OPINION: The sport curriculum needs to change; NOW!

I am not the first to say that the sport curriculum is flawed and broken, but I do believe that I bring a new, stronger argument that hasn’t been really talked about previously, at least not at JFKS. (Note: I am a not particularly athletic kinda short 8th grade Boy and this is just my subjective view on the topic) But first I will run you through on what arguments I have. At the end I am also going to present some options on how some of the issues that I am trying to address are fixable. 

1. The way that sport is graded is awful, since boys are held to higher standards than girls are. Additionally people that have shorter legs are also disproportionately graded, and it really doesn’t take a genius to figure out that a person with longer legs is going to more easily be able to run faster, jump farther, and swim faster than a ‘short’ person;
2. Sport class can very much be seen as exclusionary against ‘short’ people, as tall people have an advantage in almost every type of sport, such as: basketball, high jump, running, and soccer just to name a few, which makes sport class, even when we’re playing games not particularly fun for me, and why should we play ‘Games’ if not everyone can enjoy them;
3. The way that teams in Sport class are chosen could very well be seen as singling certain people out, since it is always the same people who get picked first and the not so athletic folks always, every single time get chosen last. (Btw. I do not believe that this is the fault of any students that are the choosers and I’ll come to that) This of course, as I am sure anybody who has been in this sort of situation, is quite humiliating and socially degrading. The thing is that this is not like grades, which could be viewed quite similarly, but the big difference is that grades are secret. (To which extent this is true is a whole ‘nother debate but that’s not important now) With this, however, everyone, if they want to or not, knows who the athletic people are and who the not ‘sporty’ people are. 
4. One of the reasons we even have sport as a class is that exercise helps with learning and your mental state in general, which the curriculum also expresses in the following quote: “Damit leistet Sportunterricht einen nicht austauschbaren Beitrag zur ganzheitlichen Bildung und Erziehung der Schülerinnen und Schüler. [...] Insbesondere fördert der Sportunterricht die körperliche und motorische sowie – damit eng verknüpft – die psychische und soziale Entwicklung der Kinder und Jugendlichen.”  Now this is not a fact that I’ll be trying to argue, since it is scientifically proven to be true, however if that was really what they wanted to achieve with sport class, then it would not need to be graded, and we wouldn’t do things like throwing, since no one really gets exercised through that. I don’t think that even I have sweated a single drop during activities such as throwing.
5. In my experience sport class could also be seen as quite sexist, as the girls usually do gymnastics and dancing and boys usually do soccer and basketball. I find this to be incredibly problematic as I, as a boy would like to do some dancing or gymnastics in sport class and not just always have to play soccer. Now I can see why they did this, as these are stereotypically the activities that girls and boys like to do, and this makes purely logistically easier. Yet, in my opinion, a strong argument against this, is that people who are in 11th and 12th grade get to choose, which sport they want to do so why aren’t we allowed to do the same. Also getting a bit more diversity of activities can’t be that hard. 

To be honest there are a lot of other arguments but I hope I managed to capture my main gripes. A possible solution for this is always having the teacher choose the teams, but then the teams most likely wouldn’t be fair. The main thing to take away from this is that we need change and we need it now!” (None of the opinions expressed are those of the JFKS nor the entire MR team)