Do you think high school students should be allowed to be exempt from gym class if they’re participating in extracurricular athletics?

31 comments

1. I’m for it, but what are they doing during that gym class period then? That’s really my only concern there. A school system will want something a student has to do during that time to show they aren’t just letting kids slack off. You could have like an “open lab” time at the library or something, but performance standards are going to require something more structured probably…something with objective learning outcomes.

2. As one of those people on a high school sports team I loved gym and would not have traded it for a study period I’d spend surfing Reddit in the library. My gym class had a “combine” at the beginning of the semester and then the four top finishers were captains and picked teams because the gym class was called team sports so we just did a different sport every week.

3. Sounds like your school was dumb by not allowing them to work out during gym.

4. In my school student athletes who did a certain number of extra curricular sports practice hours per week were exempt from PE and many did use that time for a study period. It was especially helpful for students who did swimming/diving/water polo as those all had practice for 90 min before class every single day, plus several days a week after school practice as well. I’m a bit surprised other schools don’t let student athletes out of PE. Sports is a huge time commitment, for sure.

5. Most schools in my area use athletics as PE. Freshman/sophomores had first hour “Athletics” class. If you played a sport then practice started at 6:30am and you practiced for a portion of first hour before showering and heading to second hour. If you were varsity then practice would start at the beginning of the last hour class. If your particular sport was out of season, say you played football and baseball but didn’t play a winter sport, you reported to first hour or last hour as usual and you did weightlifting and conditioning.

6. At my kids’ high school, they are exempt.

7. In my school, we *were* excused from gym if were doing sports.

8. My teen’s school does this and I’m in favor.

9. There’s basically no reason for someone participating on an athletic team to have PE class.

   Now, I think most athletes probably enjoyed PE. But the sport participation should fulfill the requirement.

   At my school, if you were an upperclassman on a sports team, you didn’t have to take PE.

10. No. But I also think physically education should be a requirement for graduating.

11. Gym for us was more fun. Rather than just straight up training. We would cycle through different sports (including going to the local bowling alley) every two weeks. We’d learn the rules and play. There was always stretching and a little calisthenics but it wasn’t like high intensity practice I did for crew.

    I always saw it as a fun class to blow off some steam and have fun. There was a running rotation which was a bit more like training.

12. Sounds smart to me. They’re clearly already fulfilling the requirement.

13. Yes but I always hated PE, I’m so fucking glad my school only requires us to take it for 1 year.

14. We did. Our athletics period counted as our PE. High School could also sub band, vocational study, or work release.

15. I was in sports in school and I never heard anyone complaining about it, besides girls because they either didn’t wanna get wet in the pool or because they didn’t want to do anything physical to sweat so they just walked circles around the gym talking. I think it should be a part of the curriculum, especially seeing how fat of a country we are.

16. In my high school we had 1 semester of gym required for the entire 4 years and virtually everyone took it together in summer school so we wouldn’t have classes before or after, just PE and home. It was awesome.

    Because the requirement was so low, there was no particular reason to exempt athletes. It does seem silly to make them regularly take gym every year *and* practice for their sport

17. I don’t know how it works at most school districts, but for me sports were broken up into three distinct seasons. Fall, Winter, and Spring. Different sports happened in each and there was no overlap between them. So, unless a student is doing three different sports, there will be part of the year where they are not in a sport and so will need to be in a gym class.

    Furthermore, there are things that gym teaches you that sports don’t. Gym at my school also incorporated health and nutrition lessons. We also had driver’s ed incorporated into our gym class. It wasn’t just a workout session, we were actually learning things.

    Now, I will admit that I was the kind of person who after fulfilling my gym requirement took gym electives in later years. I was doing a sport as well (just during the Winter) but I had more things I wanted to do in gym that were more important to me than some of the other classes offered.

18. PE was required for everyone at my high school. We could choose what PE activity we did most of the tine. They might offer 4 different choices per quarter. I don’t recall what the student athletes typically did. I think PE was used to expose us to different ways to be active. It was somewhat social and I suppose broke up the day. We all complained about PE. I would have rather watched paint dry than do the square dancing unit we were foced to do.

    Student athletes already got a lot of leeway about classes and scheduling. Most people had a study hall period every day. Maybe that has changed.

19. My school already did that. The gym requirement was either one year of gym class or two semesters of a sport.

20. That’s how my school worked. We had optional gym type electives like weightlifting, doubles sports, etc., but you could get your gym credits by playing two seasons of a varsity sport.

21. I think you should have the option to skip PE class if you are on a school sports team/extracurricular athletics, if you want to do studying or what not, but you should still be able to do PE class if you want to.

22. this is how it worked at the highschool i went to. students just needed a certain amount of sports credits and if you payed more than one sport you’d have more than enough.

23. Yes

24. No, because (at least in my case) gym covers more than just being physically active. For example, we had swimming as a required part of gym class. Playing football or soccer doesn’t teach you to swim. We also had health classes as part of gym class.

25. I wish they actually gave you an education in PE. We had a weightlifting class, but it was literally just , “check out this machine. Don’t hurt yourself.”

    There was no discussion on push vs pull muscles. There was no education on creating a program, or addressing weaknesses, or anything.

    It was just an activity session that felt like a waste of time.

26. I don’t even understand the point of gym class. I needed a nap or time to do homework more than I needed to stand around pretending to care about basket ball or volley ball.

27. No. Gym is a class. Sports are extracurricular.

28. Athletes don’t have PE here. I wish they would exempt marching band students – those kids bust their butts, working for hours a day before school starts and then before and after school.

29. I think we should dump gym class entirely, and any extracurricular that’s not academically based.

    People go to school to learn, not to throw balls around.

30. Gym was ways a useless class to me that should have been an elective from the start, I don’t think anyone should have to take it if they think the time would be better spent in another class

31. “Gym” is often a comprehensive health curriculum. It’s even where SEL is ending up because none of the other teachers want to be responsible for “building character” (although they’re often happy to take credit).