If high-school physical education is in trouble, certainly part of the reason is the difficult situation many of its teachers face. The difficulties involve combinations of class size, heterogeneity of skill levels, and co-ed teaching.

In some schools, it is not uncommon to find fifty to seventy students in a physical-education class, although classes in, say, English or algebra, are considerably smaller.

With that many students, there are always problems of classroom management, equipment, and space. Good teaching can be done in such situations, but it is difficult.

A second factor is the marked heterogeneity of the skill levels of a typical secondary physical education class. Varsity-level athletes are scheduled dents. Whereas algebra teachers or chemistry teachers can expect their students to have a basic level of skill and understanding, physical educators have no such luxury.

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Physical educators must often accommodate enormously different levels of skills and interests in any given class, which makes effective teaching difficult.

In programs where student select classes and programs where classes are based on progressions in skill this major problem is reduced substantially. Practices such as these enhance the quality of experience for the student and allow teachers to teach more effectively.

A third factor is co-educational teaching. Traditionally, boys and girls have been taught separately in secondary- physical education. When Title IX was passed by the federal government, parts of its requirements were that all physical education had to be co-educational.

The ideal of co­educational physical education is good. Girls have been denied fair access to instruction, equipment, and time in physical education. It will take several generations, however, for girls to take full advantage of their newly guaranteed access to sport and physical education.

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In the interim, in many of the most popular activities, girls will continue to be, on the average, less skilled than boys, making co-educational teaching a difficult proposition.

The difficulties in teaching co-educational physical education could be reduced substantially by planning programs and scheduling students in ways that would help to group students of like interests and abilities together in physical education.

This would make classes easier to teach for teachers and would make lessons considerably easier to learn for students.