by Julie Gowel ·
Friday, March 28, 2025
Dodgeball, tug-of-war, climbing the rope: gym classes of decades past tended to make the less-than-athletic students feel humiliated and hopeless. Getting picked last for a game, changing into gym suits in front of your peers, and being graded on physical ability made the physical education (PE) period something to dread for so many kids. But not anymore.
PE is not what it used to be, which was made evident by a recent weekly update sent to parents from the middle school, which included a photo of students snowshoeing and mentioned a grant for wearable fitness trackers to be used during gym classes at the Bromfield Middle School.
Tyler Wachtelhausen, Bromfield middle school’s PE teacher and assistant athletic director, as well as middle school cross-country and boys basketball coach, is changing the game in gym class. Using his 18 years of experience in teaching PE, first for the city of Newton and then for Harvard beginning in 2022, Wachtelhausen prides himself on changing with the times.
During his career, he has used metrics such as whether or not kids changed into appropriate athletic clothing, kids memorization of sports rules, and standardized fitness tests as ways to measure success. Now, he says the way to get an “A” is for students to put forth their best efforts and give their full participation in the activities. “Kids won’t be active if they’re not having fun with what they’re doing,” he said in an interview with the Press.
Eighth-grader Sean Niland keeps his eye on the ball as he winds up to hit it with a cricket bat during a gym class.(Photos by Lisa Aciukewicz)
Wachtelhausen feels he connects the most with the students who don’t see themselves as “PE kids.” His goal is to bring “unanimous comfort” to all gym classes, where each participant can feel safe and included. Helping kids feel successful, comfortable, and excited to move, he hopes, will prepare students not just for sports, but for lifelong fitness and positive associations with physical activity.
While Wachtelhausen still includes the basics of learning various sports like soccer, basketball, and baseball, the curriculum has expanded to include nontraditional activities like snowshoeing and orienteering, international sports such as cricket and rugby, and simple games designed to get kids moving quickly.
Hate snowshoeing? “Don’t worry,” says Wachtelhausen, you only have to do it for three days. “If you love basketball, you get three days. If you hate basketball, it’s only three days. You don’t have to be proficient in anything to be actively moving around. Everybody can do that to some degree.”
So how does one teacher know the rules for numerous mainstream sports, countless games such as nine square in the air, Omnikin ball, and tchoukball, international sports, square dancing, orienteering, as well as a long list of other activities designed to get kids moving? From peer networks and social media, according to Wachtelhausen. He often confers with Hildreth Elementary Schools’s PE teacher, Evan Woodworth, high school PE teacher and Athletic Director David Boisvert, as well as the health teachers at all three schools. He uses popular platforms like Instagram and Pinterest to find easy to teach games and simplified rules for sports in order to keep things fresh, lower the stakes, and allow students to experience a wide variety of activities.
“I’m thinking about their overall experience. I care more about whether the activity is making students feel good or bad, more than I care about whether they score seven goals in a game. Being an athlete is a great thing; I coach, and I love competition, but finding success in things other than skill is important to me.”
How do you measure success if you’re not grading based on skill? That’s where the heart rate monitors come into the classroom, or in this case, the gym. Wachtelhausen had the opportunity to use the wearables in Newton and will bring the technology to Bromfield in the next month, thanks to a grant from the Harvard Schools Trust.
“The trust was amazing, funding a tech grant for PE for $4,000, which is a big grant,” said Wachtelhausen. “[The wearable heart rate monitors] will give us data for our students with regard to how active they are during class. We won’t grade based on an eye test of how active they are, because sometimes kids who are less experienced in sports look like they’re not trying as hard, but they are. With heart rate, we can measure how hard they are working in class.”
Wachtelhausen says data collection is trending across education right now, from student surveys to demographics and testing results in administration to heart rates in physical education. Students will come into class, put the wrist monitor on, and be able to track in real time how hard they are working. Using red, yellow, and green lights, the monitors will alert kids when they are in the targeted heart rate zone for their age based on their level of activity. “[The kids] are having fun, they’re playing a game, and they forget that they’re getting exercise.”
“I can show the class the correlation between games that were more active versus those that were less so,” Wachtelhausen said. “We could look at our capture the flag data, where we ran around a lot, versus our four square game, where we stood in a square, and they can see the difference between how your heart rate works when you’re running around sweating and breathing heavily, versus when you’re standing still.”
From left: Evelyn Balicky, Nico Formichelli, Agastya Nambiar, John Hurley-Thibideau, Aine Clarke, Isaac Wiebe, and Alex English play a game of nine square in the air during a Bromfield gym class, March 20.
The overall goal of PE in 2025, according to Wachtelhausen, is to get students moving, keep them engaged, and help them discover activities they enjoy that they might carry into adulthood. He also aspires to have the best PE department in the state. To achieve that goal, he intends to build more extracurricular options like intramural sports, integrate more technology, and use the school’s expansive indoor and outdoor facilities to give students more ways to stay active.
PE games in 2025: Leveling up from hopscotch and Simon says
Four square is played on a square divided into four smaller squares, where players stand in each square and hit a ball underhand, aiming to get other players “out” by making mistakes or hitting the ball out of bounds.
Nine square in the air uses a grid made from PVC pipe with nine squares, where one student stands in each square and hits a large, beach ball-like ball over the grid into another square, with the goal being to end up in the center square and stay there for as long as possible.
Omnikin ball is played with three teams of four players and one huge, lightweight ball (it takes a triangle of three kids to hold it in place) in which the ball is “hit” by the fourth player on the team in a similar fashion to volleyball. The team receiving the serve has to try and control it and hit it back to the serving team or to the other team.
Tchoukball is a team sport where two teams of seven players compete to score points by rebounding a ball off a frame (goal) and having it land outside a designated area without the defending team catching it.
Capture the flag is a tag game in which two teams compete to capture the other team’s flag and bring it back to their own base while defending their own flag and avoiding being tagged.