Making kids choose 'teams' for PE - assumed this was an old fashioned thing?

[Devicey]

But told today that it happens every week at DCs primary.

Honestly thought this was something I have just seen on films and assumed wasn't done anymore?

Always similar kids left to the last couple that no one wants on their team.

AIBU or are there far better ways to divide up a class of kids for PE?

Nobodies saying its scarring people for life
But it's unpleasant going through it week after week as a child and hardly instills a love of sport into the child that's always picked last.

For all the people insisting that kids should just "suck it up", I wonder why you are so opposed to making a small change out of kindness? Do you just get a kick out of making kids feel bad?

Just adding myself to the list of people who developed permanently low self esteem from this practice (and the fact that it created a school-approved channel for bullying) and has never been able to get into sport or exercise since.
I'm a successful functioning adult generally so you wouldn't be able to tell, but it has definitely affected me

Cruel?

You need to look up the definition of cruel. I doubt the NSPCC would say letting children pick teams for games/PE is cruel

Well, you could read the posts from people on this thread where they say it has affected them.

Kids are cruel.to each other all the time,otherwise they wouldn't have bullying policies in school
Why are you so against finding an alternative method of children picking teams ?
Would it kill you to do the ,one ,two method ?

@SoupDragon I want the published peer-reviewed studies of the psychological effect on children.

Echoing all those who were affected by it and in fact, complained to my DS’ school when they did the same thing and he was left on the bench for the whole lesson because there was an uneven number. He’s dyspraxic and was never good at team sports but was an excellent swimmer and thrower.

No, it does not teach resilience, it just makes you feel bad.

@Leypt1 has it -

I wonder why you are so opposed to making a small change out of kindness? Do you just get a kick out of making kids feel bad?

Exactly.

1-2-1-2 is quicker than the long dragged out faff of letting the kids pick teams! (apart from the guaranteed three in every class who forget what number they are and the hurried attempts at second-guessing the order and rearranging yourself in the line further down)

Cool
https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7102/11/11/701

https://sportsforschools.org/does-enjoyment-of-pe-lessons-affect-exercise-as-an-adult/#:~:text=According%20to%20recent%20research%2C%20a,lives%20when%20they%20get%20older.

But the onus is on teachers and teacher qualification bodies to make sure that what they're doing it evidence based before they do it

And people shouldn't have to somehow "prove" to you that their emotions are valid

Oh get over your self ,
There are fairer methods, people on here have said they remember how awful.it made them feel ,yes this is anecdotal but so what ,it doesn't mean it didn't make them.feel awful at the time.

Well, where are the published peer-reviewed studies that prove your stance?

Why are you so keen on a nasty way of picking teams that leave so many children feeling miserable about sport when there are many alternatives? Do you like the idea of making children feel miserable?

I'm convinced some teachers do it on purpose for the ego trip of setting kids up against each other. Some of them are worse than the school bullies themselves.

It was the reason I begged my mum to write me a letter every week to get out of PE.
surely we should be encouraging kids to be active and to enjoy being active rather than bashing their confidence and making them dread going to school on PE days?

As an adult I actually enjoy keeping fit and sport, I don’t need to do team sports or compete against people, I can do it at my own pace and set my own goals. School just taught me to fear sport and to hate it. It took me a long time to realise that team sports are just a small part of sport but at school it was pretty much the only part.

This brings back a memory of primary school PE class.

I needed to wear glasses to see things far away. As a kid, I didn't realise that I should wear them for PE. This meant when playing ball-sports, I couldn't see the ball. One day when playing rounders in PE class, I managed to hit the ball. The teacher led the whole class in a slow hand-clap, saying "finalllllllly, Apollonia hit the ball".
About 40 years later I still remember how this made me feel.

We used to get to stand in line in height order, then it was 1, 2, 3, 1,2,3 down the line ( or however many teams)

@Lorac23 I'd read that! Bonus points if some of the sporty bullies were morbidly obese by their early twenties, while their victim was fit and looked great.

Got me on my soapbox now, but here goes:

Based on my experience of PE (late 90s up to late 2000s) - and, it seems, the experiences of many others - the whole system is crap and needs reforming.

Splitting kids into those that are inherently "good" at sport and inherently "bad" from a very young age doesn't improve resilience - it just creates a lasting impression that you are crap at sports and shouldn't bother trying. The many small ways in which this is manifested and enforced, including picking teams, reinforces this by associating sports with deep-seated feelings of humiliation, which are shown to be the type of feelings that stick with people the longest.

This can and does have long-lasting impacts on people's willingness to try new things and work at improvement, i.e. the very opposite of resilience.

There are behavioural studies that demonstrate this phenomenon at work in a range of other contexts. What these studies show is that the most important thing for encouraging ongoing effort is rewarding the behaviour of trying hard and working to get better, not rewarding the characteristic of being "good", which only encourages resting on your laurels.

Weekly public humiliation isn't a "minor disappointment". A minor disappointment that helped me build resilience was twice getting only 99% in the annual spelling test (still the best in ths school by a long way). Now imagine that this spelling test, instead of being once a year, non-competitive, and basically never mentioned again, had been a weekly team event along American spelling bee lines. Imagine that I and the runner up, as the best spellers, got to pick teams. The dyslexic kids would always be chosen last and would be jeered at, with the teacher's encouragement. Imagine how "resilient" those last-picked kids would then feel! There's nothing intrinsically competitive about physical exercise, and there's nothing intrinsically uncompetitive about academic subjects. (A pp mentioned maths; thank God we didn't pick teams for that, as it would have gone about as well for me as PE did. But you get the picture.) Schools would do well to stop using PE as a humiliation tactic / popularity contest.

So many things done past and present in the names of kids' resilience, despite many saying it had the opposite effect. I often think of TV shows where you'll have an old fashioned dad knocking seven bells out of his kids physically or mentally to toughen them up - not sure that helps more than self-belief. The kid who is poor at sport doesn't need a fake medal, but also doesn't need regular humiliation - at least not if resilience/appreciation of sport is the goal.

If I wanted to foster a love of reading, I wouldn't apply team picking for groups in the way it's done for sport. If I wanted to help a kid get to grips with a subject, I wouldn't stick them in a corner with a dunce hat on when they got a question wrong. If I wanted to improve mental health, I wouldn't encourage spreading illnesses that affect the brain.

PE is one (maybe only one) of subjects where kids that are great at a sport done at school can genuinely challenge themselves in school (and those that struggle are kind of ignored). If you're naturally good at other subjects, there is more of a 'waiting', sometimes for years, whilst schools concentrate on ensuring others reach curriculum target level.

This was how teams were always picked when I was at school a very long time ago. I was always one of the last picked, and I can't say it bothered me in the slightest. Until reading this thread I would have assumed it was still done this way.

Team games with players picked at random regardless of skill are pointless. Give the captain the responsibility of picking the best.
Surely Team games are a small part of PE so it matters little.

Team games was all we ever did in PE.
What has being the "best" (in the opinion of another child) got to do with learning about sports and physical activity? The point of a PE lesson is not to win.

You sound like a dick, I really hope you're not a teacher.

I see the peer reviewed studies have shut you up though.

I can’t believe they do that in 2024. I vividly remember it and hated it. Only reason I wasn’t last was I was useless but tall. Zoe and Jayne were always last at primary and secondary (useless and short)

Solidarity with all the 80s kids who hated PE for this reason (and showers and sadistic teachers) who found out later in life that not all exercise is bad!