KIN 305

Tyler Meyer

My Beliefs

Ever since I was able to walk, and probably even a little before then, physical activities,

primarily sports, have been a love of mine. Growing up, they were heavily intertwined into my

life and now as I beginning to learn and understand how much of an importance they are to

living a healthy life. As I continue on into teaching, I hope that I am able to share the wonders

of physical activity with my students are give them the building blocks for living a healthy life.

Of all the school subjects, I feel that physical education may have the highest value to

the students as a whole. While other subjects may be valuable to only certain students who

have a special gift in those areas, physical education is valuable to every single student. The

value of physical education is found in its purpose. That purpose has 2 parts to it, the one that

is most obvious to the naked eye is to make students skilled in a wide variety of physical

actions, but the second and more life-lasting purpose is give the students the building blocks

(skilled movements and health knowledge) to living healthy for the remainder of their lives.

If you look up physical education on the internet or in a dictionary you find very basic

wording that says it’s instruction in physical activity and games. While there is nothing that is

incorrect in that definition I feel that it is lacking things that I would use in my definition of it.

It’s not just about learning sports and different activities, it’s about developing and improving

motor skills and students learning about their own bodies, what they excel at.
 Expectations are one of the ways to help clarify what students should strive for in that

class. My expectation for students is that they give effort in all activities and that over time,

they attempt to improve on the skills we learn in class. Those expectations are also what I will

measure the success of my students because I feel it is unfair to grade a student in terms of

their skill in a sport because that gives unfair advantages to some students. While it can be

claimed that this advantage happens in other subject areas as well, I feel that in physical

education the advantages are much more drastic and present. By this I mean that with other

classes the skill difference between students isn’t as wide because students are constantly

practicing and working on those skills (writing, reading, math) automatically as a part of their

daily life while with physical education there could be a skill that some students never think of

outside of class, so the difference between those students and the highly skilled ones are more

prevalent in physical education. Also in physical education, student skill level is something you

can determine visually instead of having to test them to determine it. These two problems

show that there requires a change in the grading style. In terms of overall goals, not just

expectations, I hope to see improvement in their skills as they practice more and that as they

progress through their schooling they are able to keep these skills. The other key goal of mine

is to have the students fully involved in the class, meaning that those with low skill levels aren’t

discouraged and give up, and that those with high skill aren’t bored and stop trying.

Values that I aim to promote in my program are for the most part consistent with what

you would find in other subjects but the main difference is that the physical activity in physical

education adds a whole new level of interaction. With normal classrooms, the values are

centered around being respectful of others, and developing as a learner. With physical
education, those same values apply but there’s additional values such as developing physical

actions, being a fair-participant in games, and a value for physically active lifestyle. These are

the values that I will be able to verbally show and explain to students but there are other values

that I want to promote that aren’t as obvious to the students. First and for most I want to

promote my faith, obviously in certain school systems this isn’t something that I can do very

openly but I can show that value through my actions. With the value of a physically active life

being something that is in the future for the students, being an example of that will help greatly

to promote that value.