The Center for Disease Control and Prevention reports that an astounding one in five school age kids in America has or is obese (January 25, 2017). In many elementary schools physical education is required for students at least twice a week. But as soon as they get into middle school, physical education is a choice, and once again in a world where 1 in 5 school kids are obese it has never been needed more. While some kids don’t enjoy physical education as much as others, it should be a required class in schools, because it will aid overall performance in school, help prevent many types of health issues and it will improve mental state of being.
As we all try to stay afloat in the fishbowl that is school, it has been proven by the National Center for Biotechnology Information, or NCBI that regular sessions of Phy. Ed. improves performance in school (n.d.). The NCBI states that gym drastically improves performance specifically in core classes. This means that the main classes physical education improves are math and ELA classes. Also, after a session of physical education, they noted that students responded quicker to cognitive activities. Cognitive activities and learning is the way a child responds to the world, and learns from it (Peronto, 2018). The NCBI also stated that they saw an increase in attention span of students after a session of physical education. On a similar note according to experts at the U.S. Department of Health they saw an increase in “academic