Wellness Requirements, three credits of HPER courses needed to graduate. Health, Physical Education, and Recreation are some of the categories you pick from in order to fulfill this requirement. Wellness requirement shouldn’t be required to graduate. Students should focus on core requirements and not over simplified classes like walking or badminton that place constraints on students time and increase their financial burden.
Students talk about these requirement as something to “just get done”. I’ve had conversation with students who’ve said that taking the least time consuming and easiest class was their priority, and didn’t consider these courses relevant to their academic careers.
As a nationally ranked power lifter it was easy for me to pick out mistakes in a conditioning class I took where form and proper body mechanics weren’t emphasized, ensuring movement ineffectiveness and injury. This I felt was neither wellness nor education.
Students ready for graduation have taken college level courses in fields such as mathematics, biology, chemistry. English and philosophy has made them critical thinkers. So are we to think that a walking class will in anyway enhance our education? Students in academic pursuits do not need to be curtailed with a course in badminton.
Wellness requirement course work cannot be evaluated like academic course work. Student homework in courses such as math and science requires a multitude of hours spent outside the classroom to become proficient. It doesn’t take hours of study to become proficient in walking, student have already been doing this for years.
Wellness requirement shouldn’t be needed to graduate; these courses do not enrich or round out a student’s academic career. They only tax the student by creating time constraints, and increasing the financial burden.
– Nicholas Stapher
