Oh maaaaaan this makes my blood boil. Just being on the periphery is not the same as being in it. I know of a couple of students that are so disruptive that they are receiving their instruction sitting outside, but in my huge district, it's only one or two and it's temporary to see if it will shape better behavior in the classroom. And we have a few other students that walk around campus all day with a rotating group of instructional aides. I'm not a behavioral therapist, and from what I've seen, the general tactic is ignore what you don't want, praise what you do. And that works great for kids that have brains wired to understand that, but these kids don't in many instances. So they know that whatever they do, it will be ignored and the reward part of doing what's right and feeling good about it simply isn't there enough to overcome the other stuff. And this has lead to some really crazy situations in my district in the last two years. I'm waiting for the pendulum to swing back the other way and settle somewhere reasonable.
That P.E. class sounds ineffective for just about everybody. In our district, we have non-credentialed people for the k-3 P.E. class--the YMCA, etc., provides the classes. They aren't very good, the classroom teacher is supposed to be out there with their class at all times because the P.E. providers aren't credentialed so it's against the law to have a class out there without a credentialed teacher present (in loco parentis law). But I see the teachers sitting out there not doing anything to help their students. All teachers have had to take a class in teaching proper P.E. during their teacher preparation training, and P.E. is a state mandated course, just like math and reading. But P.E. is the first thing they pull the kids out of for testing or punishing. And there is a legal amount of minutes that the students are to be doing P.E., and this has been largely ignored, to the students' detriment. Once my students get into fourth and fifth grade, we have credentialed P.E. teachers doing the P.E. for them using a really great curriculum. My students do better there, but I often have to do what they call push-in--be with the student to facilitate what works, and pull the student aside and work on something else when the activity isn't working for the student or I can't modify it in a way that makes sense.
It's a big subject, and one that I'm obviously passionate about. All needs need to move their bodies and have good P.E., but the special needs kids REALLY do. I hear reports all the time from the teachers of "my kids" that the next 30 minutes after their P.E. class with me, they get more done academically in that time than they do the rest of week. Makes me feel pretty damn good. Okay, off my soapbox...for now.
