Swimming skills

23 comments

1. Grades dont exist anymore so even the children who just float around heads down until class is over get a gold medal now.

2. Swimming pools are disappearing here and new ones can’t be built because of NIMBY/’Wie gaat dat allemaal betalen?!’ mindset.

3. I can’t ride a two-wheeled bicycle, I will never take for granted any common skills such as swimming or cycling.

4. I remember swimming being mandatory at school… and even then I remember some people just sucked at it, just normal for any skill.

5. It could also have been in a so called “new belgian”

6. At what point do you decide to jump into a pond, when you know you can’t swim? What’s the decision making there?

7. It’s harder to practically organize swimming classes nowadays. At least that’s what my friends in primary education tell me. Partially because it’s more expensive to organize due to private public coops monopolizing all new pools making it more expensive. Partially because some simply aren’t replaced at all. Combined with fewer teachers causing larger class groups, which makes it harder to safely organize them, it also means less attention to individual students.

   This basically just causes everyone I know signing their kids up for private swimming classes.

8. I am 21 and still had swimming classes, but in our pool there also were other schools, schools from other cities that don’t have their own pool, and now they’re renovating our pool so the current kids and teens have to go elsewhere and those that went here also need to go to that elsewhere so another pool in the region is overpopulated. It was always chaos because the acoustics in the building are very bad and with lots of other kids and big groups splashing and swimming around, it was hard to hear instructions, took a while to get ready to get in the pool and go back to school…Usually only 45 or so minutes of actual swimming if even that, and that for maybe 6 or so times a year (whenever the school managed to reserve pool space for our classgroup). I think it’s just that the schools and therefore the pool space is overpopulated, and lots of pools build in previous decades needing renovations, so swimming classes go bye bye. Because most would already not drown anyway, in early secundary school lots of swimming classes got cancelled because there wasn’t enough space and time and the primary schools or lower year got priority. My mom found it very important for me to learn how to swim so for several years I got separate classes in the evenings after school, so I was at points in the better half of the classgroup at swimming. If only I didn’t have slight breathing and motor skill problems.

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   And of course, gym classes in general but especially swimming is a very bad space for bodyshaming and bullying. I got my period pretty early and general puberty so I skipped lots of swimming classes in late primary school because of that, and other kids also were often “sick” on days we’d go swimming because they were ashamed of their body, or already weren’t good swimmers so they got bullied for being bad swimmers which then only aggravated the issue.

9. in my area (knowing from family’s with small kids i work for). there aren’t enough swimming pools compaired to classes that like to give swimming classes, so kids get 2 swimming lessons per year now over here… when i was a kid we had swimming lessons every 2 weeks so yeah.

10. I’m 20 and we had swimming classes every other week for all of primary school. But even after that, some people still couldn’t swim.

11. From the article
    > Vermoedelijk kon geen van beiden goed zwemmen, meldt de Duitse nieuwssite ‘Aachener Nachrichten’.

    So they couldn’t swim well. More likely they knew how to do breaststroke in a swimming pool, which gave them enough confidence to jump in a lake. But lakes are deep, cold, dark, have undercurrents….

    Plenty of people that knew how to swim have drowned because they thought a lake was just a swimming pool out in nature..

12. Closure of public swimming pools have led to many schools simply not being able to offer it.

13. In India, I’ve seen many people die because they didn’t know how to swim.

    Over there it’s a daily occurence that a small boat would capsize while crossing the Guanga and most, if not all of the people, would drown not very far ashore.

    I’ve witnessed an Indian guy attempting to have fun on the beach. And then being taken by the sea. An israelian guy attempted to rescue him and they both died.

14. Damn, I was doing kilometers in the pool every day in my preteens.

    Even though I don’t expect my son to be a competitive swimmer, I’ll make sure he can swim like one.

    I don’t want to imagine losing him to drowning because I did almost drown myself at 12 because I almost hit 50m without breathing… Ended up in the hospital for 3 days. I was rescued by 3 classmates and my teacher.

15. When I went to Disney world five years ago, the hotel pool was basically constant rescues. Just every hour at least some kid would jump in with no idea it was even dangerous. Not little kids, who were supervised and wore life jackets, but the 10-16 range like this article. Old enough to go to the pool alone but not in the pool at all.

16. It isn’t mandatory. You’ll go to lessons but if you don’t want to swim, they can’t force you.

    For reference: although I went to the pool in school, me actually being able to swim took until I had private swimming lessons in high school. In elementary school, I’d just have a meltdown if someone tried to force me to swim, so teachers left me alone.

17. The fact he never appeared above water makes me think it has more to do with a cold shock or something like that.

18. IIRC, it’s still in the “eindtermen” of elementary school that pupils are able to swim a small distance.

19. Mo wukken urpel springt er in da sop als hij nie kan zwemmen?

20. Swimming is still mandatory at school but kids will have 2 hours of swimming lessons once a week for maybe six months. There is no way you can learn to swim in such a little or short time especially since they’ll only get taught for a few minutes each. Most of the time is spent waiting in line or fooling around until the teacher has time for you

21. Temperature shock?

22. You might be a good swimmer in a swimming pool, that doesn’t translate to ponds one to one.

23. My primary school drove us 45 minutes to the Netherlands for swimming lessons. You might not know this but the Dutch take swimming lessons very seriously and if you couldn’t get an A-degree (which means that you can swim well enough to be in the water on your own), you were offered extra after school lessons.
    Being able to swim is very important imo, it should be mandatory.