Health And Fitness Lifeskills Elective Module For Marsiling Secondary School
To broaden the quality of school education and allow students to look forward to more opportunities for experiential, practice-oriented learning, an increasing number of schools have started to introduce elective modules. As its name suggests, an elective module is a specially designed programme to help students discover their interests and talents, and make learning more engaging.
Many a times, what we learn from the textbooks cannot measure up to what actually happens in the real world. Welcome to the real world! The real world out there is where our skills are tested and where we gather new knowledge.
Forget about the route learning and focus on the practice-oriented learning. There’s a saying from Xunzi, one of the greatest Confucian scholars of early years that went “What I hear I forget, what I see I remember, what I do I understand.” Indeed this is true.
Simply by doing something, we are able to register that motion in our minds. Never underestimate the power of the subconscious. It’s just like building muscles. The more you work out, the stronger our muscles become.
I’m happy to share that yet another school has embraced health and fitness as one of the elective modules for their students.
For the students of Marsiling Secondary School, they are the second batch to go through this programme which I first piloted for West Spring Secondary School. And you can be sure more secondary schools will be joining them very soon.
Through the health and fitness elective module, or some call it lifeskills elective module, I aimed to give my students a firm foundation of what staying healthy. The term ‘healthy’ means different things to different people. Yet we all agree that being healthy includes being free from diseases, staying fit and eating well. There is no running away from exercise and nutrition. These are the twin cores that supports a good health and fitness programme.
Throughout the 5 week lifeskills programme, the Marsiling Secondary School students were inducted into different exercises that they would find useful to achieve the aim of staying healthy. These ranged from bodyweight exercises to resistance band workouts to gym work.
With a mixed gender group, it was obvious that looking good was no longer just the prerogative of the guys. Many people have the conception that only guys workout or exercise because they want to look buffed and macho. Dispel this notion as more girls (especially of similar age) are beginning to pump iron, work out and undertake physical activities of all nature. Kudos to them as it’s always good to start young.
A healthy body supports a healthy mind. Only when we are fit and in good shape do we feel confident and have the bandwidth to handle the challenges in life.
Viva la Vida!