Not really a GQ, as I imagine every elementary school PE teacher had his or her own dark motives for this. And I have no idea why it’s taken 20 years for me to suddenly wonder WHY they did this to us. Every year, from 1st through 6th grades, we did a unit on square dancing. SQUARE DANCING. Usually shoved between kickball and floor hockey (during which they armed us with hard plastic sticks and sent us charging up and down the gymnasium floor, but that’s a whole 'nother topic).
When I was a small child, nothing grown-ups did ever made any sense. So while I, along with everyone else my age, thought square-dancing was the dorkiest thing ever (and we had to hold hands with BOYS!!! Eww! Ick ick ick!), we generally just shrugged and played along. Gotta humor the adults, dontchaknow. Did anyone else have to learn to square dancing as a child? Did you ever hear why? I mean, why square dancing? Why not ballroom dancing or RiverDancing or line dancing or belly dancing or polka?
Now I’ve got “Turkey in the Straw” playing in my head. Bleagh.
In 5th grade, the first year I had an actual physical ed. class (before this the class would just go out and play dodge ball or run sprints or something a few times a week), the first unit we had was square dancing. I have absolutely no idea why they made us do this.
It can’t even be claimed as some kind of local “cultural” thing or such, me being in CA.
And the PE classes were segregated by gender, so your partner was of the same sex as you. This made it seem all the sillier.
Damn, that was 20 years ago. I wonder if they still do it.
We did it for May Day (which is Lei Day in Hawaii) and performed it for our parents. Various classes learned other dances. Some Japanese, some Hawaiian. There are pictures of me dressed up in a paper bag American Indian costume for 3rd grade May Day dances. Pretty common here.
We were tortured with square-dancing in elementary school as well! This was between 2nd and 6th grades at a largely-Hispanic elementary school in Miami in the 1980s, so it DEFINITELY wasn’t a cultural thing there. Never did make sense to me, except possibly as a way to teach us manners and how to interact with the opposite sex. Didn’t work very well, though.
I’ll never forget standing on the asphalt of the outdoor basketball courts on those sun-baked Miami afternoons, just wanting to go inside to play with Transformers or G.I. Joes, but having to deal with “The Virginia Reel” and other classics. I’ll never forget the announcer on the records (because this was the mid-'80s, and our school still had scratchy old record players), who sounded like The Count from Sesame Street. He could have been a Southerner, but to me it was Transylvanian all the way, and it strangely fit.
“HONOR YOUR PARTNER! AH! AH! AH!”
“HONOR YOUR CORNER! ONE! TWO! THREE!”
“ALL JOIN HANDS, CIRCLE TO THE LEFT! AH! AH! AH!”
“YOUR LEFT HAND AROUND HER! FOUR! FIVE! SIX!”
“YOUR RIGHT HAND AROUND HER! AH! AH! AH!”
I’m not saying it WAS The Count, or they were Sesame Street squaredancing records, but it sure sounded like him. It’s a wonder I ended up as a musician after those years when music was simply a torture device by evil grownups.
Here’s another one: in elementary school P.E., did anyone else ever have to stand in a circle and hold a giant parachute, and kids would be assigned to take turns running underneath the parachute? Tell me it wasn’t just us!
We had square dancing every year right through high school - from 1988 to 2001, and this in upstate New York where you probably couldn’t find a square dance to go to if you wanted to. Usually in the very early spring, when there was still snow on the ground and nothing else for us to do. We did the parachute thing too, but only in primary school. I always liked that. It was pointless, but fun.
Not in elementary school, but in high school. Pretty much everybody loved it because our PE classes were normally segregated by gender, so this was the one time all semester we got to have PE with the boys. It was also great that we didn’t have to change our clothes during that unit, aside from making sure we were wearing shoes that wouldn’t destroy the gym floor. My school also held hoe-downs at lunch on the last day before Christmas and again before Spring Break.
Some highlights:
Getting to dance with grade 10 boys when I was in grade 8. They seemed so grown-up at the time.
Said grade 10 boys competing with each other to see who could do the best job of spinning a grade 8 girl half-way across the gym. (Ok, maybe not a highlight, but definitely memorable.)
Everybody stomping so hard we made the record skip.
Making square dance raunchy at the hoe-downs.
However, even though all my friends and I loved it in that so cheesy it’s cool kind of way, I’ve used what I learned precisely twice since I graduated from high school, and one of those probably doesn’t count since it was just a bunch of us crashing the Christmas hoe-down our first year out of high school. Unfortunately, video tape exists of the other time, and it’s my friend Courtney and I tormenting our friend Alvira by singing “Elvira” and doing the Elvira dance. I really, really hope that the footage has been taped over, but with my luck I doubt it.
We did it in junior high school in Southern California. I went to a school with a largely Latino-based student body, so learning the “square dance” seemed totally out of place. While it was the only time we can mingle with the ladies during physical education class. I got stuck with the least attractive girl who spoke little English… sigh.
Yep, it’s been going on for a long time. I had to do it in sixth grade, 1958, in Mr. Warhime’s class in Woodmoor Elementary School in suburban Baltimore. No one liked it, no one knew why we had to do it. And, get this - in fourth grade, same school, Miss Danenberg’s class, we had to do the Minuet!!! Why? Why? WHY?
I think it was eighth grade for me. You know how it goes - all of the boys on one side of the room, not wanting to get involved, and all the girls on the other side, eager to get started. Not a pretty sight.
To this day, whenever I hear “do-si-do” I cringe and have a panic attack.
We never did square dancing in any of the three schools I attended. The thing is, I grew up in Tennessee. I’ve always wondered if the public schools in the area did square dancing - I was in parochial school.
As I recall out torture was called the “progressive barn dance”. It wasn’t dance and it sure wasn’t progressive - we had to hold hands with girls …yuck.
I live in Idaho, but even around here square dancing is not a common activity and it wasn’t even common back in the 1970s, as far as I know. We had to do square dancing in my earlier elementary years (I don’t recall doing it past the third grade). I hated it and thought it was silly, and I just hated the idea of having to dance around with other classmates as I hated most of them, too. The P.E. teacher also hated me (the feeling was mutual) and she had no patience for my lack of cooperation, so this made me hate square dancing (and just about everything else we did) even worse.
I never had to square dance, but in elementary school we did have one session where we learned country/western style dancing, and had to perform at an assembly.
We also got to learn this new thing called aerobics. Hated that with a passion.
I went to school to spend the afternoon with my daughter one day last week. At P.E. time, we went to the gym. The kids ran around and did streaches to warm up. Then the teacher says pair up – they were learning how to square dance. Apparently the practice of teaching youngsters to square dance if very much alive and well.
I remember learning the minuet in 1st grade, which was in 1976 – Bicentennial year. And also doing square dancing at least a couple more times in PE after that.
I’m hoping some teachers will pop in here to explain why to us, since nobody seems to know.
My burning question to those who have already posted… Have you USED these skills since you learned them? Ever? Even once?
Hm, I don’t think that’s specifically the reason. I went to Catholic school and I have memories of square dancing as well. And I’m in Michigan, I’ve never ever seen anything for an actual square dance.
So I’m like the OP. Sure, everyone’s saying whether or not they had squaredancing, but the burning question is: WHY? Why on earth do the majority of grade schools (mine was late 80s, early 90s so it’s still pretty recent) teach squaredancing, when there doesn’t even seem to be a regional cultural tie to it?
Good lord, we did it for like one class (80s here) and participation was so unspirited that we never did it again. I, of course, got stuck with the stinky girl–and she really did smell bad. And we had to do the parachute thing, too. One kid had to run under it.
These teachers want to know why I don’t wanna pay taxes to finance P.E…it’s cause I remember P.E.
We did the parachute thing in elementary school and square dancing in junior high. In high school, we did line dancing, ballroom dancing, a very quick intro to tap, and the Charleston (which, I must admit, was fun). The “well-rounded dance experience” (their terminology) made more sense than square dancing alone.
Classes weren’t segregated, but there were rarely the same number of different sexed people. That didn’t really matter, though. Most people just danced with their friends anyway. The real danger was if there was an odd number of people in the class and one was stuck dancing with the gym teacher.
(Small, very rural town in central Maine)