A parent in Coquitlam, BC received this letter from his child’s School Board. The Daily Physical Requirement is explained here. While exercise is a good thing, one wonders if the education bureaucrats should be intruding into a family’s life outside of school hours? It’s unclear what would happen if a parent refused to fill out the form.
h/t ‘Pongo’
letters like that is why I have a burn barrel!!
I don’t see how this is “intruding into the home” the activity time is supposed to be provided at the school. But what I do have an issue with is that the schools are supposed to be teaching, here is anther half hour where they get to stand beside the parking lot and smoke. We home school anyways, wouldn’t leave my kids to those wacked out enviro nazi pot smokers.
I don’t have a problem with Phys Ed but expecting kids have to engage in physical sports outside school hours and log it as a prerequisite to graduation is overreach. Parents have to push back against this. Next it will be a community service or volunteer expectation. Before you know it we’ll have to donate blood then adopt a homeless person or donate free hours at Insite Vancouver in order for our kids to graduate. Stupid educators.
I would have fun with that form. I would add activities such as tactical fire and movement, knife fighting, beating the dog, bullying, etc. I’m sure their nanny statist little heads would explode from the crap I would come up with.
Schools already intrude on a family’s life, it’s called HOMEWORK.
Something which I had several “discussions”about with Princes and their minions. ( principals and teachers)
They have the children all day and if they can not teach/complete in that time, it is their problem not something that is done on my time. Imagine if I sent an unfinished knitting project to school and told them to find the time to let the child complete it during the day? I think they would tell me to blow it out my ear.
Which is exactly what I tell them. Oh and none of that passive aggressive keeping a child in at lunch and recesses either, thats what the threat of lawyers is for.
Homeschooling rocks! Unless of course you are from Germany…..
Nice letter. In Germany when you don’t fill out forms like that they send a SWAT team to your house, kick in your front door and take your kids away in a black van. The bureaucrat who wrote that letter clearly wants to hold the very same Sword of Damocles over the heads of parents in BC.
May I suggest a campaign of taring and feathering school board employees? Perhaps running them out of town on a rail too.
Or you could just wait a while longer for the gentle 3AM knock on the door.
Robert L, you beat me to it. Six hours a week with the Southern Alberta Free Militia (that’s me) featuring unarmed combat (their Tae Kwon Do classes), shooting (some target practice) plus the occasional weekend “tactical” exercise (camping, cross country skiing — biathlon), history of weapons (plastic model building). Draw some meddling busy bodies away from social services while they spy on normal activities. Be creative.
1. Bull riding
2. Coal mining
3. Building demolition
4. Logging
5. King Crab fishing
6. Paragliding
Yep — my kids have a full schedule!
It looks more like giving kids credit options other than PE. Instead of forcing everyone into PE and sports teams, they seem to be allowing students to meet those graduation requirements in a variety of ways.
I think that running school board members our of town or tar and feathering them should count towards their exercise requirement. One way to help everyone is to hire a few discharged marine gunnys or army DIs to come in before school to exercise the chillums and require, by law, that all members of the school board, administrators, secretaries, janitors, and teachers participate for the full time in order to draw their paychecks. Or a good alternative would be the exercise hours devoted to using the school board as punching bags.
Hear, hear. It’s time to push back twice as hard. But take the opportunity to *educate* your children. One of the things that schools do (and don’t fool yourselves; it can be documented that they have been doing this since the 1800s) is to try to use your children to reform *you* as well as to ensure that they conform to whatever the state currently endorses.
For all the short comings in the education system and people focus on a minimal physical activity target? People have already abdicated parental responsibility in so many aspects of life. If they do not want to dwell on what is taught in the education system at least they could support and effort to drag their kids away from their electronic devices for 30 minutes a day! Oh, the kids don’t want to kick a ball around for half a hour. Heaven help them they might break a sweat. By the sounds of it the parents haven’t brook a sweat in many years!
For those trying to make a fascist connection get a grip!
There is no problem, CT, in the school sending parents its recommendations for daily physical activity. Beyond that, it’s none of their damn business (nor is it yours or mine).
All ready have the “volunter” thingy in some districts here in REDfraud country(AB).When my grand daughter told us that WE,the grandparents had to work her prom so SHE could the required volunter points for her to graduate.Needless to say,quite a few of us showed,but I don’t think the fascist teachers got what they were expecting. Heh
CT said: “People have already abdicated parental responsibility in so many aspects of life.”
Well CT, you know, in a free country people are allowed to do that. Because, free country. Its not socially optimal maybe, but then freedom does allow people to be goofs if they want. Optimal is what you get when Big Brother organizes your time for you. Optimal for Big Brother, anyway. Perhaps less so for you.
Then CT quite ironically said: “For those trying to make a fascist connection get a grip!”
You do know that the Fascists were all about the physical education, right? Hitler Youth, vast public spectacles with gymnastics and marching, Olympic Torch processions from Athens to Munich proving what superior specimens German males were, all that stuff. In fact, most of our more objectionable public health regulations had their debut with the Fascists.
Health Nazi is an actual thing, not just a figure of speech. And that letter is just what it looks like out in the wild. You don’t have to step on the rattlesnake to know its a rattle snake, do you?
I remember taking my then 8 year old daughter to a skeet shoot and then a shooting range. the political correct types didnt know how to react when she brought targets in for show and tell. As is was politically correct for me to take her instead of her older brother but politically incorrect to shoot guns.
Next it will be a community service or volunteer expectation.
That’s crazy talk! Show me one province, except Ontario, where kids are compelled to work at $0.00 an hour, or they dont graduate. (For you progressives, that means they are working at slightly below minimum wage.)
http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/extra/eng/ppm/graduate.html
(scroll down for ’40 hours’)
All sarcasm aside, Milton Friedman always said the minimum wage kept low skilled workers unemployed. High School students are generally low skilled, and there used to be a time you could hire em for cheap. You’d have to teach them, but it seemed to work out just fine, and no tax dollars were required. Now we have to pay the government to administer voluntary activities. Orwell would be proud.
In Ontario, you have to perform 40 hours of community service/volunteer work in order to graduate high school.
Forced volunteering…kind of defeats the meaning.
It’s about time the educational system admitted that physical education and fitness is essential to health!
The current lack of physical activity children are living at home and at school amounts to child abuse.
The out of shape, overweight, poor nutrition lifestyle is resulting in a crisis in the health care system. The majority of hip/knee replacements are for overweight people. The amount of Type 2 diabetes unless it is reduced substantially, will bankrupt the health care system.
Bone density needs to be established in childhood to teen years. It can’t be done later in life.
Taking responsibility is the duty of parents and the educational system.
Previous generations of parents and teachers lived up to their responsibilities.
It’s about time for today’s parents to do the same.
Yeah, right on Larry! MAKE the sonsabeeotches run, that’ll larn ’em!
…oh, wait…
Line one: One hour a week running to get me some smokes.
Line two: One hour a week lugging home my beer, cabs are expensive.
Line three: Waiting in line at the ATM to with draw my monthly welfare check half an hour.
It would be a cold day in hell before I’d submit to passive aggressive communism.
In other physical exercise news, New York has an interesting problem.
http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2013/09/03/warning-issued-to-bicyclists-in-nyc-gang-attacking-riders-along-the-hudson/
Seems that some of the local baboon troupes have discovered how much a decent bike sells for.
“Presently, officers only have a vague description of the men, who are described as being in their 20s.”
No kidding, that’s what the article says. Men, who are described as being in their 20s.
So if you see some men in their 20’s on your ride to work my fitness freak friends, get out your… oh wait, you’re not allowed to have a gun are you?
Guess you’re f-ed then, eh?
Well, I do see a space for some non-government exercise, as in `pick-up basketball` or whatever.
But where would I have put the hours spent every week in walking through the woods? bicycling to friends’ houses? Skating when the local pond was frozen, or roller skating at the nearby roller rink? Going grocery shopping? Walking to the library?
Being on the school baseball team counts on this form – guess what though; even if every child of either gender was interested, only a small percentage is likely to make the team. That assumes there is money in the budget for a team in the first place…
And kids with physical problems, whether temporary (broken arm) or permanent (amputated arm)?
Someone way up the food chain decides, mostly correctly, that exercise is a good thing and hey, schools are a common ground where kids can be asked about theirs. So school admins are told to collect data. And as usual, “one size fits all” is enforced.
The most likely lesson children will learn is that lying to authority figures is the easiest way to keep out of trouble. The majority of the form will be BS.
Coincidently, just recently at supper we had a family discussion about who is the employee and who is the boss regarding teachers and government in general. I’m sure that government nannies and nudgers would not have been pleased with my opinions. For better or worse, children are the parents responsibility. Unsolicited advice by others is tolerated – orders are ignored.
The point is not the “physical activity”, of course. The point is the forms. The submission. Hell, they want you to lie.
“Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better.” – (The Great) Theodore Dalrymple/Anthony Daniels
http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.ca/2006/06/political-correctness-revenge-of.html
So what’s stopping the adults from drafting a letter to the school bureaucrats demanding that they produce a reports proving that they:
1-Are spending their time at work productively.
2-Are getting off their own fat asses and working.
3-Are participating in useful community activities outside of work.
4-Are practicing what they preach.
??
Perhaps the consequences of failing to comply should be NO PAYCHECK .
“The most likely lesson children will learn is that lying to authority figures is the easiest way to keep out of trouble. The majority of the form will be BS.”
Exactly and like the Soviet Russians said of their work “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us”
The school nazi’s will pretend to care about the physical health of the chiilun while graduating the fat sloths and physically weak as long as they don’t make trouble for the teachers or anybody in their Statist network.
More power and bigger kingdom for the Edumacation Statists less for everybody else.
What did they call it Orwell’s ‘1984’? The daily flail or something?
“The telescreen thrusts Winston out of his dream state with a loud whistle; it’s time to get up. An instructor on the telescreen leads everyone through their morning exercises, known as the Physical Jerks. As he exercises, Winston tries to remember his childhood. He remembers hiding in a subway station with his mother and father during an air raid, early in the 1950’s. Since then, the country has continually been at war and everything has changed. The telescreen instructor yells at him to exercise harder and he stops daydreaming.” ‘1984’, George Orwell http://www.bookrags.com/notes/1984/PART1.html
Physical Jerks, I remember now!
Does chasing Indians count as an activity?
I’ve many indian cousins, and when their kids come to play, all our kids usually end up chasing each other around.
This should also count for multi-cultural points.
Somehow though, I think an obtuse bureaucrat (do I need to even use that adjective, or is it a given) would complain.
Everyone bitches about their kids sitting on their asses and doing nothing, until they get “the letter”. Fn hilarious!
I think it’s sad that we have gov’t that feels its necessary to tell parents to punt their kids outside and play something other than xBox.
When I was in HS there was a mandatory daily 42 min. phys-ed period for grades 9 – 13. Now, with the advent of a new curriculum and semester system, the mandatory component has been reduced to 1 phys-ed elective for one semester sometime between grades 9 and 12.
This transition happened perhaps 25 – 30 years ago, and the fact that it (a) happened and (b) endured is a strong counter-argument against any claims that parental indifference and teacher comforts are phenomena of very recent origin.
What should happen (but won’t, of course) is that all parents should join forces, call a press conference, roll all the letters into a toilet-paper roll facsimile, and then march down to the school-board offices with the TV cameras and return the forms in person to the Superintendent of Education.
Dream on Mac…dream on.
Great article. Radical Islam and Marxism have in common this abusive treatment of their victims wherein the victims are not only required to acquiesce in the most absurd lies but actively participate in retelling them thereby forcing one to become complicit in the intellectual “crime” and thus less certain in exposing, let alone fighting it.
As regards the school forms, the range of opinion on this site points up the need to restore school choice to parents. If a parent wants their child to attend a school with a stronger phys ed component, the parent should be free to send them. Equally, if a parent wants a different emphasis for their child’s education then they should be free to select the appropriate school. Schools should be forced to compete for the kids. A country with one of the best education systems, Singapore, does not even have compulsory education. So the idea that school choice would degrade the quality of education is risible.
Yeah well, I don’t have no kids to speak of…..
However, I get feed back from neighbors….here in Morontario….
Seems kids MUST ride the bus to school. Even the kid whose home abuts the school.
Noon and recess, kids are not permitted to play ball, soccer, tag or even run in the schoolyard…..staff is posted to enforce this.
The excuse is to limit liability for injuries…..
Meanwhile, right across the road, is a vast area maintained for Woodstock’s soccer programme. Weekends heavy traffic and 75 acres of kids running and chasing soccer balls.
Yep and the David Brooks’ of the world will wave their fists in fury because no one respects authority and refuse to play follow the leader. Here’s some free advice to the them: have fewer stupid GD rules. Too many stupid (the majority nowadays) rules are impossible to enforce making authorities look impotent. It also triggers defiance from a sizeable minority. It has the exact opposite effect of the one intended – it destroys trust and respect. The more they try to enforce the dumb rules, the worse the repercussions.
For example, a couple of years back the school district was on the litterless lunches warpath. It swiftly went from a suggestion to mandatory. It got so stupid that my kids were told that even apple cores and banana peels, despite being healthy, were forbidden and had to be repacked and returned home. They felt guilty and embarrassed about it so I gave them their first lesson about the virtues of unapologetic non-compliance. We completely ignored litterless lunch day and packed what we wanted and how we wanted. You don’t have participate in stupid games. I mustn’t have been the only one since litterless lunch days have disappeared.
Well, BC has a volunteer “requirement” to graduate but nobody ever fails to graduate because of it. Seriously, it’s such a joke and anybody can sign off saying the student did the work.
The fact that I have to teach my kids math and english already ( due to the weak instruction through to high school) makes this just added insult to injury. In each case, families that cannot afford either the extra time or money to do this are the ones that are going to be the most affected. It is stress that is not needed. Stick to the basics until they are mastered.
The Phys Ed requirement is still there, but it is only one semester. They demand documentation of physical activity during the off semester. I would suggest 30 minutes a day during the day…they have a free period every day as it is. As a matter of fact, they have so much free time AT THE SCHOOL that they could run math and english tutorials and blast through the rankings for provincial exam achievement if they so wished.
But that’s another topic.
Shouldn’t academic success matter if a student wants to graduate, not how many push-ups one does?
I’d like to know more about ” dance pick up basketball “…is that some kind of hip hop cultural activity ?
I keep telling SDA readers – the state makes a legal presumption you have abandoned your claim to exclusive wardship over your children by signing them over to the public wardship system (Public school boards) – please read their own commissioning docs and the ample legal precedence set by home schooler prosecution – your kids are deemed to belong to state wardship in and out of the home – the parents are mere surrogates and unpaid trustees of state child wardship systems – the “co-parent” narrative is just an allusion to the state’s legal presumption of near full wardship over your children.
You may chose to ignore this or dismiss it, or call me nuts or something and continue belly aching about how the state has usurped your natural parental rights but that will not change the standing presumption in law which exists in all matters pertaining to state wardship systems – one of which is the public school system – which incidentally is now directly an extension of CPS and family courts.
It will take more than yapping, complaining or voting to alleviate this state intrusion into the sanctity of the family unit – it will take millions of parents having enough concern for their children and enough contempt for these trespassing psychopathic technocratic misgovernment, to simply ignore them and home school – and damn the yipping and yapping and frivolous molestation the state parasites make about it.
But that won’t happen because too many complainers fear the state more than they hate it’s intrusive malevolence and they never take effective action or counter measures – the state knows this, so state intrusion continues virtually unchallenged.
Osumashi Kinyobe asks: “Shouldn’t academic success matter if a student wants to graduate, not how many push-ups one does?”
Of course not. What matters is filling in the form correctly and returning it in a timely manner. As Pongo says at 12:38pm, neither academic success nor physical training have any time spent on them by the school at all.
This is bureaucracy, not Reality(tm). What’s important is the form. Why can’t You People understand that?!!!
Now shut up and get back to work, you’ve got school taxes to pay.
The exercise requirement could easily be met by requiring each home-room teacher to take his/her class on a one-hour walk every school day. Rain or shine. Only those individuals with a genuine medical disability would be exempt. Both teachers and students would benefit from the daily hour of mild exercise, and savvy teachers could use it to impart some knowledge of the community, too.
hey Beer bear
the government works for US, not the other way around, try getting that through your head
I always had a easy time dealing with stupidity like this, after speaking to some fool and them phoning up the cops and “inquiring”, that was the end of things, as it was considered best to let sleeping dogs lie!!!
I think L C Bennett gets it!!
“I think it’s sad that we have gov’t that feels its necessary to tell parents to punt their kids outside and play something other than xBox.”
Well Bear, it isn’t the gov’t that feels the necessity, it is PROGRESSIVES with a sick need to control every aspect of your life that feels the need.
And they will never stop, unless forced to.
The first day of school was for 2 hrs, some friends reported their kid got 1/2 basically for attendance. No doubt this counts as a day in school. Now here was the perfect chance to get in 3-4 hrs of physical activity at school. I have no doubt that the school has been saddled with a ridiculous requirement by the Province and rather than say FU, they pass this requirement off to the parent in the hopes they can fulfill the check box as “completed”.
if we get this I would require them to advise which Act or regulation requires this, I bet they won’t be able to produce something and if they do find something it has no force in law and likely directed to the school board to provide X amount of physical activity.
Satire of soccer league with no soccer balls seems less funny now:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/sep/5/just-pretend-ontario-youth-soccer-league-eliminate/
Note, satire.
School sending home “fat letters”:
http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2013/09/04/schools-sending-fat-letters-to-parents-about-overweight-children/
Note, not satire.
I’ve earned every beer I’ve drained down my throat pal.
You guys are a bit confused I think, firstly expecting the school to provide the necessary 30 minutes of physical activity and then taking the libertarian view it’s not up to government. Make up your bloody minds! Is it up to government or not? You can’t have it both ways and expect this messed up excuse for a bureaucracy to get it straight. In fact, I would expect them not too.
So here’s my message, quit expecting the government to do all of your thinking, get off your butts, push away the keyboard, shut off the TV and be good role models for your kids and go do some hot and sweaty activity that doesn’t involve 2 minutes of carnal activity. I know it’s challenging and I know for a fact that you will have a million wimpy excuses that are just that. Excuses, but hey don’t you owe it to your kids?
Oh and btw, there are no short cuts… none.
We had this many years ago in Des Moines, Iowa. It was called “Contract PE” and was intended for students who wanted to take an extra class instead of PE. I took it one year and, of course, my mom just signed the form and I filled in a bunch of activities.
Gym shouldn’t be a required course to obtain a high school diploma and schools shouldn’t dictate what students do outside of school.
Bingo, Black Mamba.
I made a similar comment to my wife recently about the Byzantine rules and reg for re-cycling here in Lotusland (after yelling to her with a question as to the proper disposition of a certain article of refuse).
It ain’t about green; it’s about regimentation. Period.
If the teachers in your jurisdiction are physically fit (other than the usual culprits) you live in a remarkable school district!