Sports Day*

*or don’t worry folks, the heat wave will be over soon¹.

Ah Sports Day, that annual event despised by many teachers and students, but equally adored by others. At my previous school, we² tried to make Sports Day a more exclusive event by including sports such as Ultimate Frisbee³ and Rounders. Of course the usual track and field events ran alongside it, culminating in an afternoon of students cheering on their mates as they ran the relays and sprinted around the track.

Or that was what was meant to happen. Instead we usually ended up cancelling it three times due to the weather – too hot, too cold, too wet – which led to lots of last minute panicked photocopying by teachers who couldn’t read a weather forecast (shout out to Gwen here⁴).

The PE team would send out the team sheets, which tutors have to fill in with who in their group was going to run the 100m, 200m, 400m (but not girls⁵) and so on. The keener tutors fill this in religiously and quickly and then have to endure weeks of the PE team emailing out they haven’t had everyone’s team in for sports day yet.

I always hated filling that sheet in. You were supposed to get everyone involved, so there were always rules about nobody can do more than one event and so on. I hated sports day in school as I hate track and field events (still do), although I didn’t mind the afternoon sat on the grass watching my mates run around. This meant I was always sympathetic to the students who refused to take part, and so there was always the sporty kid in my tutor group who ran everything because no-one else wanted to, and they were the best anyway.

Kids always know who the best are in every area, despite what we might think. They also know it’s not actually about ‘just taking part’ because I’ve never met a PE teacher who isn’t ultra-competitive⁶ and so they want to win everything on Sports Day.

Every Sports Day involves house competitions, so you are running for the glory of your house, rather than your tutor group or mates. This is where the competitive PE teacher comes in because if they’re in your house, and you’ve put little Dave⁷ up to run the 100m and you know big Billy can do it five seconds faster, then they have questions about your team selection. Thing is, I teach maths, so I have no clue who is the best runner and all I know is poor Dave was the only boy in on the day I filled in the sheet, so he got picked.

Still, for us classroom teachers, Sports Day is always a great time to actually get outside and see the students in a different context. That kid who can’t sit still in your lesson? Watch them run and smoke everyone over 100m. That kid who doesn’t shut up? Watch them running the team in Ultimate Frisbee⁸, telling everyone what to do. That quiet, nerdy kid who no-one wants to work with in class? Watch the rest of the class all cheer when they catch a frisbee to win a point because the umpire doesn’t know the rules.

Turns out it was the organisation of Sports Day I hated, not the event itself. Huh, how about that?

To end this week, it would be remiss to not talk about the temperature. As I write this, I’m sat in my kitchen where it’s currently 29 ^oC and I got home from work earlier where no classroom had been below that. Switch on social media, and there is so much complaining about schools closing either early or completely due to the heat.

Why can’t the kids stay in school, they cry? We get fined for taking our children out for holidays⁹, but the school is always shut¹⁰. Bloody teachers. They get six weeks off in the summer¹¹, then they come back and close the school for two days¹², so why is closed now?

Well, buckle up for a short science lesson. A typical teenager gives out between 70 and 100 Watts of energy when sitting still, and a small electric fire runs at about 1000 watts, so you need around ten teenagers to match the output of your nan’s fire. The average class has between 26 and 30 teenagers – so three fires.

Now factor in windows that don’t open all the way for health and safety reasons and buildings that are not designed to be heat efficient as they are so old¹³, and you essentially have an oven, not a classroom. Now realise that some people start to find concentration difficult above 25 ^oC¹⁴, and most people have a clear decline in mental capacity at about 28 ^oC¹⁵, and it gets considerably worse from there. So, not only are we sending students to school in temperatures they will find uncomfortable, they will not learn as well or as efficiently, become more irritable, so you’ll have to reteach this topic anyway and it all becomes a bit of a waste of time.

A claim I see repeated on social media, is that we just got on with it in the summer of ’76 so why not now? It’s a fair point until you realise the people making weren’t even born then¹⁶, and those that were remember it precisely because it was unusual. June isn’t over yet, but we have recorded higher temperatures this year than in June 1976, and the Met Office data is showing we are experiencing more of these high temperature events.

So, who is going to fund installing air-con into every UK school? Do we need that, or more money in the NHS? What about the police, or the military? Guess who will complain loudest if it is even suggested that we spend 100s of millions getting schools air-con in every classroom. Schools and teachers cannot win as we are sorely underfunded as it is.

Until next time.

FOOTNOTES

1. I don’t think a sports day happened when it was supposed to at any point in my career – cancelled due to rain. ↩︎
2. This is the royal ‘we’, obviously. ↩︎
3. No clue, and I was the ref five years running. ↩︎
4. This is such a niche joke there are literally only two people laughing at this right now, and one of them isn’t Gwen, and she was a meteorologist. She always did her photocopying by the way, but used to try and teach me the names of clouds. Why, Gwen, why? ↩︎
5. WTF?? ↩︎
6. And I say this with great affection as I have many good friends who are or were PE teachers. ↩︎
7. This is not an autobiographical tale. Honest. ↩︎
8. Still no clue. ↩︎
9. This is the government, not the schools. If you want to blame someone, blame the travel companies putting prices up. ↩︎
10. It really isn’t. We’re open when you want to go on holiday, remember? ↩︎
11. Don’t get me started on this. ↩︎
12. It’s called training you absolute fucking bag of pasta, or would you prefer we weren’t trained on the latest safeguarding guidance? ↩︎
13. Even the new ones are shit at this. ↩︎
14. The ones posting bollocks on social media. ↩︎
15. The correlation between high temperature and cognitive function: a CHARLS 2018 cross-sectional study – PMC ↩︎
16. And given the wording similarity in the posts, almost certainly bots. ↩︎