Thursday, October 22, 2015

In these Charleston, S.C., schools, children are seen, and heard, and always active

CHARLESTON, S.C. — David Spurlock is 63 years old, a former baseball and football coach with a bum shoulder and bad back and right now he’s busy planning a jailbreak. He has spent a lifetime walking the hallways, classrooms and athletics fields all across Charleston, his home town. Those classic images of school-aged children sitting still in desks organized into neat rows? Spurlock calls it “educational incarceration.”

“We put kids in a 2x2 cell and dare them to move: ‘Keep your feet on floor and hands up where I can see them,’” says Spurlock, the coordinator of health, wellness and physical education for the Charleston County School District. “That sounds like being incarcerated to me.”

The educational model is broken, Spurlock says, and the key to fixing it is applying some of the most basic principles of sport and exercise. Students in some Charleston area schools sit on desks that double as exercise equipment, they enroll in “advanced PE,” receive regular yoga instruction and visit specially equipped learning labs each week where the line between education and physical education disappears entirely.
“If you went to anybody who’s in education, you say PE versus instruction, they say instruction every time,” he says. “But what we’re trying to show is that more movement equals better grades, better behavior, better bodies.”

 continues at this link
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/sports/wp/2015/10/20/educational-movement/

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