Yes, but…

I found this chapter to be an interesting reminder of my own misconceptions. The idea of covering the content is something that I am challenged with throughout the year. I feel I cover content pretty well especially when considering the challenges elementary PE teachers face. For instance, instead of just focusing on the content for each grade level, I tend to overlap the grades so that students can review what they learned the previous year and continue from that point. I also do that because we have two other teachers at my school that may not have covered that area which makes a review very necessary before progressing to the next level. Because of over lapping lessons, I feel like I’m teaching twice the amount. I do notice that it is necessary though because when I discuss basic topics that they should have learned years ago, they just don’t remember, never understood it, or they were never even taught it. If I was the only teacher I would know what was accomplished and know where to continue.

In addition to this obstacle, time is always an issue. This year we had a problem with students being pulled out of PE for music. This is an issue because in the state of New Jersey, students must receive 150 minutes of health and PE instruction per week. They are currently only receiving 80 minutes per week of PE on a good week. At the same time, I learned this year how strict NJASK testing was for the examiners. Our faculty had to be certified to be examiners and was given a booklet of rules to follow that seemed very strict and caused a lot of stress for many teachers, especially since there was a teacher in the district who was sued for something very technical. The state actually came in to observe the test administration. It amazes me that this is taken so seriously but state mandates are not.

Other obstacles come into play that take away from the state mandate such as band and instrumental lessons, special services, GT, assemblies etc. This is without mentioning the days that students are not feeling well enough to participate in physical activity, they are just not prepared, or the gym is not clean in time after lunch. This makes our challenge worse because time is even less than expected. It just seems that these inconveniences are not taken into consideration. This causes frustration when you feel like you have to cover everything and only if you do cover everything you are doing your job. I definitely related to this because sometimes I feel like the more I cover the better. I notice, at times, I sometimes don’t take in the consideration of students understanding as much as focusing on the teaching, lack of time, and the need to move on to the next unit. I feel we are trained to believe more is better. This year we had a specialist come in and teach one lesson in a discipline with no additional lessons. Not much can be gained from one lesson. That is like spending one day learning addition in math. It looks good on paper that we are covering new and different areas throughout the year yet we are failing to “emphasize depth versus superficial coverage” and focus on “conceptual understanding” (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005). The conclusion I came to was to focus on big ideas which will overlap content and core standards creating transfer to other areas. In the end this will provide deeper understanding of the big ideas and cover a broad area within the limited time that is given.