What’s Wrong With Dodgeball?

But the debate has rocked the community of dodgeball scholars right to its foundations. While plenty of educators still believe dodgeball is a harmless exhibition of physical prowess and cunning, not to mention fun, the sport’s naysayers have banded together with the moral fervor of the Abolitionists. Already, their movement has succeeded in having dodgeball banned in school districts in at least eight states.

In the JOPERD symposium, Jeff Byrd, a graduate student at Delta State University, urged that the “chance for injury is too great.” Robert Kraft, a University of Delaware professor, worried that even with today’s “nerf or foam balls that are often used for safety, . . . the intent remains — to hit another person with an object.” David Kahan, an assistant professor in the Department of Exercise and Nutritional Sciences at San Diego State University, employed no empirical data to denigrate dodgeball, but he did offer that his wife “dreaded dodgeball days in physical education class because she couldn’t throw and was almost always the victim of a hard-thrown ball.” Kahan found dodgeball guilty of “leaving a lone winner amid a multitude of losers” while providing “coeducational inequity, high risk for injury, and wounded psyches.”

While the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission keeps no data on wounded psyches, it does catalog just about every other sort of injury. Despite the protestations of assistant professors from third-tier universities, dodgeball’s injury rate is lower than that of nearly any other sport. In 1999, the CPSC’s national estimate for dodgeball injuries, none of which required hospitalization, was 2,926 — about the same as caused by electric corn poppers and considerably fewer than caused by key chains. As for comparable sports, bowling had 8 times as many injuries as dodgeball, golf had 16 times as many injuries, and inline skating (a non-combative, non-competitive staple of P.E. programs designed by forward-thinking educationists) produced 33 times as many injuries. According to the CPSC numbers, watching “murderball” (as detractors deem it) could be more dangerous than playing it, since bleachers cause 8 times as many injuries as the game itself.

An academic debate, of course, is no place for hard evidence. So among flame-fanning alarmists, dodgeball and, more important, the dodgeball ethos — which prizes competitiveness, and starkly delineates a winner while eliminating losers — is the greatest threat to our children since Alar-lacquered apples. Even though most now play the game with a spongy gator-skin ball, school districts are wary.

A few years ago, New York filmmaker Art Jones jokingly made a faux-documentary entitled Dodgeball, in which his characters recounted their gym-class horror stories. “I saw the best minds of my generation lost to that game,” said one. But proving once again that it is nearly impossible to parody the education establishment, a Michigan physical education association in 1997 released a no-joke documentary, No More Dodgeball: A New Beginning. In the film, overweight teachers recover painful gym-class memories, as a reenactment flashes of a 1950s-style gym teacher making children perform unspeakable tasks like pushups, situps, and jumping jacks before he informs them with blood-curdling severity, “Okay boys and girls, today we’re gonna play a game called dodgeball.” From there, it is all movie-of-the-week music swells, moist-eyed testimonials, and oblique-angled montages of pink, milk-fed children getting doinked with red rubber balls.

If one were forced to pick the single person most responsible for the anti-dodgeball hysteria it would be Neil Williams, a professor in the Department of Health and Physical Education at Eastern Connecticut State University. In the early ’90s, Williams authored the first of a series of articles for JOPERD in which he set up the “Physical Education Hall of Shame.” These articles masqueraded as scholarship — his references ranged from “Dear Abby” columns to JOPERD articles like “Pre-meditated Murder: Let’s bump off killer ball” — but they read like the rants of a man who had suffered too many gym-class headshots.

In his series, Williams vilified not only dodgeball, but any game he deemed antithetical to good physical education teaching. These included games that “are patently dangerous, have minimal participation by the majority of students, have limited physical activity, require little . . . pedagogical skill to teach . . . or single students out for potential embarrassment.” Dodgeball, he reasoned, “may have done our profession more harm than any other single factor.” In Williams’s telling, the game Duck, Duck, Goose sounds like Chinese water torture: “Children are forced to sit still while having their heads ‘tapped.'” Kickball puts “the batter on display for embarrassment in front of all of the rest of the class.” Failing to find a seat during Musical Chairs is the equivalent of being “embarrassed and punished.” Steal the Bacon is reminiscent of a “Roman gladiator contest,” and Simon Says employs “teacher deception.”

More important, said Williams, the sports curriculum that has served as the backbone of our country’s physical education system (basketball, soccer, volleyball, etc.) caters mostly to athletes, when as adults more people end up participating in what educators call “lifetime physical activities” than in team sports. Citing a National Sporting Goods Association list of the top 14 sport-oriented leisure activities, Williams indicted our schools for not taking into account pursuits such as fishing, dart-throwing, and motor-boating.

Dart-throwing and motor-boating? To produce physically fit kids? When I ask Williams if he can possibly be serious, he squirms. “I know a lot of the activities that adults do happen to coincide with drinking beer,” he admits. But he says he wanted to cite the complete NGSA list. Williams takes his own classes of aspiring P.E. teachers on exotic non-competitive excursions like “walking through a river.” Apparently they love it. He was just named Eastern Connecticut State’s “distinguished faculty member of the year.” For that matter, with the recent resurgence of dodgeball publicity, he is perhaps the only JOPERD contributor to have been on the Today show — twice in the last month.

At first blush, the entire dodgeball skirmish might seem a mere footnote to the larger story, the Wussification of America. Ours is becoming a childproofed nation, where playgrounds have been shut down because of sharp-edged jungle gyms, where legislatures pass anti-bullying measures, where students are no longer sent home with suspension notices, but are sent instead to peer mediation and conflict resolution classes. It’s a place where — as a friend who coaches his son’s t-ball team reports from Arlington, Virginia — “All players bat every inning, nobody who’s thrown out has to leave the bases, no score is kept, nobody loses, and everybody gets a trophy.”

But Neil Williams and his ilk aren’t simply a late-innings curiosity, a paragraph or two in a News-of-the-Weird round-up. They are the future. For no longer is it sufficient for our mollycoddled children, raised like hothouse orchids, to attend school for mere academic instruction. They must also learn how to salve their self-esteem, to stay with the group in cooperative learning, to set the bar low, then throw themselves a party for clearing it. Nowhere will they learn this more effectively than in the New P.E.

From the beginning, different cultures have employed physical education for aims beyond pure health. In ancient Greece, the war-mongering Spartans used physical instruction to help them withstand the rigors of military life, while the Athenians emphasized not only physical well-being, but the body beautiful, conducting their gymnastic sessions in the nude (unthinkable in the New P.E., where showering may be an affront to a child’s dignity).

By the mid-twentieth century, Americans not only had copped the British system of teaching motor skills and fitness through competitive sports, but also saw physical education as a chance to perpetuate the Brits’ towel-snapping vigor. As John F. Kennedy said in 1962, in language that today would see him impeached, “There is nothing, I think, more unfortunate than to have soft, chubby, fat-looking children who go to watch their school play basketball every Saturday and regard that as their week’s exercise.” Just a few years before, the President’s Council on Youth Fitness had been created to encourage kids to stay fit in the event Communists needed to be killed. It also sought to impart intangible benefits — that oddly enough did not include the enhancement of self-esteem.

The Physical Education Handbook, a ’50s-era text, praised competitive sports for instilling sportsmanship, which the authors defined as “being humble in victory and gracious in defeat.” Sports should teach the participant to “take hard knocks,” to “subdue emotional outbursts for the good of the common cause,” and to “adapt himself to constantly changing conditions of the game, just as he must in the game of life.” “In real life,” say the authors, “not all gain first place, not all win first prize, not all receive the acclaim and renown of the hero. So it is that sports are an ideal laboratory for education for living.”

This quaint notion was generally subscribed to by the underemployed football coach-types who often doubled as the P.E. teachers of yore. But over the last several decades, master’s degree-holding P.E. teachers have become an avowedly sensitive lot, mindful that their status in the education hierarchy rests somewhere above the shop teacher’s and below the cafeteria lady’s. As Virginia Tech’s George Graham, who crystallized much New P.E. theory in the late ’80s, quoted Woody Allen as saying, “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. Those who can’t teach, teach physical education.”

To correct this perception, academics launched an image overhaul in the mid 1960s. They started by doing what academics do best — making the simple complex. As outlined in the textbook Foundations of Physical Education and Sport, an academic named Franklin Henry sounded a clarion in 1964 for the “organization and study of the academic discipline herein called physical education.” From there, it was off to the races. Physical education subdisciplines sprouted like kudzu. While some of these, such as sports medicine and physiology, derived from the hard sciences, P.E. majors could now wade into the much murkier bogs of “sport philosophy” and “sport pedagogy” — allowing them to introduce humanism, personal growth, and self-actualization into curricula that had been concerned with making kids run laps and climb gym ropes.

These forefathers of the New P.E. were so relieved to be excused from the children’s table at their universities that many even pushed to rename the discipline “kinesiology,” which is the study of human movement. By some counts, there are now over 150 names — everything from human biodynamics to leisure science — for what used to be physical education. In the decades that followed, an entire corpus of New P.E. literature was born. (Here, the term “literature” is used loosely, to include such works as “Changers and the Changed: Moral Aspects of Coming Out In Physical Education” — an examination of that time-honored stock character, the lesbian gym teacher.)

The fundamental tenet of New P.E. philosophy was distilled by Terry Orlick, a sports psychologist at the University of Ottawa, who authored The Cooperative Sports & Games Book — Challenge Without Competition in 1978 and a follow-up book four years later. In Orlick’s world of cooperative games, “Everybody wins and nobody loses. . . . These games eliminate the fear of failure and the feeling of failure.” Granted, there are plenty of New P.E. moderates, who believe that competition used correctly is an effective learning tool. As Dan Midura and Donald Glover write in The Competition-Cooperation Link — Games for Developing Respectful Competitors, “Neither competition nor cooperation is inherently good or evil. It is how we deal with competition and cooperation that can allow for effective or ineffective results.”

But a great many practitioners of New P.E. are in the Orlick camp — and what a camp it is. Instead of the dreaded Musical Chairs, for instance, Orlick espouses Cooperative Musical Hugs (when the music stops, children hug each other). King of the Mountain is now People of the Mountain. To level the field for less athletically inclined children, he suggests playing with imaginary equipment (racketless tennis) or completely overhauling the rules, as in “strike-outless baseball” (“Who said, ‘Three strikes and you’re out,’ anyway? I don’t think it was God. So why not just eliminate the possibility?”). Traveling the world to find cooperative games, Orlick imported some real crowd-pleasers, like Helping to Harvest the Land from the ever-cooperative Chinese. And when he went to study the Inuit Eskimos, he learned the most important lesson: Never keep score, unless it’s a collective score. “When the Inuit batted inflated seal bladders back and forth centuries ago,” wrote Orlick, “the aim was to have fun trying to keep the ball up.”

While Orlick writes as if he’d eaten some bad seal in the Canadian Arctic, his themes are still being echoed. Marianne Torbert, who oversees the Leonard Gordon Institute for Human Development Through Play at Temple University, is obsessed with “movement activities” instead of athletics. Under this thinking, a child cannot burp without developing a new “skill.” Laboring under the motto, “It’s not just a game. It’s a developmental experience,” Torbert suggests playing a non-elimination variant of Simon Says called Birds Fly, in which kids try not to get caught flapping their wings when a teacher names a non-flying creature. If they screw up, they stay in the game. And a good thing too, what with all the benefits Torbert says the players experience. Though few would argue that even the original version of Simon Says provides many fitness benefits, Torbert claims that Birds Fly not only utilizes everything from self-control to “thinking processes,” but also contributes to “shoulder girdle development.”

Middle school P.E. teacher John Hichwa pushed the new approach even further in his recent Right Fielders Are People Too. Quoting the likes of Peter, Paul and Mary and Leo Buscaglia, Hichwa writes that even more important than teaching physical skills is “nurturing pro-social behavior.” To that end, Hichwa advocates eliminating “human-target games,” using whistles only when refereeing, having students use make-believe jump ropes (“Everyone succeeds and no one ever misses!”), letting the students choose all their own activities, and allowing children to help grade themselves. Hichwa, it should be noted, was rated the National Association for Sport & Physical Education’s middle school teacher of the year in 1993. Or maybe, in keeping with his teaching philosophy, they let him rate himself.

By now, the spreading of gooey layers of social science pap over formerly simple curricula has become a distinguishing mark of the field of P.E. Six years ago, the National Association for Sport & Physical Education (NASPE) — representing more than 18,000 gym teachers and professors — released its ideal “content” standards, the closest thing the diffuse discipline has to a bible. Of the seven standards, only four related directly to physical fitness, while the other three involved what the experts call psycho-social elements, such as understanding that P.E. activities provide an outlet for self-expression.

But while the New P.E. theorists bend over backwards to shave the hard edge off of competitive activities and make the activities conform to the student instead of expecting the student to master required skills, they are neglecting one of the oldest tenets of social psychology. Studies dating back to the 19th century support the concept of social facilitation, which holds that in any activity, from winding fishing reels to riding bikes, people try harder, and thus are often driven to perform better, when they’re in competition with someone else.

One of the most common canards of the New P.E. is that traditional P.E. classes — supposedly rife with rope-climbing humiliations and bloody dodgeball battles — turned an entire generation of adults off lifetime fitness. But this isn’t supported even by the New P.E. advocates’ own data. A NASPE survey showed that nearly half of all adults polled “strongly agreed” that participating in P.E. as a child helped them to become active, healthy adults. Likewise, shielding children from the competition of team sports seems to be a losing battle, since 67 percent of adults and 69 percent of teens believed strongly that “participation in team sports helps children learn lessons about discipline and teamwork that are important and will help them in the future.”

But one thing that nobody disputes about our children is that they are fat. According to the Centers for Disease Control, the number of young people who are overweight has more than doubled in the last 30 years. This is hardly surprising, since adults have gotten fatter too. So sedentary is our nation that even our pets are considered overweight (30 percent of them, to be precise). While New P.E. theorists speculate that our out-of-shape children are staying that way because they have disengaged from a system focused on competitive sports, these authorities seem to discount the more likely explanation: that our children are chips off the old blobs, little lipid factories programmed for maximum caloric input and minimal aerobic output.

Some New P.E. programs can fairly be said to address these problems. Madison Junior High in Naperville, Illinois — which features an amalgam of old and new activities — has students wear heart-rate monitors while participating in everything from cardio machine workouts to touch football to rollerblading. But more New P.E. programs seem to feature a let-the-students-decide menu allowing kids to emulate the narcissism of their parents when it comes to basic fitness. Much as Mom and Dad have forsaken running on treadmills to dabble in more expressive fare like candlelight yoga or bellydancing classes, kids can now participate in activities that have only slightly more cardiovascular benefit than dart-throwing or motor-boating.

Combing stacks of news articles that unblinkingly congratulate the New P.E., one sees kids doing everything from tap dancing to white-water rafting to playing mini golf. There’s also hacky sack, unicycling, bow-hunting, tai chi, and at one Illinois school playing with yo-yos. While New P.E. teachers take a bow for figuring out how to minimize embarrassing performance-oriented competition, it’s not clear that for a 13-year-old boy, doing the Electric Slide or chasing somebody around the gym with a rubber chicken in a new form of tag is less humiliating than shimmying up a climbing rope in tight polyester shorts. As one Wichita teenager told a reporter after he was done holding hands with classmates during a “social position” exercise: “I’m not gay.”

Recently, I conducted my own field comparison between dodgeball-playing old P.E. and New P.E.-influenced classes. At Windy Hill Elementary school in Owings, Maryland, I fall in with Letty McNulty’s fifth graders. Without a D.A.R.E. shirt or cargo shorts, and with my 100-pound weight advantage, I find it difficult to pass. No matter. I haven’t come to make friends, but to participate in a dodgeball exhibition as the prototypical bully. I plan to whoop and holler, to intimidate and scourge. If memory serves, and I still possess the true aim, cat-like reflexes, and bloodlust I believe I had as an 11-year-old, I will stalk the basketball-court perimeter and peg these little punks like human Lite-Brites.

But before we get down to business, we have a symposium on the gym floor. McNulty, though she has a “no whining” sign posted on her office window, is not completely averse to New P.E. ideas. She believes that her youngest students (first and second graders) are best served by practicing non-competitive skill-building exercises, such as learning how to kick and throw. “But you will find,” she adds, that even in first grade, “they try to keep score with anything. Even at low-level throwing stations, they’ll say, ‘We got 49 koosh balls in the basket!'”

As I address McNulty’s class, I speak in the slow, patronizing tones of one not used to conversing with children. I explain how some adults want to do away with games where there are winners and losers, or where you might have to sit out. “Yeah,” says one youngster already hip to the lingo, “you mean elimination games.” I ask the kids how they feel about this. “Not good,” says a boy named John. “It’s good to have elimination games, ’cause you can compete against people.” “But isn’t competition bad?” I ask, adopting the tone of a New P.E. theorist. Won’t there be damaged self-esteem? Wouldn’t you rather measure yourself against your own personal best? Don’t the girls get pushed around by the boys?

The children look at me like I’ve escaped from Special Ed. “We’re tougher than the boys!” says a petite towhead named Stephanie, adjusting her hair kerchief. “I lose a lot of games, but it’s still fun for me,” volunteers a large student named Eric. “We’ve been playing these games almost all our lives,” says a world-weary sprite named C. J. “We already know what our goals are, how good we are, how bad we play. [It’s more fun to play] against other kids.” Besides, adds a shy little girl named Julia, “you can train yourself to get better.”

McNulty tells me that a few years ago, Julia avoided gym class like the bubonic plague, crying every time she attended. At this, Julia’s eyes well with tears, and I fear we’re headed for a New P.E. moment. “Don’t cry, Julia,” commands one of the boys. But the hard-fought tears of accomplishment flow anyway. After years of McNulty’s working with her to develop her skills, and Julia’s participating in extracurricular sports, she’s now one of the best athletes in the class. As the teacher brags on Julia, the same boy slaps her a high-five.

McNulty informs the class that today we’ll be playing several variations of dodgeball. Since she’s in a retro mood, McNulty announces that we’re using an old-fashioned rubber playground ball, instead of the usual spongier gator-skin. The children convulse in enthusiastic titers, as if it had just been announced they’d be receiving cigarettes and skin magazines.

They seem excited to be playing a no-holds-barred game. In recent years, school administrators have shackled them at every turn. The boys tell me they are no longer allowed to play football during recess — not even touch — because of possible danger. Instead of using a softball, they are forced to play with a “rag ball” that looks like a stuffed dog toy. During kickball, says a tall girl named Carolyn, they are now forbidden to throw batters out by pegging them with the ball, even though at home, she says, “I roll the ball in the mud, then throw them out.” “What’s left to do at recess?” I ask. “Sometimes,” says C. J., “We just relax.”

As we take our positions around the court, I try to adopt a look of menace, bouncing one of two red rubber balls as McNulty explains the rules. Today’s game is “Greek Dodgeball,” one of about 50 variations of the versatile sport. In this version, two teams line up on either side of the court, with a “goalkeeper” stationed behind each one. The goalkeeper is actually an opposing player who tries to pick off the team nearest him, while his team does the same from the opposite court, creating a crossfire. As people are hit, they get eliminated, but they’re not really out of the game. Instead, they line the perimeter and become throwers themselves, until nobody on one team remains on the court.

As we play to the finish, the gym fills with gales of laughter. I’m surprised not to hear any wailing or gnashing of teeth — not even when a high heater I aim at young Carolyn’s torso takes off and grazes her cheek. “You hit me in the face,” she says, fixing me with an icy stare. “Are you okay?” I ask apologetically. “Of course,” she says, as if shooing a fly, before she fells another of my teammates in retribution.

In our next game, we switch to pin-dodgeball, in which two teams bean each other, sending players to a penalty box for one minute every time they are hit. The object is to clear opponents out of the way, while you knock down two of their duckpins that sit at the far end of the court. For this round, I announce my team needs a name. The kids kick around the “Blue Afros” and the “Crystals” (after the glue-on crystal Stephanie sports on her cheek). But we settle on “Sisqo,” for the singer who brought us “The Thong Song.” During this contest, I turn into the loud-mouthed, bullying, win-at-all-costs dick-weed that New P.E. teachers so fear, just to see if I can make the weak cower.

We have switched to a softer gator-skin ball (though earlier, the children voted 12-8 to keep the red rubber one). It is lighter and takes off in unpredictable trajectories every time the gym’s air conditioner blinks on. Dodgeball detractors like to say the sport is poor exercise because the weak are culled earliest, and they’re the ones who need the action most. But as any 10-year-old strategist knows, it is wise to take out the good throwing arms first, in the interest of self-preservation. After firing up my troops — “C’mon Sisqo!” — I direct a steady stream of smack-talk at the opposing team’s best sniper, a rangy all-around jock named Colin, who nonchalantly makes me pay every time he takes aim.

All around me, the Sisqos are taking casualties, and our pin keepers are getting the worst of it. With only one pin left and my team down to its nub, I take leave of the one-minute elimination box 30 seconds early (the kids do full stints, on their honor, but when it comes to dodgeball, I have none). As Colin drills another of our pin-keepers, I scurry to grab the ball that’s just shanked off the leg of my fallen comrade. I prepare to unleash a hell-for-leather fury in the name of all that is good and right, all that is Sisqo. But as I coil into my ball-cradling wind-up, I feel the unmistakable ping of a gator-skin ball between my shoulder blades. I turn around to face my assassin and see Carolyn wearing the cherubic, cathartic smile that all but says, “Take that, you galoot.”

Though dodgeball detractors say the game provides too little movement, you could have fooled us. After all the throwing and dodging and sprinting, we emit the dank human musk of a spent fifth-grade gym class. I’m now convinced that dodgeball, played properly, is as good a means of exercise as any. But don’t take my word for it. Take that of Dr. Brad Strand, chairman of the Department of Health, Physical Education & Recreation at North Dakota State University.

Strand is a dodgeball opponent who set out several years ago to prove that the sport was deficient in securing cardiovascular fitness. After running a rigorous study using a middle school gym class in North Park, Utah, however, he found precisely the opposite to be true. Hooking students of all fitness and skill levels up to heart-rate monitors during several rounds of elimination dodgeball, Strand discovered that players stayed above a moderate heart-rate of 140 beats-per-minute for a greater percentage of the time than they did playing most other team sports. Even more amazing, nearly half the class had a higher heart rate playing dodgeball than they did when they were sent on a nine-minute fitness run immediately afterward.

When I first contacted Strand to obtain his study, he sounded nervous, as if someone were trying to make the case that he was a child pornographer or Holocaust denier. “I’m a little leery of letting it out,” he said. “I’m not a proponent of dodgeball . . . but the thing I haven’t liked is people coming out and saying something is inherently bad without having any research to back it up.” So intense is the current academic pressure against dodgeball that when Strand submitted his study to one prestigious journal, “they said they wouldn’t even read it, it had ‘dodgeball’ in the title.” Strand changed his study’s title to the less offensive “The Effect of Class Size and Number of Balls On Heart Rate Intensity During A Throwing Game Activity.” It was published in the rather unprestigious Nebraska Journal of Health, Physical Education, Recreation & Dance. As far as Strand knows, it’s never been cited.

A few days later, I’m off to Monocacy Elementary School in Dickerson, Maryland, where a student stands a better chance of winning Pimlico’s Pick-Six than getting beaned with a dodgeball in P.E. The gym teacher, Debbie Summers, is a New P.E. disciple, and she has the costume to prove it. Today, she is sporting a safari hat, golf-club earrings, and a ski-map shirt. Her apparel is supposed to evoke the “skill themes” that her students have learned throughout the year, associated with the Amazon Rain Forest, the Olympics, a golf course, and a Winter Wonderland. Where most people look at the gym and see a basketball court, Summers sees a land of make-believe.

The gymnasium looks like the New P.E. equivalent of the Marine Crucible on Parris Island. Scattered around the court are about 25 stations where Summers’s fifth graders will revisit the movement concepts they’ve been learning all year. Festive, magic-markered laminated placards identify the stations and highlight the aforementioned themes. From an even vaster array of activities, the 25 stations set up today were voted on by the school’s student government, since, Summers says, “It didn’t seem fair for me to choose.”

As the children enter the gym to the boombox strains of a jazzy “Jingle Bells” (in keeping with the Winter Wonderland theme — not Christmas, Summers assures me), she announces to the kids that they will be traveling to all their stations on sit-down gym floor scooters — seats on wheels, with side handles — which she calls “jeeps, sleds, golf carts, or whatever you pretend them to be.” After a quick review, the students are unleashed. They mount their scooters, and I follow three of them to the Howler Monkey Howl station.

“What do you do here?” I ask. “You have to howl like a monkey,” one girl deadpans. According to the posted instructions, it’s a little more complicated than that. Students must “bend knees slightly, lean the body forward, hang arms at sides, touch fingers to the ground at each step, stop now, and then beat chest in monkey fashion.” I ask Summers what “lifetime physical activity” this addresses. “Well if you look,” she explains, “they’re shifting their weight a little bit.”

From the monkey station, I catch up with a boy named Charles. He is tall and athletic and is sporting a blood-blister on his lip that he got from playing basketball (not in Summers’s class). As Charles sets about his task at the Blizzard station (in which children sit on their scooters while kicking tennis balls helter skelter), I ask him if he ever feels silly doing things like the Howler Monkey Howl. “Yes,” he readily admits. “Because one, you don’t do that stuff in real life. And two, it’s not really a physical education activity.”

There are, at several of Summers’s stations, impressive displays of coordination, though the activities don’t look as taxing as, say, a vigorous round of dodgeball. At a juggling station, it seems every student can at least keep up scarves, if not balls or pins. Most seem capable of making it partway up a climbing rope, which they’re supposed to imagine runs through the four layers of the rainforest, though as Summers emphasizes, “They don’t have to climb, they can just hang — there’s no competition.”

But most of the rest of the stations would have a ’50s-era gym coach scratching his Vitalis-slicked head in puzzlement. At the Javelin Throw, kids toss pool noodles through a hula hoop. Over at the Coke Bear Dance, the students aren’t getting a fraction of the exercise enjoyed by the hockey-playing polar bears that decorate the station’s sign. Instead, they pull empty Coke cans out of a baby wading pool and use them to build pyramids.

Perhaps the most ridiculous stop is the Build a Snowman station, where students are asked to build snowmen from soccer balls stacked between rubber donuts. “What’s the point here?” I ask Summers. She smiles, wiggling her fingers. “It develops fine motor skills.” So does scratching your ear, of course, but most people don’t expect to get an “A” for it in physical education.

In another corner of the gym — perhaps the busiest corner — sits the Gold Medal Stand. While students mount a crate and play a jambox that blasts the national anthem, they haggle over who’ll get to drape themselves with a gold medal labeled “Winner,” which they’ve earned for doing absolutely nothing. As a fifth-grader named Holly is taking her turn in the limelight, another student named Miles approaches her. “I want an award!” he demands impetuously. Holly tells him he’ll have to wait. “You must worship me,” she says. While Summers insists her kids don’t perform any activities for which they’re not cognizant of the attendant skill, it’s hard to see what’s being honed at the Gold Medal Stand. Maybe their self-indulgent-little-twit skills.

Over in the Snow Plow Zone, Cordelia and Julie sit on their scooters while picking up foam balls with their feet, which they then drop into a milk crate. Trying to impress them with my New P.E. buzzwords, I ask if this is one of those “lifetime physical activities” that will be so useful to them when they are adults. “Nope,” says Cordelia matter-of-factly, before reconsidering. “Well, maybe if you have two broken arms.” I ask the girls if they can think of anything that would promote physical fitness more effectively than the Snow Plow Zone. Their faces light up. They can. There’s this one game that involves a lot of running. It’s more fun, and they assure me that it’s much “better exercise.” It’s called dodgeball.