by:  Tamar Gelber

Gross, sticky, sweaty, and very, very annoyed.  Many of us have experienced these feelings at one time or another, but for many students these are reoccurring feelings after gym class.  Gym Class, or Physical Education, at Westborough High School should not be a required half year course every year but instead be optional.

Gym class supposedly consists of 56 minutes of physical exercise every day.  This is highly untrue as most students know.  The first 10 minutes are used to change into day-old gym clothes and take attendance and the last 10 minutes of class are used to change back into our street clothes, which are now going to become sweaty and smelly because we do not have time for showers.  So in total a gym class consists of 36 minutes of physical exercise, tops. According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, children and adolescents need at least 60 minutes of physical activity every day.  A period at our school doesn’t even contain that time, add to that, that a gym class is usually only 36 minutes of actual time in the gym or outside, and gym becomes completely pointless.  Without even the potential and ability to get the needed amount of exercise in a gym period, all the motivation I might have had to actually exercise has evaporated.

As many students in the Fine Arts Department know, although taking a music elective such as band, chorus, or orchestra is extremely fun and fulfilling, it can also be slightly frustrating because it’s a year-long class that does not get weighted into our GPAs.  For many of us music is our passion, and we hope to either continue using it, or pursuing it as a career in the future (which makes up for it being an unweighted class.)  Many people, not only are not at all passionate about physical education, but also either participate in after school sports, go to the gym several times a week, or take alternative exercise classes such as yoga or dance.  So not only are students doing exercise outside of school for the appropriate amount of time teens should be exercising, but P.E. also uses another half semester credit that does not get weighed into our GPAs and doesn’t allow us to take the courses we are actually interested in.  Personally, I was not able to take an elective until sophomore year because of my schedule (that included orchestra) and from then on I could only take one elective a year.

If P.E. was not a requirement every year then I would have been able to take 3 more electives or 4 more full-year classes in my high school career.  This could have made a huge difference on my transcript.  Colleges would have been able to see how many more classes I was taking and I could have potentially upped my GPA.  More importantly, I would have learned so much more.  Instead of taking just one journalism class, I would have been able to take 2 or maybe 3 as well as other electives that had interested me.  The Physical Education course at Westborough High School inhibits our education because it allows us one less course a year that we could have taken and more seriously, it really doesn’t teach us anything.  An unhealthy student that is forced to go to P.E. class for 5 months, once a day, for 36 minutes will not be affected in the slightest.  They will not become healthier or go through some giant revelation about exercise.  This is high school, things like that don’t happen in P.E. class.  The only people who I’ve ever known to wholeheartedly enjoy gym class are the extremely athletic students that take the intensive gym class with Mr. Reed, where he gives them one on one coaching and they are able to run on the treadmills and use the weights.

Physical Education should not be a required course at Westborough High School.  We are not given enough time in class to make the exercise worth anything when only 64% of our 56 minutes of class are used for exercise. P.E. also takes away potential elective choices or full-year classes that could have been taken to increase knowledge and have a more impressive transcript.  Lastly, most students are involved in outside activities that include some sort of exercise at least several times a week.  Physical Education should not be a mandated course at Westborough High School, and should instead be optional—for those 3 kids out of 1000 who actually enjoy it.