Clinton is on Nickelodean,and he ROCKS!!

about childhood obesity and fitness.he is absolutely wonderful with these children.What a great guy.I miss him

the money that they used to,and food is the one pleasure people can still enjoy.also,going off about no PE in the schools,and junk food in the cafeterias.Bill is being so sweet and supportive with these<chubby> kids.

Kids in grade school here only have PE twice a week. There's only three PE teachers for 5 schools. High school kids only have to take PE for 1/2 a year in their freshman and sophomore years, nothing their junior or senior years if they don't want to. No wonder kids are getting fat.

And the junk food in the cafeterias, oy vey. They sell bags of chips and fruit rollups at lunchtime.

To be quite honest, going to PE every day didn't change my physique at all. Or that of anyone I can think of. The truth is, we just aren't that active.

PE was a huge, pointless pain in the ass.

You get in (we had 50 minute classes), change for 5 minutes, get in your spots for attendance (another 5 minutes or so), the teacher goes over the days activity and you prepare for it (another 5 minutes), and then you have, what, 25 minutes for the activity before you have to take it down and head in (5 minutes) and then go change (5 minutes) so you can leave when the bell rings....

And during those 25 mintues or so of the activity, you're really only active for about half the time, and going half-speed at that (if you want to). Kids who wouldn't otherwise exercise on their own at that age weren't helped by PE, because they only got 25 minutes of exercise a day and didn't even have to give it a lot of effort during that time...


It should have been an elective, it was so pointless.

And forcing people to take PE didn't help things.

Imagine, you are playing softball, and you are at shortstop. Your left fielder doesn't really care about fielding the ball in a timely manner, and if you field a ground ball you may as well just hold it, because your first baseman either can't or won't catch the ball to tag the runner out...

When I was in high school (I graduated in 1986) we had to take PE every day for 4 years of high school. The boys and girls were separated into two separate gyms and only got together for the occasional play-to-kill coed volleyball game or when it was time for that week of, listen to this, square dancing. LOL We had 2 minutes to change into a gymsuit and 2 minutes to take a shower after gym was over. We ran laps around the school whether it was warm or cold, or sometimes even ran to one of the grade schools and back. That was at least a mile. Nobody was allowed to slack off. The smokers and overweight people were always last but they always, always finished it.

We also lifted in the weight room after school or at lunchtime if we wanted. The gym was always open. We could shoot a pickup game of hoops when we were done with lunch. I don't think there were many people who felt all this was forced on them. It's just something we did. Things have changed, big time.

so it's obviously not a magic bullet. However, I and most of friends almost always broke a sweat in gym, so, when you get rid of it, or reduce it to 3 days a week, or have crappy facilities and no equipment, you're probably eliminating the ONLY opportunity a lot of kids get to today to get some exercise these days.