The Dodgeball Myth: Why Bad Teaching Feels Like Good Education

This episode critiques dodgeball in physical education, arguing it promotes negative habits like targeting weaknesses and celebrating elimination. It highlights survivorship bias, noting that while some enjoyed dodgeball, many others felt excluded and discouraged. The episode suggests alternative activities that teach resilience and confidence without the negative aspects of dodgeball.

Physical education is not just about sports, but about teaching movement literacy and essential life skills. Elimination games like dodgeball are being removed from PE classes because they often leave struggling students behind, hindering their learning and enjoyment of physical activity. Instead, PE classes are incorporating games that are designed to be inclusive and challenging, helping students develop confidence, competence, and a lifelong love for movement.

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Until next time, Just Keep Trying!

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:04

Welcome to the Movement Sherpa podcast. I'm Chris, a physical educator, author, and lifelong student of movement. Every week, I explore different facets of the movement world, not to improve athletic skills, but to expand the understanding of the language of movement, with the core belief that movement is for everyone. Imagine, if you will, it's the first week of school. You get your child up and dressed, get him a good breakfast, and tell them you're gonna go to school and be a good learner. So your child walks into their math class on that Monday, and the teacher is phenomenal, working with all the students, answering questions, and making sure every student feels like they belong. By week two, though, the teacher tells the kids who are struggling with fractions that maybe you should just go sit against the back wall and watch while the rest of us do math. Then by the end of week three, the teacher's only working with the five students that are actually gifted in mathematics. The other 25 kids sitting against the back wall sit there feeling invisible and they just sort of wait for the bell to ring? As a parent, you would be furious. You would be in the principal's office demanding answers or in front of a school board ranting and raving. And why? Because math is for every student in the class, not just the ones who are gifted. So let me ask you, why then is this acceptable in physical education? If you haven't guessed it, today we're going to talk about dodgeball. It's something we got to address. So we're going to talk about dodgeball, survivorship bias, and why we have to stop confusing a hard childhood with a good education. And before I get going, something I really want to keep our focus on today is something about the where and the who. The where is school. I want our focus to be that we are talking about dodgeball as it applies to school. And the who, let's keep our focus on the students. We aren't talking about everyone outside of a school, just the students. Let's go check this out. I had just finished my outline for the episode about bicycles, which is what I was going to be doing this week. And after I finished it, I needed to go to the store to get something for dinner. And sure enough, I run into the parent of one of my students. And you know, here it is. It's almost time for school to start. And I had a feeling he was going to ask the question that I seemed to get asked every year, this time of year. And he looked right in my eye, put his hand on my shoulder, and said, You're gonna let the kids play dodgeball this year? And you know, I looked at him with this sort of, are you serious look? But, you know, he's a bigger guy. You could tell like his identity is sort of wrapped up in sports. And then it felt like he was trying to sell me dodgeball. And he looked me right in the face and he's like, you know, it's good for them. PE today is just it's too soft. And you know, look at me. I played dodgeball, and I turned out fine. And I didn't really have a lot to say. You know, I don't want to be confrontational, and I acted like I was in a hurry, and I deep inside my mind I realized I need to put my stamp on this, I need to explain what it is and why it is we don't play dodgeball. So, as much as I believe his intentions are good, um, I have no doubt in my mind he's one of the one of those adults who don't remember his classmates who stopped participating in games, you know, the ones who didn't want to play anymore because of games like Dodgeball. And I can give you right off the bat what I call my four red flags. The first is the absurdity of elimination. In school, remember, because we're talking about school, there is no other subject where getting kicked out of the learning experience is actually designed in the lesson. Okay? And then the next one is what I call the illusion of engagement. You're walking down the hall and you peer into a gymnasium and you see a large number of children moving and playing. If you were to assume you'd be like, oh, look, they're all engaged. But let me ask you, have you ever been voluntled to do something? You know you're doing it because you were told to, not because you wanted to. Well, it's kind of the same way for students in a classroom. It's called classroom management. They are doing what they're told. Some of them aren't doing it because they want to. Um, the third one that comes into my mind is is is called the character myth. And it's because so many people tell me that games like this, it builds tough, resilient kids. And I always in my mind scream, is it build resilience or does it build resentment? And and lastly, being a Gen Xer, I understand the feeling of nostalgia. And it's like we almost call it a rite of passage. Now you gotta play dodgeball, I played dodgeball, you gotta play dodgeball. But you know it's funny. Whenever I I talk to people about their memories of physical education, they mention the parachute, the good times they had at field day, but no one seems to talk about PE in middle school or high school. I'm wondering if we might have the reason why. And you know, as I as I as I think about the nostalgia, it makes me want to talk about that first thing, survivorship bias. Now, some of you might be looking into the you know your your podcast device and say, Well, I don't know what a what is that. It's defined as a logical error where you focus only on survivors or successes of a process and you ignore the failures. And if you do that, that sort of makes it helps you lead or get to false conclusions, right? You overestimate the success of something because you're only looking at the good. And so when he tells me, you know, this this parent, when he tells me, I played dodgeball, you know, I turned out fine, that right there, that's that survivorship bias. And and I feel like dodgeball has um a blind spot. Well, okay, let me let me rephrase this. I think those who love the game have a blind spot. And I I'm not because I'm talking like those are the people that love it were the ones that were the athletic kids, you know, that always picked first kids, and of course they loved it. But as a teacher, I want to know about the ones who hated the game or absolutely did not like it. Because these are the kids who you know these kids, they stopped dressing out for gym. Uh when it came time to go to a PE, they're always wearing the wrong shoes. And these are the kids that at an early age decided that movement and sports weren't for them. And I feel like these are the voices that we are missing from our conversation. So when an adult or anyone, someone says to me, I played dodgeball and turned out fine, as much as I would like to say something negative, I don't. You know, I don't say no, you didn't, but I I just look at them and say, I'm glad you did. Here's something that's really important, though. I honestly deeply believe that kids need hard things. Kids absolutely need failure, competition, risk. I think they they need to feel you know discomfort and loss, and and even in some ways, they need to know how to deal with embarrassment. You know, we are trying our best to keep kids engaged in trying research and data support that this younger generation right now that we that we have, you know, they are the most sedentary of all generations in history. And part of it is the way we've started to design our society. Okay, we've got tons of digital devices, remote learning, remote work, automated conveniences. It just seems like this generation and the younger ones, they are spending a lot less time moving. And I need to keep all kids engaged, not just the ones that want to. You see, what's important about these is that failure comes from attempts, right? You try, you fail, you try again. That's the resilience we're working for. And unfortunately, when you talk about a game like Dodgeball, that is sort of everyone go out to play, you get tagged, you get hit, you sit down, you wait, you watch. The learning's done. Now, when you've been eliminated from the game, you're not sitting there studying your way to get back into the game. And in fact, it's my opinion, just me, little me, that dodgeball accidentally, not intentionally, but I believe it accidentally teaches three bad habits. It's to target weakness, avoid embarrassment, and celebrate elimination. And I don't think that's the lesson that we want to be teaching. I was working a school function one year when a gentleman came up to me to talk to me, and uh he kind of quickly got to his point, and he he said, Uh, I just want to know why we've lost so much in PE. And to that, I of course naturally responded with, Well, what do you feel like we've lost? And you know what's funny is he had a hard time articulating exactly what he felt like it was, because obviously he wasn't asking his kids what they did in PE, did they have any homework in PE, or even what their experiences were like. He just was assuming it would be like his. And even if I was asking you right now, do you what do you think modern PE is missing? And uh, so as I as I've talked to people, I kind of came up with a list of five things that I think people assume is missing from modern PE. And I'm gonna kind of explain where it actually still is. And the first of these five was awareness. And you know, we work on awareness almost every single lesson in games like tag, ultimate frisbee, anything where there's movement going on, you need to be aware of what's happening around you. Uh, strategy comes up a lot, but PE uses invasion-style games all the time to teach skills. And if you're having to go into the opponent's territory, you have to come up with a strategy. Uh, people like to tell me quick reactions. That's not being taught. But hand-eye coordination games with balls or striking a ball with an object requires quick reactions. One dad tried to tell me courage, and I I'm iffy on this one on the basis of I don't think it should require courage to go to a class, but so be it. We do do rock climbing, gymnastics, dance, or even the courage to go learn how to ride a bicycle. And lastly, confidence. But if you think about confidence this way, that where any activity I can see improvement, well, that's confidence right there. And and so I don't think that a game like Dodgeball is actually focused on learning and celebrating movement. Unfortunately, I feel like its whole purpose is to celebrate elimination. And when you strip away everything else from that game, what you have is throwing objects at a classmate until they can't participate anymore. More than once, I have been in a conversation with someone, and when my career comes up, they they wow, it must be nice to just play games all day. And I share this laugh with my my music teacher friend because he says, you know, people just assume he just sings songs all day. But I have to stand up and be the guy that says, wait a minute, physical education is actually considered a core subject. We have standards and accountability, just like math, science, English, and history. Yet it seems like for some reason people have decided that a classroom only counts if it has everyone sitting at a desk. And that to me is a strange definition. Because anytime you come and look into a physical education classroom, you're going to see students doing a variety of activities that include reading instructions, counting repetitions, um measuring the distance of either a jump or a movement, or estimating the force of how hard they're gonna have to hit something, or even you know, the the pressure of making a decision while gameplay is going on. And that's literacy. That that is critical thinking. And it's just teaching kids another way of thinking. Just because I mean, right, the purpose of math isn't to turn students into mathematicians, and you know, science isn't to turn you into a biologist, it's to change and expand the way you think. And so PE is no different. You know, we're not teaching you to be a sports star. We are our subject is movement literacy. And we teach them these skills so that they can benefit from it for their whole life. Oh, and um, too many times people tell me, oh, it's PE, don't don't take it too seriously. And that that hurts my feelings sometimes because you wouldn't want the other classroom teachers to not take it so seriously. I mean, I can't think of a person who would defend a math lesson where half the class is removed from instruction if they got like one question wrong. Like, oh, you're out. This is this isn't a game show, it's not elimination. I mean, I don't like eliminating students from the learning experience. That's not how we teach students. That's called a game show, and that's perfect for adults. But you know, you might say, is dodgeball fun? And I'm gonna say, yeah, it's a lot of fun. But is it good teaching? And you know, it's not. It's not. Teachers, we don't judge lessons based on you know the the couple that succeed, because if we have a whole class that's not succeeding, then we aren't teaching. And uh, you know, there's a lot of science that supports stuff like this. You know, it says that to children who when they stay active, they feel more competent, they feel more included, and eliminate elimination games, you know, they they do the complete opposite. And well, that right there tells you that's a reason to not do these games. You know, I want to expand on the science side of things for just a for a moment because if we start off with the definition or the the primary function of school, it's well I'm sure we read the definition, it's to equip individuals with with knowledge, critical thinking skills, and social tools needed to become capable, independent adults and active participants in society. Pretty straightforward. And um, you know, if yeah, if you were to come to my class, you would look in, and there's a really good chance you would see kids playing a game because I love to use gameplay to teach skills. Uh I hide the the purpose of the lesson into the game in a in a tactic I've uh I've called my Miyagi method. Um, I don't know who in the world doesn't know who Mr. Miyagi is, so this is a quick tangent. Uh the movie is the karate kid. Daniel LaRusso needs to learn karate. Mr. Miyagi agrees to teach him karate, but Daniel starts doing what he believes are meaningless tasks around the house: washing a car, painting a fence, sanding a floor. And then when he gets all upset, Mr. Miyagi shows him, look, you actually learned this, this, and this. And that's exactly what I try to do in my physical education class. I want the kids to enjoy the gameplay without realizing, wow, they worked on their heart and lungs by doing all this running. Wow, they worked on their jumping skills without realizing that stepping on a box on and off got their legs stronger. And um, well, that's the whole point of education, to keep the children engaged. So I want to quick, real quick, go over something we call the zone of proximal development. Okay. Uh easier sentence, it's the Goldilocks zone of learning, right? You you want tasks, it's a sweet spot, right? It's a it's a zone where you want to avoid boredom, but you also want to avoid frustration. It's that area where a child will learn with a little bit of guidance, but not me doing everything for them. And uh so that Goldilocks zone is the whole goal of physical education. And unfortunately, games like Dodgeball put kids in something known as the panic zone. And in that panic zone, uh it asks too much of the student. It always leads to frustration, it leads to anxiety, it leads to fear, and it leads to a discouraged student. And that to me is like the opposite of an ideal learning environment. I know this has been a lot to go through in such a short podcast, but I wanted to take just a moment to talk about what we're doing right, um, the reasons why we have taken elimination games out of physical education. And the main point is that everything changes and PE has changed, it's grown, it's not what it was 20, 30 years ago. We don't do any sort of elimination games, we don't use exercise as punishment, we don't let the students pick the teams. We do, we've changed all these things to make it a better learning environment for our students. And if you have those memories like I do, it should make you feel good that we're making this change to make PE better. Because really, believe it or not, almost every kid is going to stop playing organized sports. Okay, and I'm I'm not being critical. I'm just, it's life, right? Uh schedules change, our bodies change, our interests change. And, you know, I haven't, I don't even know of a an adult dodgeball league you might find anywhere. So the point of physical education is not to prepare kids for sports, it's to prepare them for a lifetime of just being healthy and making healthy choices. We we have a term for this, we call it physical literacy. Oh, you learn how to read a book so you can go out there and explore any book you want to read. Well, it's the same thing with physical literacy. You know, our job as PE teachers is not to turn you into athletes, but to turn you into able bodies who could learn how to play a sport because you have be you have that established physical literacy. And and I know I I can already hear some of the parents right now they they're panicking saying, no, no, no, no. If my kid doesn't specialize right now, they'll never catch up. But I promise you, the research is is not supporting that. Our our kids, our kids benefit from variety of movement far more than they will ever from specialization. And that that learning of different skills, it it translates across so many other activities. And the beauty is it also lessens the chance for overuse injuries. And so, where does this leave dodgeball? Like I said earlier, is it fun? Yes. Does it belong in school? No. I say we leave it to the adults and maybe some of the young adults who want to play because that's what they chose to do. That's our show for today. I hope you enjoyed it. I also hope that we have a better understanding not only of why we don't play dodgeball, but also a better understanding of what we're doing in physical education. I look forward to future episodes when I can have a guest and we can talk back and forth and expand on this conversation. If you like the episode, please give me a subscribe, a like, a follow, share the episode with a friend. Let's keep that conversation about movement going. Next week, balance point. Why riding a bicycle is more than just balance. That's our journey for today. Do me a huge favor. Go outside and lift your face to the sun. Move around a little bit. It doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be yours. I'm your movement Sherpa, and I'll talk to you next week.