Last week the two other PE teachers and I put our classes together during a very rainy Friday morning. We offered students a choice of an organized game of kickball or walking in the hallway. I was the designated hall monitor. While the students were walking I decided to take a look and see just how many kids were overweight. The national surveys consistently say that 25% of youth are overweight and the numbers are rising.
So I counted the total number of people walking (32). These were high school students (mostly ninth and 10th graders). Then I counted the total number of students that looked overweight. I didn't count anyone who looked like they could lose five or ten pounds, only those that were obviously overweight. There were 11. That came out to 34%.
I remembered that I had recently read that more young girls were overweight than young boys so I counted girl to guy ratio of the 11 overweight. There were 4 overweight boys and 7 overweight girls. That means that roughly two thirds of the overweight students were girls.
Now this is VERY informal. The kids that chose walking may be the kids that lean more toward inactivity. If I had surveyed the entire class, the percentages may have been different, but my stats weren't very far off the national stats we keep seeing. Remember, those kids aren't statistics, they are living, breathing human beings with hopes and dreams and futures and they deserve a better start from all of us: Parents, teachers, advertisers, food companies, EVERYONE.
Take your own informal survey and see what you come up with. Let me know what you find out!
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