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Yi Yu

Professor Beadle

English 115

5 October 2017

Could P.E. Classes Only Be Disasters?

Do you remember those athletes who are able to make beautiful and fluent body movements

during Olympics? Its such an enjoyment to watch them doing sports, but taking sports exercise

in classes is not as enjoyable as you think. I was born and raised in China. Back in my country,

P.E. is a required subject for Chinese high school placement test. The P.E. class is considered

monstrous among most Chinese middle school students because of its unusual intensity and the

sense of competitiveness. The fear of taking P.E. classes is also the fear of pain, meaningless

repeating and constant comparison. On the other hand, students value taking P.E. classes once

they have found the one sport that they are good at and succeeded in doing it. Although students

dont really talk about how they value P.E. classes, they would secretly keep those glorious

moments of challenging themselves in their minds. The experience of succeeding in doing

something is crucial to teenagers while they are growing up, especially when it has physical

involved.

Due to limited educational resources, it is mandatory for Chinese students to take a high

school placement test if one wants to go to high school; otherwise you cannot get high school

education. The competitiveness in education is extremely fierce in China, especially for high

schools and colleges. To increase the difficulty of the placement test and set the barriers of

getting a high-level education, government decides to take P.E. scores into account because more

and more students can perform well academically. Two sports are needed for the P.E. exam. The
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required sport is running, and the other one can be chosen from long jump / high jump / shot put

/ rope skipping etc. In the city I used to live in, the P.E. score counts for 7.4% of the high school

placement tests score proportion (the proportion varies among provinces, but nearly the same).

One point lost can be significant to you since you are competing with about one hundred

thousand students living in your city. That is to say, the P.E. exam is as important as an academic

exam.

The most obvious fear that students have for P.E. class is periodically physical pain. I could

vividly remember the physical pain Ive been through to meet the requirements. There were

some horrible days. In order to run for 800 meters in 3 minutes and 40 seconds in the actual P.E.

exam, I needed to run for 2km every P.E. class, two times a week. I am not going to make it

was the sentence I repeated to myself every time our coach blew that whistle. Still I stayed and

ran for I didnt want to fail the exam. After running 2km for the first time, I could barely breathe

and stand. The next morning, I woke up in extreme pain, my thighs trembling. Like the physical

pain we needed to suffer every week, academic evaluations--the most crucial part of school life--

were also periodic. Once a week or once a month, we would need to take a quiz or a midterm

exam on different curriculums. Preparing for academic evaluations once in a while was like

doing physical training every week. We panicked when the academic preparation work

approached us, being intimidated by its amount and difficulty level, just like how we were

intimidated by the upcoming physical pain in the P.E. classes.

And sometimes, even though students have reached the standard, our government is very

likely to raise it. This change clearly aims at setting higher barriers for middle school students to

enter high school. Students previous endeavors in training may probably turn out to be nothing.

Your P.E. teacher will only ask you to do more and never get satisfied by your current
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achievement. And for the next several months, students would need to start all over again to meet

the new requirements. This is our collective fear projection: that we will be consumed.

(Klosterman, 42) We fear to be consumed by the process of meeting endless new standards and

what we are told to do when we were still in middle school. We are afraid of the consequences of

not exploring ourselves because we are ultimately vulnerable to our fates (Toro and Hogan,

38). It seems that we will all turn out to be the replica of one another if we do nothing but keep

meeting governments standards. Our self-recognition will be so low after graduating from

middle school for all we did in middle school was to know the standards and try to reach the

standards. We have become so numb of what we learn and what is happening.

Another fear we have for the P.E. class was to train with other students. For those students

who did not do well in sports, training with others could be so depressing. Although some

teachers believed that competing with each other might help us improve faster, this idea does not

apply to all students. Especially for those who are falling behind, comparing only robs their

confidence. Comparing with other students could be a disaster when you dont possess enough

confidence in yourself. As a matter of fact, it is one of the most dangerous ways to get you into

depression and anxiety. Thinking in a way that you are not good enough like everyone else can

stop you from accepting and finding who you are. The hardest part is to admit that you are not as

good as others although youve tried. To make things worse, if others better students laugh at

their clumsiness, it would be extra hard for them to recover from self-hating. Those students

couldnt just ignore the depressing feelings and cheered up to train because the truth is, they

couldnt. In fact, they had to deal with these emotional breakdowns using much more time than

they dealt with the physical pain. These feelings actually reflect emotions a lot of Chinese
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students going through in middle school, not just those who do not do well in P.E. class--

frustration of falling behind and anxiety of being judged by other students or adults.

Regardless of how stressing a P.E. class looks like, the value it brings is also essential to

Chinese middle school students, yet it is not usually mentioned in students conversations. In

fact, doing sports is one of the few things in life through which you can actually witness the

change of yourself in such a short time if you practice enough. Your body and muscles will react

to your practice quickly. One nice example for comparison would be writing. You may not

notice your improvements until youve written essays for several weeks. As the change in doing

sports can be so quickly seen, it actually encourages you to put more energy in practicing and

even to discover what you are good at doing. Once you found it and get a good score on it, the

painful progress of achieving the goal is almost unforgettable. Sometime in the future, when you

encounter challenges, those moments will remind to keep going.

In conclusion, our fear of taking P.E. classes reflects our fear of pain, doing what we are told

endlessly and comparing to each other. I admit, it is really hard to stop comparing our scores to

other students; more specifically, to treat those better students who are more successful than us

with a normal heart. There is a process we all have to go through before we can handle that

feeling. It is going to be a journey full of challenges and depressing moments. But once youve

found your own voice within all the noises the crowd has imposed you, you will see how to deal

with these anxieties. Its not an easy job, not at all. As college students, there are going to be

more moments filled with anxiety and struggles. Like whats said in the animate film The Lion

King, At the way I see it, you either run from it or learn from in. So what are you going to do,

fellows? I say we face our own shortages no matter what, and well figure out our own way to do

the job eventually.

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Works Cited

Klosterman, Chuck. My Zombie, Myself: Why Modern Life Feels Rather Unread. Monsters, A

Bedford Spotlight Reader, edited by Andrew J. Hoffman, A Macmillan Education Imprint,

2017, pp. 42

Toro, Guillermo del and Hogan, Chuck. Why Vampires Never Die. Monsters, A Bedford

Spotlight Reader, edited by Andrew J. Hoffman, A Macmillan Education Imprint, 2017,

pp. 36-38

The Lion King, directed by Rogger Allers and Rob Minkoff, performances by Matthew

Broderick, Jeremy Irons, James Earl Jones and Robert Guillaume, Disney, 1994