School PE lessons, children made to pick teams, disgusting or what

[DistingusedSocialCommentator]

I've just read a thread by an FM here asking if "schools were getting children to choose teams" and FM felt it was "old-fashioned"

Schools bang on about inclusion/fairness/caring/MH well-being, etc etc

FFS (sorry about my language) how the F does a child feel when they are the group of children who are almost the last ones to be picked???

What ruddy clowns at schools still allow this disgusting and ignorant method of choosing teams?? Are you not ruddy aware that this method of choosing teams can and does affect children's MH and can scar them for like

Any teachers here care to comment, or justify this ludicrously pathetic and ancient method of hosing teams??

does it go in your child's school or one you work in? If so, have you pulled up the culprits?

AIBU to believe this method of choosing teams is outdated and harmful to many of our DC?

Tomorrow, I will get on to the papers/radio and tv stations to outlaw this crass method of choosing teams in PE and other settings in schools.

I was always the last but one to be picked for the school team.The popular sporty ones were Captains,allowed to pick their teams.I hated it.I hated it so much,knowing i would be the last resort to my friend,who was overweight,hence being picked last.I imagine she felt absolutely awful.The Captains were never nice either,they didn't want you on their team so give you the worse position and spoke to you like crap the entire time.

I think the problem is that PE teachers, by definition, were the sporty kids in school, and therefore are unlikely to fully understand what it is like to always be picked last.

No, it's not the most traumatising thing in the world that can happen to a child, but when it happens again and again, it does hurt, and it can so easily be avoided if teachers use a different method.

I agree that it's good for children to recognise weaknesses and strengths, but that's not what this is about. When I remember being picked last for PE, it's not the fact that I was bad at PE that hurts (I don't care about that), it's the fact that every single lesson, this weakness - which incidentally was the result of a disability - was essentially rubbed in my face as I stood waiting while every single other child was picked. The worst was when the children would audibly groan when I ended up on their team.

This is another justification that gets trotted out in these discussions: “children need to learn what they’re not good at”.

Oddly enough though there isn’t a single story here from someone who thought they were God’s gift to PE and then was absolutely astonished when they got picked last one day.

Kids who aren’t good at something know they aren’t good at it just from going to those lessons: they don’t need their incompetence showcased in front of everyone else in the class to be aware of it themselves.

It does not traumatise children for life. It does teach them that sport is not for them.
I was always picked last, I suspect I have undiagnosed dyspraxia. I hated it and avoided all sports as an adult as I was terrible at all of them. DP loves sports and taught me to enjoy playing at a fun level even though I am still not any good at sports.
PE should be about encouraging every child to be more active for life. Instead it puts lots of children off sports for life.

And building resilience is bollocks. I knew I was bad at sports. All my classmates knew I was bad which is why I was picked last every single time. I was not brilliant at anything else. Instead I just felt pretty much like a public failure once a week. Until I started faking illness to avoid PE.

There are a million ways you could pick teams without resorting to these kinds of awful strategies. Letters of the alphabet, or just walk down a line of kids saying "a, b, a, b, a, b...."etc. etc.

No team-picking should be allowed in this day and age. This kind of casual cruelty and humiliation would never be tolerated in an adult social club or workplace.

Given how serious an issue sedentary lifestyles are, the absolute last thing we should be doing is making exercise into a miserable experience for kids.

Create a hundred cards with letters of the alphabet on them and keep throwing them up into the air until they land to form a child’s name. Rinse and repeat to get the next team member. Oh and do it to find the name of the kid who will be doing the throwing. Can’t get fairer and less traumatising than that

...or how about the adults who are supposed to be teaching the lesson take a few minutes to plan balanced teams and then tell the children which teams to go and stand in?

You know like in every other subject where teachers have to spend a little bit of time thinking about grouping as part of their teaching style.

Picking teams is lazy and there's far too much poor, lazy teaching of PE that favours those who are good at it and expects those that aren't to "develop resilience" by being ritually humiliated rather than actually attempting to develop and teach them something.

This is a major bugbear of mine, how badly PE is taught in school compared to other subjects.

Those who are shy and unconventional are often the ones not good at sport. This was me. Frankly I (and the rest of us) would have been glad to not get picked and allowed to sit on the sidelines. Sadly sport wasn't optional. On the plus side, dividing the class up into top and bottom sets helped. Those of us in the bottom set had a teacher with an interest in American sports so we covered games like softball. Made a welcome change from the predictable "popular" sports the top sets were doing.

Yes, the teachers picked the leaders

When we pick teams in the playground,
Whatever the game may be,
There's always someone left to.last,
And usually it's me.
I stand there looking hopeful,
Tapping myself on the chest,
But the captains pick the others first
Starting with the best.
I wish for once they'd pick the teams
Starting with the worst.
And then maybe,
A girl like me,
Could end up being first.

Tomorrow, I will get on to the papers/radio and tv stations to outlaw this crass method of choosing teams in PE and other settings in schools.

good luck with that one. I bet they’ll be fascinated.

I agree with you op. Children should not be taught they are shit at sport...they should be encouraged to take physical exercise.
Competetive teams for especially sporty kids could be selecred by the teacher and do their own thing. Non sporty kids could focus on peacticing to improve.
Or here's a thought...very sporty kids could be taught to exhibit true sportmanship and play alongside less able kids once in a while if the teachers selected mixed ability teams.

Practicing*

The whole point of that previous OP that you're referring to, @DistingusedSocialCommentator is that it IS unusual these days. That's why the subject came up. So why are you acting as if it's standard, and planning to rush to the media this morning to stop it happening?

Good grief. What an over reaction and a completely illogical response to a thread about how it DOESN'T generally happen these days.

Exactly. It doesn't happen much these days and rightly so. The idea of ranting to the media is laughable.

The kids themselves are far less inclusive! There’s no holds barred when they choose.

I'd be interested to know how many of the "I was always picked last and it never harmed me" crowd actually still do any exercise?

No wonder we have a generation of snowflakes with zero resilience or emotional strength. Jeez

I was usually last to be picked because I was awful at sports. It's never held me back with anything else.

You're being very OTT.

👍👍👍

By choosing teams the teams end up roughly equal (as each team captain chooses the strongest player)

The random 1,2,1,2 method could end up with very unequal teams where the team with significantly weaker players have no chance.

Just playing devil's advocate

I tend to agree with you that it seems a bit unfair and needlessly embarrassing for the kids that are always chosen last.

However I'm thinking back to my own school days where I was a painfully shy child who will have no doubt been chosen last as I wasn't great at sport and tended to blend into the background, yet I have no recollection of the team choosing process or how it made me feel. So maybe it isn't as awful for kids as we, as adults, would imagine. It may be that it would be a worse feeling to go through as an adult (say at a work activity etc).

Me. And in fact now captain my own local team. Wasn’t a biggie. Often I was academically top of class, no one adjusted the scores to let the (more sporty/less academic) feel less butt hurt.

I was always picked last. I was rubbish at sports, couldn’t hit/catch/throw a ball, and didn’t care enough about PE to make any effort at all. Being picked last didn’t bother me in the slightest.

I was academic and musical, and always had plenty of friends. Maybe if I’d been mediocre at everything, or short of friends, then it would have upset me.

Ironically I’m a runner now, in my 50s. A lot of the sporty kids at school were the “cool” ones, who mostly smoked, so I expect they’re all a lot less sporty than I am now!

I was one of the 'last picked' and am into fitness now, but more individual fitness rather than team sports. I never got into any team sports (much prefer tennis/running etc) which I think stems back to my shyness at school and not really being confident enough to excel in these sports.

Realistically, even if your PE teacher had done 1,2,1,2, you'd have been equally upset by your team then going 'oh, God, why do we have to get her?' And they'd try and swap, one of their friends claiming they were 1 and you were 2 so there wasn't a space for you. With Team 2 then complaining instead.

It's what mean kids do.