They had a science night at the school last night so I took the opportunity to pull the principal aside and tell her what a good job I thought the gym teachers were doing. Gave her the one minute synopsis, too, of why it was utterly unexpected to me. She introduced me to the gym teacher (the only of my kids' teachers I've never met) and I complimented him in person.
I'm still not ready to change my mind on the general case, though. One decent guy doesn't compensate for a boatload of buttheads. The local school board is facing budget cuts and they're thinking of cutting the planetariums that some of the schools maintain. I've been sitting on a letter I wrote a long time ago that suggests it would be far better to ditch PE classes. I stopped short of sending it last time because the recipients would just toss it aside as kooky.
OTOH, if the general case is true, and PE classes are no longer the training grounds for bullies that they once were, then it would obviously be worthwhile to keep them over the planetariums. I don't know. It's a pretty big leap for me to think that IN GENERAL, kids really are learning good sportsmanship in PE. For the past 30 years I've been convinced that good sportsmanship was an oxymoron.
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