CELPIP Listening Part 6 Practice Test: Daily Gym Class for Every Student

NARRATOR: In most Canadian provinces, physical education is compulsory in elementary school, yet the number of minutes children actually spend moving varies enormously from one classroom to the next. Some students have gym every day; others manage barely two short periods a week, often squeezed out by assemblies, testing or a lack of gym space. A growing coalition of health professionals now wants daily physical education written into provincial law. Few people would quarrel with the goal itself. Writing it into law is another matter.

NARRATOR: Dr. Nadia Okafor, a pediatrician in Winnipeg, sees the consequences of inactivity in her office every week: children who are out of breath after a flight of stairs, and teenagers already showing early signs of diabetes. In her view, voluntary guidelines have had twenty years to work, and the results speak for themselves. Okafor also points to research linking regular exercise with better concentration, arguing that thirty minutes in the gym may sharpen, rather than steal from, the hours spent on mathematics and reading. For children whose neighbourhoods lack safe parks, or whose families cannot afford hockey fees, school may be the only dependable place to be active. A daily requirement, she contends, is simply a matter of fairness.

NARRATOR: Gordon Fraser, a principal in rural Saskatchewan for fifteen years, shares the goal but doubts the method, and his objection deserves more attention than it usually receives. His school has one small gym for three hundred students, and timetabling a daily class for every group would mean cutting music, art or library time. None of that, in his view, justifies doing nothing; his teachers already take classes outside for walks and games whenever the weather cooperates. What troubles him is a single rule applied identically to every school, regardless of its building, its staff or its winters. He would prefer funding for trained gym teachers and equipment, which he believes would improve the quality of each lesson, not merely the quantity.

NARRATOR: Okafor counters that schools have pointed to a shortage of resources for decades, and that without a firm requirement, activity will always be the first thing dropped when the timetable gets crowded. Fraser replies that a rule schools cannot meet tends to be quietly ignored, which helps nobody. Both sides, notably, want children moving more. Admirable as the goal is, a law with no money behind it may turn out to be more symbolic than real.