BY BLAKE BEAMAN
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Forty-two states have now fully adopted Common Core standards for core subjects, like math and language arts. However, this year we have seen the integration of Common Core values in other classes that you may not expect, like physical education.

The physical education department at Roseville High School has been trying to integrate Common Core with assignments like where students tested their heart rates after running at varied speeds and times and created bar graphs with the data they gathered.

Teachers are trying to improve students’ skills for their other classes, such as analyzing and interpreting data and making a visual representative of that data, like a bar graph. However, the assignments being done in these classes are very simple and are not effectively supplements for anything like what students will be seeing in other Common Core classes.

If written assignments are to be done in P.E. classes, they need to be at the same level of the students that are doing the assignments. Giving high school students middle school level assignments is pointless, especially in a class like P.E.

Written assignments in a P.E. class cause the class to stray away from the original goal. P.E. aims to get students active and in shape. This is one of the very few times some students have an opportunity to be active, and that time is wasted with basic written assignments that are being done every day in the other classes that students have.

However, I don’t think written assignments are completely pointless. It gives some students the chance to demonstrate their knowledge about the unit they are currently in when they may have a hard time doing so physically. If the class is in a basketball unit, written assignments that are given must be about basketball and how it is played, not how many times a student’s heart beats in 10 seconds after jogging in place for 30 seconds. Assignments like these would be more useful and applicable than others where we measured our heart rates

One of the intended benchmarks for P.E. classes this year was to get the students to the point where they can run for 20 minutes straight. We spent a lot of class time training for a test that was supposedly going to come at the end of the term, with written assignments pertaining to this run along the way, meant to help us interpret our findings and understand what goes into the run. However, these assignments provided very little aid when compared to conditioning.

But, any help they may have provided went to waste after the teachers failed to follow through at the end of the term and administer the test.
If the teachers want to implement Common Core, they should do with more useful assignments than what we’ve seen.