Physical Education

In our goal to rid our campuses of bullying, an area that is often overlooked is PE classes. A lot of bullying takes place during physical education class. Physical education teachers must take an active role in making sure the classes are properly monitored.

Many students who are victims of bullying are not athletically inclined. They may be physically weak, uncoordinated, and unable to defend themselves. For this reason, going to PE can be a horrifying part of their day.

Bullies can sense the insecure demeanor of students and they will take advantage of this weakness. During PE class, bullies will physically attack their victims. Because of the aggressive nature of some PE activities, bullies can physically abuse other students without any ramifications. PE teachers must be careful when choosing the types of activities the students will participate in. By offering organized, non-aggressive activities, PE teachers can help prevent students from being victimized.

Verbal abuse in PE class is also a concern. As I mentioned earlier, students who are not athletic are at a greater risk of being bullied. Students who are weak, overweight, or uncoordinated are prime targets for verbal abuse during PE class. Sometimes, verbal abuse can be more painful than physical abuse. Being made fun of and teased is an extremely degrading experience for children. By nature, victims of bullying are not very confident and being teased on a daily basis will only solidify their belief that they are not worthy of respect.

Since verbal abuse is much more covert than physical abuse, it is extremely difficult to detect. PE teachers will need to monitor their classes carefully and look for signs of verbal abuse. Students who seem upset or spend a lot of time by themselves may be victims of verbal abuse. Teachers should also pay attention to the different cliques that form. If a student or group of students is suddenly spending time with a student they usually do not spend time with, this could also be a sign that bullying is taking place.

Often, teachers will unintentionally promote bullying by allowing the students to choose their own teams or groups for an activity. Unfortunately, this happens frequently in PE classes. PE teachers will pick two captains, who are usually the most athletic or popular students and allow them to select the students they want on their team. One by one the students will be chosen. For the more popular and athletic students, this is a great opportunity for them to feel good about themselves. They know they will be picked in the early rounds. But, imagine what this must be like for the less athletic and less popular students. This is an extremely degrading experience. They stand there just knowing they will be one of the last chosen. Their lack of self-confidence grows deeper with every round. Inevitable, there will be two students left, both of them praying they will not be the last one chosen. In reality, neither student will feel very good about themselves. However, the student who is chosen last will feel rejected, hurt, and embarrassed. This is bullying!

PE teachers need to be on the lookout for bullying during class. Bullying does not take place only in the hallways, bathrooms, and cafeteria. Bullying also happens during PE class. Our students must be protected throughout the entire school day. By being vigilant, PE teachers can do their part in helping put a stop to bullying.

Dyslexia is a complicated process that involves many different procedures and cognitive faculties. Before people are discussing the specific syndromes of acquired dyslexia, the processes mediating word recognition and pronunciation are briefly reviewed. The visual system efficiently processes a complicated stimulus

that is, at least for like alphabet based on languages, is composed of smaller meaningful unit letters. In part the number of words, there is often a considerable visual similarity between words. In addition, the position of letters within the letter string is also critical to word identification. The light of theses factors, it is perhaps not surprising that reading places a substantial burden on the visual system and those disorders of visual processing or visual attention may substantially disrupt reading.

The fact that normal readers are so adept at word recognition has led some investigators to suggest that words are not processed as a series of distinct letters but rather as a single entity in a “process akin” to the recognition of objects. At least for normal readers under standard conditions, it seems that this does not appear to be the case. Rather, normal reading appears to require the identification of letters as alphabetic symbols. Support for this claim comes from demonstrating that presenting words in an unfamiliar form for example, by alternating the case of the letters or introducing spaces between words would not mat substantially influences reading speed or accuracy. These data argue for a stage of letter identification in which the graphic form is transformed into a string of alphabetic characters that are sometimes called “abstract letter identities.”

The word identification requires not only that the constituent letters be identified but also that the letter sequence be processed. There are mechanisms by which the position of letters within the stimulus is determined and maintained is not clear, but a number accounts have been proposed. One possibility is that each letter is linked to a position in a world “frame” or envelope. It should be noted that under normal circumstances letters are not processed in a strictly serial fashion, but may be analyzed by the visual system in parallel. Disorders of reading resulting from impairment in the processing of the visual stimulus or the failure of this visual information to access stored knowledge appropriate to a letter string are designated “peripheral dyslexics” and are discussed in the future.