After reviewing my blog posts for HOPE journal, I think I have some idea of which direction I want to take this with the new perspective about physical education.

First of all, I think I have gained an important perspective and attitude towards physical education throughout this particular course. I have never envisioned physical activity to be this in depth and broad as a curriculum and an education. I think what I really want to focus is the idea of how it feels to be healthy. I want to really push through to connecting the things that I have learned in this class to really focusing on helping students to feel healthy and that it feels good to be healthy.

I think I definitely found some of my strength in my role as a physical health educator. I found that I have good projection of my voice and is able to make instructions very simple. However, simple instruction will not have any impact when there is no purpose behind it. This is something that really struck me during my time in this course. I know how to be simple and be a good presence in the gym as an instructor, but I think I really lacked in the purpose in terms of thinking that physical education was just doing different games and activities that the students could enjoy.

This led me to think about the what I am learning in the IB cohort as well. It is hard to miss the emphasis on the purpose of learning. Every lesson should have a purpose because knowledge can be gained by searching for them on the internet. Why do we participate in certain physical activity? Why do we engage in certain topics? Because we want the students to feel the importance of these big ideas. The importance of physical activity and being healthy cannot be taught unless the students experience them for themselves. Studying different subjects comes from similar perspective. The importance of learning cannot be taught unless students feel that there is a need and that there is a interesting thing about it and we can explore more into it.

I think this leads to the idea of what makes a good physical health educator? I think as I have felt throughout the course, a good physical health educator is a person who can guide students to become engaged in activities that they might have never approached if they were to do it by themselves. Physical health literacy can only be achieved once the students start moving around. However, they have to be purposeful and meaningful, even though the students might not know it at the time. The importance is how I can get the students to be more engaged with all different activities that can promote healthy living.

If a person is physically or healthy literate, the person knows why health is really important in our lives. Moreover, they are people who can discern whether they are making healthy choices and are being physically active and choose to be more active than their current self if the discernment does not see a great support of good examples of physical activities.

Health and physical activity can become an issue where the world is becoming more comfortable, fast and in some ways, more lazy than the previous generation. I think this mindfulness really helps us to understand what is really important, not just in physical activities but in all other courses as well.

Thus ends my Hope Journal entries, and I really enjoyed my time being in this class which helped me a lot in gaining new perspective about this area.

End.

This session was on individual physical activity, and the lesson was particularly focused on Yoga.

This was very relaxing and interesting lesson out of all the lessons we have done.

One comment that caught my attention in this particular lesson was about the religious background in Yoga. Although it is a individual physical activity, one of the lesson providers briefly raised a comment that some have found practicing Yoga to be somewhat religious in terms of things like meditation and being able to feel one’s mind and soul and other things that could trigger a sentiment of religious practice.

This really made me to think about some of the things that might arise from parents and families from various backgrounds. This does not have to do with Yoga, but sometimes, there might be students who are uncomfortable in certain situations where they might not feel like participating in certain activities because they are mindful of their own culture. Or maybe not the students but the parents might feel a little unsure about the things that students might be doing in physical education.

I think it goes back to the question of what are we trying to teach? Whether it is Yoga or other physical activity is, our purpose should be promoting physical activity and healthy life style. To achieve that goal, we can take variety of ways and methods that could fully help students to develop various different knowledge about their body and health.

I think if this message is clear to the students and to the families and parents, it might become easier to communicate with people from different backgrounds.

Overall, it was an interesting lesson.

End.