CSU, Chico News

In a speech following the Columbine High tragedy, President Clinton asked citizens to seek to understand how youths become alienated from their peers, and related how he had felt as a boy when he wasn’t picked to play in a schoolyard game.

California State University, Chico physical education professor Cathrine Himberg knows all too well what happened to the president, because it happens to thousands of school-age youngsters every week. Thanks to a discussion about dodge ball, and some inspiration from her 10-year-old son and a friend, she has started a campaign to wipe out such practices.

Himberg has launched CASPER, which stands for Concerned Adults and Students for Physical Education Reform. The organization seeks to end P.E. class practices that alienate and humiliate many children, including using exercise as punishment, asking “captains” to pick teams, teaching participant elimination games and having classes watch students take fitness tests “in the spotlight.”

CASPER’s Web page, www.csuchico.edu/phed/Casper, has examples of other inappropriate P.E. practices, and ways for teachers, parents and students to encourage schools to end them.

“As a former P.E. teacher, I’d been aware of inappropriate practices, but it wasn’t until I was a parent that I saw so clearly the damage being done,” said Himberg. “Now when I see kids humiliated by being picked last or not picked at all, it crushes my heart.”

As one letter written and posted to the CASPER home page points out, P.E. class anguish is long-standing: “I was always the last one picked. It had been that way since elementary school and would go on that way into college. Even if someone was injured but could still play, that person would still be picked before I would be… Many times I started to believe I was a weakling and a failure that no one wanted.”

Along with the psychological damage, Himberg said, children excluded or humiliated in P.E. class also often become physically inactive young adults, contributing to an increasingly sedentary population. “When you aren’t involved, it leads you away from staying active,” she said.

In many cases, no one in the school knows the right way to run a P.E. class, Himberg said. Budget cuts have eliminated P.E. teachers from many schools, so that classroom teachers with little or no P.E. training are responsible for physical education. The result is “organized recess,” Himberg said.

“Would you ever expect a teacher in reading to give two books to the class, and expect all the students to take part and learn? Some P.E. classes are like that. Students spend more time waiting for a turn than they do actively involved and learning,” Himberg said. “Parents need to know there are plenty of options for how to have healthy, developmentally appropriate classes.”

Since CASPER debuted, the response has been “overwhelmingly positive,” Himberg said. Last month, she passed out 750 CASPER buttons at the national meeting of P.E. teachers and teacher educators, and found many of the field’s leaders wearing them throughout the conference. “The general feeling is, it’s about time somebody was doing something about this,” she said.

Himberg said when she returned from the national conference, the editor of the journal Teaching Elementary Physical Education had already written her to ask if she would write a series of articles on inappropriate P.E. practices. The first is scheduled to appear in August.

Himberg is also currently writing Teaching Secondary Physical Education in the Information Technology Age, which is scheduled to be published in fall 2000. Co-authors are Himberg’s husband, CSU, Chico communication design professor John Roussell, and CSU, Chico physical education professor Gayle Hutchinson.

To spread the word about CASPER, Himberg is writing grants, forming an advisory board, planning a brochure to send to PTAs and seeking sponsors for the nonprofit organization. Rollerblade of Northern California helped underwrite the building of the Web page.

The origin of CASPER dates to last spring, when Himberg sat in on a session at the 1998 national conference discussing dodge ball. The popular P.E. class game is notorious for favoring strong-armed youngsters and humiliating others. “That got me thinking,” Himberg said, and she went home and talked about P.E. with her son and a neighborhood friend. “The boys and I came up with the CASPER name and slogan that night,” she said.

Himberg admits she did not face P.E. alienation growing up in her native Norway, but became familiar with it after she moved to the U.S. and later began her studies in physical education. While completing her Ph.D. at Virginia Tech, she taught P.E. in an elementary school in Blacksburg, Va. She now teaches and trains future P.E. teachers at CSU, Chico.

Himberg said she had not heard Clinton mention his personal P.E. tale but did hear others in the wake of the Littleton tragedy. “People are trying to make sense of these tragic shootings,” she said. “Sadly, CASPER’s message is timely.”

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 25th, 1999 at 12:39 pm and is filed under 1999 Spring.