She actually did grade you on effort rather than ability, for one thing. I'd always made Cs and Ds in gym because I'm not athletic (mostly I scraped by on acing the written tests), but in her class I got Bs and the occasional A-.
For our gymnastics unit, she did something I've never seen anywhere else. There were 5 skill areas: trampoline, balance beam, uneven parallel bars, mats, and the horse. Next to each one, she posted a list of routines to be performed and what grade each one would get, and then let us decide where we wanted to put in our efforts. For me, that meant the trampoline was an easy A, the bars a fairly easy A-, I hated the horse and was content with the C routine there, the balance beam I could work up to B without getting into anything that really scared me, and I spent almost all of my effort on mastering a headstand for the B+ routine on the mats. And every single day she came by, while I was working on that, with a word of encouragement. She and the nightmare teacher are the only ones I remember 40 years later.
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dancing_serpent
Re: Thank you!
Date: 2014-10-30 06:38 pm (UTC)For our gymnastics unit, she did something I've never seen anywhere else. There were 5 skill areas: trampoline, balance beam, uneven parallel bars, mats, and the horse. Next to each one, she posted a list of routines to be performed and what grade each one would get, and then let us decide where we wanted to put in our efforts. For me, that meant the trampoline was an easy A, the bars a fairly easy A-, I hated the horse and was content with the C routine there, the balance beam I could work up to B without getting into anything that really scared me, and I spent almost all of my effort on mastering a headstand for the B+ routine on the mats. And every single day she came by, while I was working on that, with a word of encouragement. She and the nightmare teacher are the only ones I remember 40 years later.