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AIBU to believe this method of choosing teams is outdated and harmful to many of our DC?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

After being vilified for being shit at sport every week at school I went on to do regular aerobics, swimming, skiing and cycling. At nearly 62 years old I do two sessions a week with a personal trainer.
All school sports taught me is that team sports can be full of vicious losers who think being accidentally good at something makes them special.
I enjoy physical activity despite school, not because of it.

As an adult who can think rationally of course not but as 8 year old who is picked last every week,it's not going to help their self esteem particularly if they don't have any other areas of being exceptional.

And?
I m 50.this was done when I was at primary school.it was horrible then and it's horrible now if your the kid that's always picked last
We all.survived being made to write" lines" too it doesn't mean it was in anyway a good teaching method.

Some kids are not good at anything they already know that they don't need the added. humiliation of being picked last every week.

@TowerofsongBut recognising one's limitations is nothing to do with anyone's innate worth as a human being, or their capability in other areas. We all have strengths and weaknesses and I don't think it should harm us to recognise those.

I could recognise my limitations in PE as a child without the weekly ritual of being picked last in front of everyone - any child who is not great at sport is well aware of that already - just as a child who scores 10% in a test does not need their teacher to line the class up in rank order in order for that child to “recognise their limitations” in that subject.

I do exercise, eg weights, gym, walking, yoga, badminton. As a kid I liked cycling, rollerskating, ice skating and trampolining. I hated anything that involved standing around a field shivering in shorts and a t-shirt in cold weather. And developed a particular dislike of hockey sticks aimed at my shins.

I don't really do team sports and I guess that's because I learned early not to to trust group dynamics, as you could be spat out as quickly as you were invited to join in. Either for not being good enough, or for being too good. Or just because someone in the group woke up in a bad mood. I think that was also a useful life lesson.

This is all valid and it wasn't much fun back in the 1970s. I just don't know that it needs the absolute fury and media storm as per the OP .

I don’t know that it needs the media storm either. I just find it crazy that OP is saying “should teachers stop doing this thing that clearly really upsets a significant number of kids, has no apparent benefit, and is very easily avoided?” and people are saying “No! Kids NEED to feel rubbish!”

To add a bit more clarity re my own situation - I was ok in primary, cant recall much, ok in junior school and ok the first 2/3 years at high school - it all started when my indigenous ex mates turned on me because of the NF

I left/retired early in my early 50's and now over 60 but below retirement age.

Being last all of the time does impact some children and possibly especially one they are about 6 years old or over. Teachers should be aware of this. Its not nice and its not clever

Thankfully at work, as we had so many training sessions and a couple of team buildings a year - the manager or the person doing the training did the splits into teams. At times, they did nominate a leader of the team as the senior workers/managers and they chose the rest, which is ok by me

Thos that do not see my point and confirmed by many others here. Hopefully, your cchild, GC or great GC never has to go through the trauma of being picked last because of what they looked like, wore specs, had a speech impediment/diability, or weight/religio/culture/language etc or behaviour was slightly different to others.

Children will not often tell their parents/step-parents/guardians/etc/etc/etc, but it does stick in their minds

The tv show, The Apprentice. That reminds me of work and our team meetings. The meetings at times were vicious. I hated chairing as we all had to take it in turns and some would try to take advantage and try to fuck up my team chair position. I was polite and assertive as I was not going back to the school days. This was made easier by a supportive manager and 2 good co-workers mates,
One of these work friends did not watch The Apprentice as it reminded them too much about work.

Back to schools - if there are any schools, please let me know where ie town, county is all i need to build up a picture and then I will go to the media. Message me in confidence but to be clear, I do NOT want the name of the school and location other than town/area or county.

I will try and bring this thread back up during shcool hols or weekend when teachers are free and possibly let us know whats it like in their place of work

Hopefully, some reading this are teachers or have teachers as family and can tell them about this

*I attended school decades ago, and this was always the way it was done.

We all survived.*

Just because we survived doesn't mean that there aren't better ways. We also survived corporal punishment in schools, dunces caps, being made to stand in the corner facing the wall, doing lines etc. It doesn't mean that we shouldn't move on from methods that are now outdated and have the potential to do harm to mental health.

Much better to for the teacher to sort teams, or to just do the '1,2,1,2' method. Might not be perfect, but it's certainly a damn sight better.

I think there is a big difference between not being good at team sports, and being absolutely shit at any physical activity that involved any co-ordination.
Not being the best at netball is fine. Never being able to throw or catch a ball is a lesson in humiliation.
And the stereotypes are insane on this thread. The assumption that everyone who is shit at sports is great academically. When we all know children who are terrible at sports and do not shine at anything.

The problem is that you're addressing a situation that reveals a symptom, not the underlying problem.
Children know whether they're shit at sports without the measure of when they're picked for teams. They'll know whether they're popular or not in a hundred other ways outside of being picked in PE lessons.
Even if the teacher organises random teams, kids will see the look on the better players faces when they're sent to their team, or the sighing, or the swearing under their breath.
You don't solve the problem of popularity or talent and their impact on self-esteem by removing one superficial indicator of it.
Again, you'd be addressing a symptom, not the problem - which you address by supporting children to appreciate and develop their own qualities, and manage other kids to do so too.

@PietariKontio children also know if they are good or bad at academics. So should we do the old fashioned thing of sitting children in chairs 1 to 30 with the smartest child on seat 1, etc. Some schools used to do this, and moved where children sat if their schoolwork got worse or improved.
Or maybe adults should not try and humiliate children?

You don't solve the problem of popularity or talent and their impact on self-esteem by removing one superficial indicator of it

True, but at least you're not rubbing their noses in it. Team selection by team leaders can be really humiliating. Kids know if they are popular, good at sports, academic etc, but they don't need it to be reinforced in a slow and humiliating way in full view.

I guess what I should have said was, were you put off from exercise for a couple of decades and then finally discovered you weren't as crap at it as school had made you believe (my own path!)

I currently coach a non team sport and where we make teams for an activity I do 1,2, 1,2.
Sometimes I'll throw in a 1,1,2,2 if they're looking unbalanced 😱

Nah, I was just a super lazy nerd for the first two decades of my life 😁

Well said!!

I teach science; when I hand back test papers the kids inevitably start asking each other what they got. I tell them the only mark that matters is their own, but I ultimately I can’t stop them comparing marks.

What I don’t do is make a public show of making sure everyone knows where everyone else ranks in the class - and I’m pretty sure I’d be (rightly) fielding complaints left right and centre if I did.

This!

But also, even if you are academic:
a) academic subjects are far less “public” than sporty ones: it’s much less obvious if you’re struggling with a long division problem than it is if you’re bad at sport
b) being academic doesn’t have the same social cachet as being sporty. Think of all the derogatory names for academic kids (nerd, geek, boffin, spod…) - can you think of any for sporty kids?

Thos that do not see my point and confirmed by many others here. Hopefully, your cchild, GC or great GC never has to go through the trauma of being picked last because of what they looked like, wore specs, had a speech impediment/diability, or weight/religio/culture/language etc or behaviour was slightly different to others.

Presumably a lot of posters who don’t see your point would be only too happy for their child to be picked last, because resilience…

I don't doubt that my DC will frequently be picked last, their genetics are not in their favour. I think describing that as a "trauma" is ridiculous and insulting to those who have experienced actual trauma. It's uncomfortable, unpleasant maybe even upsetting. I hope I will be able to help my DC see that it's also not the end of the world, and that there were other parts of the day that went well.

Do people saying it’s no big deal and now I’m an adult I do lots of sporty things etc really think the only reason someone isn’t picked and is always last is simply because they’re not sporty?

I’m one of those who was always among the last to be picked for sports teams. No one told us this would destroy our mental health, so we just got on with it. I had other friends and was good at other subjects.

The unspoken lesson was that you had to cope with disappointments, because life sometimes throws them at you, and at most people. Coping with difficulties and solving problems strengthens you. Nursing a grievance weakens you.

I think I the word trauma is overused.

I'm raising a child with developmental trauma.

My siblings and I were put into care and separated. Then the homes we were in abused us. That was trauma.

I get that being picked last sucks. I struggle to call it traumatic though.

Being beat up everyday is traumatic by kids at school. That's trauma.

The fact you were kicked and punched randomly sounds traumatic. Bullying sounds like the core issue here. Not being picked last.

But what so few people seem to be understanding here is that this practice is entirely unnecessary and completely avoidable.

Bad things happen to the families of the children I teach: there is absolutely nothing I can do about it. They have three GCSEs in one day: nothing I can do about it. They don’t like the fact they’re not allowed to wear hoodies at school: nothing I can do about it.

But if a significant number of children found a method I used for sorting them into teams upsetting, I’d just stop doing it. (Or, actually, I’d have enough empathy not to start doing it in the first place.)

It’s not the scale of the damage that’s the issue here, for me, it’s the fact that it absolutely does not need to happen at all.

LOL. We always did this at school, and as I'm not sporty, I was always last to get picked.

Guess what, it didn't affect my MH and I wasn't scarred for life.

Not everyone is a snowflake!!