It's time for The Blue and White's October issue! This month, the staff of the magazine takes its first foray into the world of Columbia Athletics with our Fall Sports section. Throughout the next few days, we'll be rolling out selected stories from the section so you can get a head start. First up: PE Dispatches, direct from the front lines.

P.E. Dispatches
By Paul Barndt

And you thought you were done. To the many Columbians who missed the fine print about the two-semester PE requirement: we sympathize, and we're here to help. We bring you dispatches from the front, the class students have survived, and, yes, enjoyed. For those of you who have completed the required stint, keep in mind that you receive credit for up to four PE class—don your mesh shorts and wristbands, and get back out there.

Diving

Gordon Spencer brings an aged, mellow wisdom to his diving class, which he's taught almost fifty times. Show up five minutes late, leave ten minutes early, it's all good, man. He's also got a bone-dry sense of humor; if you belly flop, you'll hear your gym-mates laughing as you surface and wonder what Gordon said that cracked everyone up.

Continue reading after the jump...

Columbia's myriad of research institutes helped Bwog to realize that not only will studying PE or blebs in college prove fruitful some day, but that every research, however small, can be funded if need be. Even if you have to ask reactionary drug war people for the money.

A few favorite centers:

Center for the Active Life of Minority Elders

Center for Decision Sciences

Fecal Incontinence Center

Institute for Tele-Information (CITI)

Langmuir Center for Colloids and Interfaces

Center on Medicine as a Profession

Renal Transplantation Center

Center for Resilient Networks

Most Columbia students remember gym class as a pre-pubescent nightmare characterized by itchy uniforms, bloody noses, changing in public, and balls flying into their groins. Steve Silverman says it doesn't have to be that way. Silverman runs the physical education program at Teacher's College (making him a gym teacher who teaches gym teachers how to teach gym) and studies PE for a living. Bwog sat down with the man behind the progressive curriculum last week to get his thoughts on dodgeball, Title 9, and lazy kids.

So why did you decide to become a gym teacher?

Well, I like to think of it as a physical educator more than a gym teacher...

Oh, ok, sorry...

I was interested in helping children learn about physical education in a way that would make them feel efficacious about movement. Children will only move and participate in physical activity if they're liking it.

Gym class at my school never motivated me.

Isn't that sad?

So how do you get kids to like PE and to keep in shape?

Well, that's the key question isn't it! A lot of the traditional methods that people have experienced are not the way. Children have to be in situations where they learn motor skills. Traditionally we've tailored PE to children who are higher skilled. For low skilled children in particular, the concentration on traditional sports does more to turn them off to physical education than it does to promote physical activity.