The Physical Education In The Urban Junior Middle Schools Of Hanzhong City: Present Situation, Problems And Their Countermeasures

In the context of deepening the comprehensive reforms nation-wide, the educational fields have also witnessed their steady reforms. To meet the further reforms in education, the teaching reform of Physical Education (PE) has been targeted as one of the top priorities in schools of all levels in all types. Due to the vast territory, it is natural that there are individual and local problems and characteristics in the physical education among schools all across the country. Therefore, this research ventured to choose Hanzhong City between Qinling and Bashan mountains as the object of study, which, in our view, is conducive to the exposure of those local problems in PE among the junior middle schools in the vicinity to table corrective proposals. Meanwhile, this research can also serve as a basic step to shedding some light on the problems existing in the teaching of PE in junior middle schools nation-wide and on the reformative countermeasures needed to improve the teaching quality of PE in all the schools in question.This research, by adopting the methods of literature review, questionnaires, interviews and mathematical statistics, conducted a survey of the present situation and problems in the teaching of PE in six urban junior middle schools chosen from Hantai District, Mianxian County, Xixiang County, Liuba County and Ningqiang County of Hanzhong City, with the students and teachers randomly chosen from the above 6 schools as the subjects. The questionnaires and the interviews covered the following focuses: the PE teaching faculties,teaching regulations, teaching facilities, the curriculum design, the employment of teaching aids, teaching organization and teaching assessment.The results show that the gender difference among the teaching staffs in the schools surveyed is great, with 69.1% males; their academic titles are on the low side on average, with only 7.3% of PE teachers holding high-ranking titles; the class hours of PE course are reduced to be given to the courses of Chinese, Maths and English; there is a common lack of PE teaching facilities, with only 50% of the schools surveyed having standard plastic tracks and fields. On the side of the subjects of students, they argue that new ideas are absent in the PE teaching with monotonous and uninteresting teaching contents, resulting in that they do not like the course itself but do the physical activities outdoors. In addition, an amazing phenomenon was found that both boys and girls of the schools surveyed are fond of soccer,which is quite the opposite to the results found in other case studies. The reason for this is that the campus soccer program in Hanzhong City has been carried out well, with the female team winning the first place in the provincial soccer competition in 2015.With the report and analysis of the present situation and problems existing in the physical education of the schools surveyed, this paper points out that the education authority of Hanzhong City should make constant effort to optimize the qualifications of the PE teachers concerning gender balance, their educational structures and academic rankings, that more favorable policies should be put into place for their academic promotion, and that the organization and management of the extracurricular training work be part of the teachers paid jobs for uplifting their salary and their initiative as well. In addition, it is suggested that the teaching facilities for PE in schools be upgraded or renewed by regular maintenance, by rejuvenating the frequently used facilities or replacing the useless ones by raising supportive funds. As for the testing system and assessment of PE course, it is urgent that the reform be needed in the aspects of rationalizing the relationship between PE graduation test and the development of the students' physical abilities, reducing the backwash and the guiding force of the test to the PE teaching curriculum. It is also important that group teaching or teaching groups be adopted, the number of students per class be properly controlled to optimize the teaching results. In light of the popularity of soccer sport without much gender difference in Hanzhong City, this paper holds the view that more favorable policies and supportive efforts should be strengthened for the better development of this spotlighting sport, with school-based soccer training programs to be designed, put into place and further developed among junior middle schools.