The Daily News has a piece today on how many schools aren't meeting minimum PE  requirements. I'm a little surprised. Minimum PE requirements in NY State are pathetic. For most of my career, students had PE one period per day. A lot of them would be off one day to go to lab. That's no longer the case in my school and others.

A few years ago, the geniuses in Albany gave an alternate formula that required only 90 minutes a week for gym. So many schools went with giving a 3-2 program, giving gym every other day alternating with some other subject. In my school, these subjects have included health, art, music and enrichment in social studies. It's a troubling trend.

First, despite all the crap you hear and read about gym teachers, it's pretty clear that physical activity is something we need more of in the United States. Our diets are among the worst in the world, if not the worst in the world. Other countries are beginning to suffer from obesity just as we do, and that's only because our national treasures, McDonald's and KFC, are replicated everywhere.

It's remarkable that in the face of such issues NY State sees fit to diminish PE and health rather than expand it. But that's pretty much to be expected when the only thing of importance is test scores. That's underlined by our standards, the much despised Common Core. This has caused 20% of students to boycott tests for the last three years. Regrettably, the geniuses in Albany have chosen to respond to this by renaming the standards, leaving us the same old crap, and hoping that no one notices.

I guess if you're working in Albany, you have priorities. What they are I have no idea. If the physical well-being of school children isn't paramount, there must be something that inspires your decision. Lobbyists? Bags full of cash? Opium dreams? It really could be anything. Maybe PE is flawed in its current form. I don't know. It's been a long time since I was in a gym class. If there are flaws, slashing it in half is probably not the optimal improvement.

Let's turn from negative effects on students and look at this from a teacher point of view. All of us are facing multiple observations based on the Danielson rubric. It's ironic that you have supervisors lecturing you on how you need to differentiate when we are all judged in exactly the same way. It's a little stupid too, actually.  Consider that gym teachers are somehow supposed to ask penetrating questions while students are playing volleyball. I mean, it's an absurd expectation, and when you consider that there's a 40-minute period less time to dress and undress, when are the kids supposed to play?

Consider also that PE classes run as high as 50, assuming city class size rules are even followed. This means that gym teachers have 500 students a week. How are they even supposed to learn student names, let alone form relationships with them? To me, that's a really important part of teaching, more important than tests. I don't know about you, but I remember a lot of students. I don't recall what grades they got on standardized tests, or even my own.

What message do students take when they see you only on Tuesdays and Thursdays? How is that message reinforced when the teacher struggles to remember who you are? And when we add classes like music, art and health to the mix, what are we telling our students about those subjects?

Hey, it's nice that you can get a 4 on some standardized test. But when you drop dead at 54 of a massive coronary while chomping that double cheese Whopper, will that be any consolation? Do we serve kids well while ignoring their health?

The geniuses in Albany think so, and that should be good enough for anyone.

That's how many students PE teachers can see. Under NY State regulations, a student in a five day gym class gets .58 credit a semester. But a student in a three/ two class, that is three days a week semester one, and two days semester two, gets .50 credit a semester. Not much of a loss for half the time, right? And easier to make up now that it's only half the time.

On top of that, you can actually reduce your PE staff by half with no issue. The gym teacher used to teach only one class period two, but now teaches two classes. And on the other three, or two days, you can program a music class, or an art class, because consistency in those subjects is just as unimportant as consistency in PE classes. And the music teachers, who also have fifty students per class, can also see 500 students a week. What could go wrong?

Let's start with the 500 students. How do you even learn their names? Are you even supposed to? And if you aren't, where do they come off judging you by the one-size-fits-all infallible Danielson rubric? I mean, if I'm teaching kids to play basketball, am I supposed to act like a coach? Or am I supposed to stop every twelve minutes and have them do a writing exercise? Should I have them turn and talk? What did this basketball game mean to you? How did you feel when I interrupted it to have you write a paragraph so the person observing me wouldn't rate me ineffective? Let me show you this PowerPoint presentation explaining the History of Cement, which was the precursor to these wooden planks on which we play today. You will love it. But if you don't you will watch it anyway.

Of course, as a teacher, you have to carefully figure when you show that PowerPoint. Because, you know, your Monday, Wednesday, Friday class is 33% ahead of your Tuesday, Thursday class. So you have to calculate mathematically which lesson to give when, because perish forbid they should be one solitary minute ahead of your other class. No, plans must be followed, and it will be eighteen days exactly before the Tuesday, Thursday class can see this PowerPoint.

Naturally, you have to give essay tests to your 500 students. The only way to prepare for that accurately, according to your supervisor, who claims to have been trained in this stuff, is to have PE notebooks. And the only way you can make sure your students don't copy into this vital PE notebook info is to have them never, ever use computers. Also, you can't trust the kids not to copy from one notebook to another, so you need to keep the notebooks in school, all 500 of them, in some ___location TBD by teacher. After all, it's important that teachers get a voice in how this work is done. That's what makes their jobs so fulfilling. That, and grading 500 essays on the inner workings of volleyball, because they have nothing better to do. Of course they will use a rubric for this.

So just pass out the 50 notebooks every day, after the kids change, and after a brief warmup, and have them sit on the floor to write the essays. After all, PE isn't just running around and indulging in sports. This is about rigor, not enjoyment. If you were to teach the kids to love to play volleyball, well, then they'd just want to play volleyball and they'd never want to write that all-important 500-word essay on why they love to play volleyball, even though your meticulously crafted Danielson-based lesson ensures they will hate volleyball whether they would have liked it or not.

So, yeah, give all the PE teachers so many classes that they can't even learn student names. That's a good step. Then ask them to do all the crap that every Danielson lesson wants. For goodness sake, don't acknowledge that their goals may be different than the goals in the algebra class, because every class is really the same, and it's important to formulate questions based on degrees of knowledge. All that joy in sport and physical exercise, well, that's for the pros. If we'd wanted students to enjoy physical exercise we wouldn't have placed them in a half-time class. We wouldn't have let them know we care so little about this discipline that we're not even bothering to reinforce it each and every day, like we do with every other class.

And hey, for the other half, we'll dump in music and art, because we don't give a crap about that either. If it doesn't terminate in a state exam, if teachers and students aren't rated on it, we're not gonna worry about it. All that enjoyment and passion stuff is for losers. We at NY State Education Department know what's important.

And no we're not telling you specifically what's important, because we might change our minds tomorrow morning.

That's how we roll.