The back row of PE
Every games period has children strategically hiding. How to design classes where hiding is impossible and unnecessary.
Read note →15 years teaching Physical Education and Yoga to Grades 1–12. My programme has two promises: nobody hides in the back row of PE, and nobody graduates without knowing how to calm their own nervous system. Sport for the confident; movement for everyone.
I was a state-level 400m runner whose career ended, as many do, on an orthopaedist's table at nineteen. Yoga rebuilt my knee; teaching rebuilt everything else. What I carried out of that year was the conviction that movement is not a talent contest — it is a birthright, and school is where children either claim it or lose it.
Fifteen years on, my programme runs both engines at once: an athletics and games stream that has taken 47 district medals and sent three students to state camps, and a whole-school yoga practice — including the three-minute assembly pranayama that 900 students now do without being asked. The shy-kid metric is my favourite: the number of children who stop hiding in the back row by October. It is currently 100%.
If your school wants a PE department where the trophy cabinet and the quiet mats both matter — where sport is coached seriously and no child dreads Tuesdays — I'm easy to find. Track, 6 AM.
And yes, the breathing exercise works on stressed parents at PTMs. I've tested it.
Fifteen years across yoga, athletics and team sport — every body included.
PE traditionally serves the athletic 20% and quietly humiliates the rest — the last-picked, the asthmatic, the girl who was told running isn't ladylike. I run it inverted. The sporty kids get real coaching and medals; everyone else gets movement they can love for fifty years — and yoga gives every single one of them a nervous system they know how to operate.
Lead a four-teacher department. Built the dual-stream programme (competitive + recreational), the assembly pranayama practice, and the exam-season yoga clinic seniors actually attend voluntarily. 47 district medals alongside — the two streams feed each other.
Grades 1–12 PE; coached sprints to three state-camp selections and quietly abolished elimination dodgeball, which nobody has missed.
Post-injury retraining: RYT-200 then RYT-500, plus NIS athletics certification. Rebuilt a knee and found a vocation in the same year.
Every games period has children strategically hiding. How to design classes where hiding is impossible and unnecessary.
Read note →How we got 900 students breathing together daily — and what it did to first-period discipline referrals.
Read note →Running a genuinely dual-stream PE programme where medals and mats respect each other.
Read note →My daughter — asthmatic, last-picked, PE-note forger — now does sun salutations at home and jogged a 5K with me on Sunday. I cried at the finish.
Riya's motherPARENT · GR 9Discipline referrals in first period dropped by a third the year assembly pranayama started. I checked the data twice.
PrincipalTHE VALLEY SCHOOLShe coached my 400m to a state camp AND taught me to sleep before finals. Both mattered. I run for my college now.
ArjunALUMNUS · STATE CAMP 2023