Dance Dance Revolution to fight obesity? No, that's the Gym's job.
Kids these days are packing on pounds at a record rate. Childhood obesity has been all over the news, of course, and inevitably politicians have gotten into the act.
One state’s approach to this problem is the most preposterous thing I have ever heard. Thirty to 34 percent of West Virginia’s children are obese, according to the CDC. The state is attacking the problem with a video game, Dance Dance Revolution, and plans to put the game in every one of its public schools. I’m not making this up. A news report in
USA Today said officials would “incorporate the dance-pad-based video game into curriculum over the next two years.”
This is the same state that just re-elected its 88-year-old U.S. senator to another six-year term. So anyway, they claim this game will make kids skinny. I know something about that game. My kids bought it a couple years ago. The game plays music, and to get a high score you have to jump around and land on various spots on a plastic sheet. For about a month bad music blared from our basement while the lamps rattled upstairs. So I have credibility when I declare to the free world this tidbit: It doesn’t make kids skinny. It makes them hyperactive. And even more addicted to video games, which sends the bathroom scales even higher.
So all of this prompted a question. It’s a simple question maybe someone could answer for me. Whatever happened to gym class? Used to be, every student went to math, history, English and then gym. You changed into shorts that doubled as Speedos and ran around in a 50-degree gym. And played games long since banned by pencil-necked administrators. And back then, no one, absolutely no one, was fat.
Maybe they don’t have any gym teachers anymore, I don’t know. Harrison Junior High, circa 1972, had a gym teacher, let me tell you. He never wore a shirt, and had more chest hair than Austin Powers. He had polyester “coach’s shorts” with a double snap waist band that fit snugly around the back side. He invented bracket creep years before the IRS coined the phrase. And I’m also certain he had a thing going with the female gym teacher. And he had no use for one student. Me.
Ask anyone at Harrison Junior High, Great Bend, circa 1972 — our gym teacher had favorites and I was not on his list. He loved jocks. I could have been a jock but that would require that I need to reach puberty before the age of 19. In choir I sang alto and never saw a pimple until my freshman year at KU. When that one zit arrived I drowned it with Clearasil. It never returned.
Back then I was elbows and teeth. Pumping iron wasn’t on my checklist. Getting the heck out of junior high school was, however. But don’t confuse me with Napoleon Dynamite. I was cool. I wore Converse high tops and had a long collection of zingers, one liners and lots of friends not named Pedro.
So any rate, that was the year of the Winter Olympics. Gym teacher guy discovered the parallel bars. To execute the parallel bars required many things. Like muscles. One by one we had to “perform.” You had to jump up to the bars and try to hold a pose, which meant holding your legs at a right angle to your chest. After about two seconds, my arms quivered like a baby robin’s legs perched on the edge of the nest. Then came violent shakes, and then I fell. The guys with beards at age 9 who are now bald with 20 grandchildren won various “medals” in gym that year. But no one was fat.
I suspect my dad heard me tell these stories over dinner way back when and probably said something like, “That’s great. Builds character.” I know one thing it didn’t build. Muscles.
Childhood Obesity 
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