Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Dodgeball In The School Environment

The National for Sport and Physical Education makes some good arguments as to why dodgeball should not be allowed in schools. However, I believe there are many other reasons why dodgeball can be associated with the school settings and it will not exclude the "weaker" players. In a P.E. class, I think that children should be able to choose what they would like to do as an activity out of a certain amount of options. If a child does not want to participate in dodgeball, and it is being offered, then they should not have to. They should be able to choose a different game that they can participate in that they would enjoy more. In any type of game I believe that a person can be targeted by others. For example, if you have a child (Mike) who is 5 feet tall playing volleyball against a person on the other team (James) who is 6 feet 3 inches tall, and it just so happens that they both are in the front line on the rotation, I am pretty sure that the James will be able to spike the ball down onto Mike which targets him because he will not be able to defend against it. Now if you look at it the other way, both Mike and James are playing dodgeball, and Mike happens to be a great pitcher for baseball, he will be able to eliminate James in this game. So I believe that you can make an argument for many games where kids can be targeted. This is where the Physical Education teacher will need to be an influence to teach kids different types of games to play and different variations of each game that will give students options as to which game they prefer more and would like to be a part of throughout that section of the course.

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