Physical Education

Pete Rose will go from jail to gymnasium in January when he comes home to finish his sentence for cheating on his taxes. Educators are planning for Rose to help teach physical education and health at five inner-city elementary schools designated by a federal judge. Rose will become a teaching assistant when he's released from a federal prison camp in Illinois on Jan. 7 to start performing 1,000 hours of community service.

Every week, seemingly every fall, it's the same. "I'm extremely impressed with their speed, their athletic ability on both sides of the ball, their big-play potential," says Michigan Coach Lloyd Carr. But it could just as well be the coach of any UCLA opponent. Speed. Athletic ability. Big-play potential. Agile, mobile, but not hostile. Toughness? Physical ability? You never hear it, and the Bruins are beginning to take it personally, as though it's a challenge to their manhood.

Missing from the schedule of many students this year is one class that used to be a given: physical education. From North Carolina to Hawaii, gym classes have been squeezed out of the school day -- a trend that parallels a national increase in childhood obesity. In 1991, 4 in 10 high school students took daily PE classes; 10 years later, barely a third did. In 1980, just 5% of school-age children were severely overweight; 20 years later, the number had jumped to 15%.

Physical education class has long suffered from an image problem. Children often deem jumping jacks and chin-ups boring or goofy; parents wonder if the time would be better spent on reading skills. But a new study makes a strong case that physical education may be the single best strategy for curbing the nation's growing child obesity problem -- at least among girls. In the first study to evaluate the effect of P.E.

Leon Wood, an All-American, a first-round National Basketball Assn. draft choice and a 1984 Olympian, is generally acknowledged as the best basketball player Cal State Fullerton has produced. He also is 1 of only 3 basketball players recruited by George McQuarn in his 8 years as coach to have graduated. Wood transferred to Fullerton after playing his freshman season at Arizona. After sitting out a season, he played for the Titans from the 1981-82 season through 1983-84.

In theory, choosing after-school activities for children should be fun and easy, but parents say it's hard to know how structured a child's time off should be, and just what sorts of programs are most worth while. One thing is clear: Since tight-budgeted schools have greatly reduced the number of physical education and arts classes they offer, moms and dads are increasingly using after-school hours to provide youngsters with opportunities to explore new interests or develop special talents.

They're pumping up in the Shorecrest weight room, practicing leaps in the dance studio, shooting baskets in the gym. Sound like a fancy new athletic club? No. It's the latest in physical education offerings at a suburban Seattle high school. By all accounts, America's children are in worse shape physically than their counterparts a decade ago.

Give kids a break, doctors said Monday - or you might find that they have trouble paying attention in the classroom. In a policy statement released on Monday by the American Academy of Pediatrics' Council on School Health, pediatricians urged schools to maintain regularly scheduled recess, arguing that it offered academic, social and physical benefits for children of all ages, from elementary school kids to adolescents. Even as increased pressure to raise standardized test scores has pushed schools to consider cutting recess, the personal time for kids shouldn't be curbed to make more time for classroom study, they added, noting that, “Ironically, minimizing or eliminating recess may be counterproductive to academic achievement.” For similar reasons, withholding recess also should not be used as a means of punishment, they said.

Let's say you are the type of student in high school who loves physical education. It's your favorite class. You run to P.E. Despite this making you a minority on the planet Teenville, you also love the uniforms. Love running around the track, vaulting hurdles, swimming laps, sweating through . . . ahhh, there. There's that one thing about P.E. you probably hate, like every teenager before and after you: the dreaded communal shower in the locker room. Some things about P.E. never change.

Physical education may be disappearing from some schools, but a study finds that kids who engage in sports or physical activity may do better academically. Researchers analyzed 14 studies (most from the U.S.) looking at the relationship between exercise and school performance. Of those, 10 were based on observation, four used interventions. The number of participants, aged 6 to 18, ranged from 53 to about 12,000. The study was released Monday in the journal Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine . Although some of the studies were inconsistent in discovering a link between being more active and better academic performance, other papers did find evidence.