacher and see if they can give her some encouragement or at least let her pick her event.

In a way, they do. As soon as a test is given out the kids go round asking each other what they got. They all know everyone else’s score and measure themselves up against each other. It is the same in everything for kids.

Ask any kid and they can tell you exactly what they and each of their class mates is good and bad at. They are much sharper than we think they are.

And it is absolutely girls who will opt out. We ask for volunteers for our Sports Day (secondary) and can never fill the spaces on the girls teams. Some girls end up doing five events because their classmates are too embarrassed. It just means that girls sports ends up being given second class status.

I was forced to do daily sports at school. I have terrible hand eye coordination, I'm not very flexible and was just bullied horribly for my incompetence. It meant I hated sport for years.

In later life I discovered I have a great sense of balance which means I'm a really good skier, I am very strong so am really good at weights and have excellent stamina which means I'm good at long distance running.

If school made sport properly inclusive instead of revisiting the same tired old sports (and my kids are still doing the same sport I did at school 40 years ago), then perhaps you'd instil a lifelong interest in sport.

The current tired approach didn't work when I was at school and it's still not working.

Best post so far

In a way, they do. As soon as a test is given out the kids go round asking each other what they got. They all know everyone else’s score and measure themselves up against each other. It is the same in everything for kids.Ask any kid and they can tell you exactly what they and each of their class mates is good and bad at. They are much sharper than we think they are.

This. Despite teachers efforts to avoid giving kids (and more so parents) a sense of "relative" academic performance, most kids can rank the maths or reading tables in their class from top to bottom immediately, can tell you who is best and worst at drawing/sport/music.

Life is one long performance, and learning to participate and try, without needing the motivation of winning, goes hand in hand with resilience. Its why private schools often have exercises in coping with failure, because its essential to be able to tolerate failure and keep on trying. Great innovators fail again and again and are not knocked down.

Legrandsophie, I do n’t see how making it compulsory would help. The girls are sending you a clear message they do n’t want to play sport, why can’t you accept that ? Why does your opinion they should want to trump their opinion?

Which is a shame because if you can get past the narrow offering of competative sport there is so much fun physical activity out there.

These days sports day is often the only competitive athletic opportunity available at all! Regular PE isnt competitive and neither are most of the sports clubs at most primary schools.

Most of the sporty kids seem to be academically able as well so just more praise for the already lauded.

There's no correlation between sporting ability and academic ability. All areas of attitude should have their opportunity to be celebrated.

The girls are sending you a clear message they do n’t want to play sport, why can’t you accept that ?

Because usually it's not that they dont want to participate in sport. Its that they don't feel comfortable doing so, for various reasons, and it's that aspect people want to change.

I think you’ve misunderstood. It isn’t about “validating” the children who are good at something at the expense of the shit kids, but acknowledging that, for a range of reasons, encouraging and retaining the interest of girls and young women in sport is challenging, and that among those reasons is the lack of positive representation of girls in competitive sport from the youngest of ages, and the gendered notions that even the youngest of girls pick up that girls should be pretty and nicely dressed and clean and that football and running around and getting dirty are boy things. In an opt out system, we’re therefore more likely to see girls opting out en masse than boys - when actually, some of those girls might even be quite good at sport or athletics and aren’t opting out because they’re shit but because they don’t want to be seen by their peers as “the girls who want to act like the boys”, which only serves to further marginalise girls in sport.

Do we assume that a lack of girls going into STEM is purely them sending a clear message that they aren’t interested? Or the lack of women CEOs and CFOs simply because women don’t want to be senior in industries? Or do we acknowledge that there are all kinds of reasons and that a lot of them begin with what little girls pick up very early on about gender roles?

Absolutely agree with the message about girls being the ones that will opt out. And it appears a lot of parents on here are reinforcing the message that if you aren’t competitive or the best at it, then sport isn’t for you. Which really is the opposite message we need to be getting through to children.

I was shit at sports and hated sports day. However the way most schools run sports day now is totally different and very inclusive. PE itself sounds much better too, my DS does yoga! Sometimes in life we have to do things we don't like, hiding kids away from things they don't enjoy all the time is not exactly healthy.

Children know who struggles with which subject at school, they work it out very quickly and every day is an academic child's time to shine.

How is it inclusive? At my kids' secondary school, they play netball, basketball, rounders/softball, track and field. Oh and ping pong. Tennis, swimming, etc.

Exactly what I did at school. No yoga. No non competitive physical activity at all.