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IN THIS ISSUEMention dodge ball and most people grimace or groan. In the Northwest suburb where I grew up, we called it "prison ball." Different name, same object: to smack your opponent mercilessly with a hard rubber ball. Before each PE class, I would say a silent prayer: "Anything but prison ball, please, please, anything but that." When my prayer went unanswered and the team captains started choosing up sides, my prayer changed as my insides churned: "Please don't let me be the last one chosen. And don't let it hurt too much." Kids who got hit (the slow, the fat, the unathletic, the apathetic) had to go to "prison" and stand around while more kids got walloped. Always a scrawny child, I didn't have a chance against the brawny players. I would cringe and cower behind some other hapless student when the powerful throwers were winding up, murder in their eyes. Compared to this, dissecting pig fetuses was kind of fun. It's been 30 years since I took my last painful whap! in that dreaded game. Yet I can still feel the sting—to my skin and to my pride. Just about everyone else, it seems, despised dodge ball, too. A few months ago when I proposed doing a magazine on PE, my colleagues all made sour faces. "Yuck, I hated PE!" was a pretty standard response. Dodge ball has not died. But there are signs that the mainstay of the old phys ed is ailing. Sure, you can still find this relic in gyms from Nome to Yellowstone. But lots of schools are replacing the pummeling with activities that kids of the 1950s and 1960s never imagined. Students are scaling rock walls. Juggling colorful scarves. Balancing—or teetering—on unicycles. In Salmon, Idaho, they're skiing down an artificial mountain behind the school. In Corvallis, Oregon, they're toning up on rowing machines and treadmills. In Seattle, they're playing games of cooperation instead of competition—focused on beating their personal best instead of creaming their peers. Who could have predicted back in dodge ball's glory days that the new millennium would bring Frisbee golf, inline skating, and interpretive dance to the schoolhouse? PE's renaissance, however, is threatened by money woes and back-to-basics trends across the nation. Lumped in with other so—called "frills" such as art and music, PE is a handy target when the public calls for higher academic standards and lower costs. Ironically, trimming this layer of "fat" out of school programs can add flab to young bodies. The impact of inactivity on human health is well—known. Around the Northwest, phys ed teachers and health advocates are fighting hard to keep PE—the "new" PE with its emphasis on lifelong fitness—in the curriculum. To get an inside look at some of the Northwest's best efforts to save PE—and to leave dodge ball in the past with white lipstick and big hairdos—read on.
—Lee Sherman
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Date of Last Update: 9/28/01 
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