We only had one required semester of PE all through high school. Most kids took it their freshman year, and didn’t shower afterwards. I filled up my schedule my first three years of high school, and ended up taking it the second semester of my senior year*. I was the only one who showered… but I was further along the stink-scale that the 14 year old kids in the class with me, and it would have been unimaginable going into the next class smelling of funk.
Good times. There’s not many times in a 5’11 guy’s life where he can play center and dominate the boards…
Jr High & High School locker rooms can be violent. Especially if you are a virtual walking skeleton, as I was. 6 feet tall, about 90 pounds. No, I’m not exaggerating. Former asthma patient, here.
When I moved to Huntsville, Alabama, I joined High School JROTC. No gym required. Best thing that ever happened to me.
Class of 2001. While there was technically a one-year PE requirement in high school, I got it out of the way by doing it for three weeks in two consecutive summers (four hours a day, 8 to 12.) First year I walked or rode an old bike to school (less than 1 mile away) and the next year I had a car. So it was get up, go to school, come home, take a shower and have lunch, and then go back to school for band practice (one of the reasons I was taking summer school PE to begin with.) Even then, you didn’t get really sweaty in June in Albuquerque (it’s hot but dry, and normally with a high in the 90s) and we weren’t outside all the time anyway.
In middle school, 6th grade PE was only six weeks long. The school was doing some weird rotating electives thing you had to take, so six weeks PE, six weeks Home Ec, six weeks typing, etc. I honestly don’t remember if I had PE the next year, but I don’t think so. If I did, I’m pretty sure it was the last class of the day. 8th grade PE was some time in the afternoon (same school system, different school.) There were showers there, but nobody ever used them and there wasn’t time anyway.
There were a couple of shower stalls in the gym in my small high school, but we certainly didn’t have TIME to wait in line, wash, dress…after gym was over, it was a scramble to get out of the loathesome royal blue gym suit into regular clothes and get to the next class. (The gym suits all stayed in the lockers all year long, too. If you took the thing home to wash, and if you forgot it, you couldn’t participate in whatever was going on in class and had to make it up! - by running around a field 10 times or something.)
I made a career out of skipping P.E. in high school, so I wasn’t even in gym, let alone the showers. From what I heard second-hand, students were supposed to shower, but few did.
I never thought anything about it at the time, but looking back I’m a little shocked at that. I’m not sure teenagers are the best judges of their own personal hygiene.
I’d be curious to hear from Dopers who are high school teachers – when kids come to your class after gym class, are you wishing they would have used the showers?
Was in middle school in the mid to late 70s, high school into the early 80s, public school in upstate NY throughout.
We dressed out for gym and both schools had showers but we weren’t required to use them. I don’t remember anyone doing so in middle school, a couple of guys might have in high school.
As others have said it pretty much never seemed necessary: there were a total of 42 minutes available for gym class, 5 minutes on each end for dressing out, another 5-10 minutes for taking attendance, screwing around, having the coach explain to us what we were going to be doing and there wasn’t much time left to actually DO anything. Forget about when we were on split sessions because our high school was being expanded…IIRC we didn’t even have time to dress out then.
Gym was a waste of time, period. I think I broke a sweat maybe once or twice in 8 years. Seriously, when you have 45 guys playing softball for 28 minutes you probably aren’t even going to get up to bat. And of course my friends and I used to figure out ways we could do as little as we could possibly get away with. The coach certainly didn’t care, it made his job easier.
Nope. There were showers but no one ever used them (I’m thinking they were pretty nasty-looking due to neglect). The coaches never made us, and they never gave us enough time to shower anyway.
I remember being sweaty but not enough to raise a funk, so I didn’t really care.
We had to wear those awful bloomer things with attached ‘modesty skirts’ in the 60s and early 70s. They were bright banana yellow so it was impossible to sneak away to smoke or hide from the crazy gym nun and there was no chance we’d leave the school grounds looking like that. When it was windy the skirt part always blew up over our heads, but thanks to the voluminous bloomers underneath our modesty was not at risk, and either was our chastity once anyone saw us in those.
This isn’t really ugly enough to get the picture but the style is the same.
My recollection is that showering for gym class started in high school when I was younger (US, early ´80s). Some folks did and some did not.
My children both shower after gym class, it is mandatory beginning in the first grade. I think they shower together, boys and girls, though I have never asked come to think of it.
The schools all walk the kids over to the city gymnasuim and pool for gym class. At the same facility, the kids do all shower together both before and after swim lessons, as there is only one large shower room. Before they shower with suits on, of course, afterwards is about half suits on and about half suits off. They also nominally have a boys and girls´ dressing room but most of the kids pay absolutely no attention and get dressed wherever.
My sons are also expected to shower in the public showers in the changing rooms after soccer matches – all the other kids do – but I have drawn the line there as the showers are mostly just disgusting. Dutch institutions generally live up the the obsessively clean stereotype but the showers at most of the soccer clubs are the exception.
We had showers available, both in the locker room where I went to Middle School (Which was in San Diego, CA) and in the High School I went to (in Vancouver, WA)
Never once did I see anybody use them; least of all use one myself. In both schools the showers were the same completely open style, with a several shower pillar type deals with about 7 showerheads on the top in a circle.
My freshman year I made sure to take PE as my last class of the day so that I didn’t have to worry about it. My sophomore year- PE was only required for one semester- so I didn’t worry about it as much. After that we were not required to take PE.
I was also on our High School swimming team- we did shower after practice/Meets. This was not at the school though but a community pool. This had the same type of shower pillar deal, but only one… so all the swimmers from 3 schools had to share it… so you were in and out pretty fast. I would usually try to hop straight in from the pool so I never took my trunks off, but this was a matter of convenience. Others did. Meets weren’t as bad though, since you could go take a shower and get dressed if all your events were done. So if you got done early- you could shower in a relatively quiet locker room.
High School for me was 89-93. And, if it needs said- I am a boy.
We rarely showered. Our PE class was usually at the end of the day, last period or next to last. And it also depended on what we did in PE. The teacher had us do the minimal exercises then we’d play a sport. Basketball could be sweaty but volleyball or whiffle ball (the most fun sport we played) usually wasn’t.
I went to high school from 1998-2002. Once we hit grade six or seven we were told to slap on deodorant. The high school locker room had showers, but not nearly enough for all thirty girls, and we were given only a few minutes to change and get to our next class. I think the one term I had to take gym it was at the end of the day, anyway. (What an incentive to skip!)
Nope, never once, at any level of schooling. At my middle school it wasn’t even an option – the showers hadn’t been used for so long there that they’d started using them as a storage space.
I was a sub for a year, and I don’t remember ever noticing it. As some people have said, I think most of the kids just didn’t break much of a sweat in gym class. And I know they didn’t shower (at least the boys) because I subbed in gym class, too, and none of them ever used the shower (except one boy, once, who’s parents were not-coincidentally European! I remember because the other boys were teasing him about it).
Never got sweaty enough to really need it, though I did have a washcloth and deodorant in my gym locker (which were permanent, year-round assigned lockers to make it convenient) and I’d wash up that way if I felt I needed it.
The showers were in a bit of a dimly-lit corridor cutting through the locker room, and most had no curtain and the ones that did, the curtains were kind of grimy and gross. I have no idea if the showers even worked… they had a distinct air of disuse about them. I do know that getting hot water out of the sinks was nearly impossible, so I had no expectations that hot water out of the showers was ever going to happen! We had no pool, so washing away the chlorine wasn’t a concern for us. I think more of the guys showered regularly, but I only recall a couple of girls using them once, on a dare.
Yes, indeed. Way too private. Along with most other girls, I remember developing the skills of being able to change your bra and shirt without ever, at any point, actually being topless. Even so, for those less bashful there really was no time to shower if you wanted any hope of getting to your next class in time.
How is it that no one has mentioned the hair issue??? I went to high school in the midwest in the late 80s - the era of big hair. High school girls regularly spent an hour on their hair and make-up before school in the morning. You could not have paid those girls enough to take a 30 second shower and then head off to their next class with dripping wet hair and no make-up. However, virtually all of them kept a cordless curling iron and full make-up kit in their gym locker for touch ups. If you sweated during gym class, you weren’t doing it right. Cool people did not exert themselves during gym.
I was a flat-haired, make-up-less rebel, but I hated gym class too much to do anything that would make me sweat.
We were supposed to take showers after PE, starting in 7th grade. I even had one female teacher who tried to enforce the rule. It was humiliating. I was only 12. All the girls stood in a line wrapped in towels, and had to flash her before heading into group shower to prove we were naked. Before that, most of us went in with bras and panties on, hidden under our towels and took fake showers.
There are just so many stages of development at that age. I don’t know why schools just don’t get with the program and offer private stalls in the showers.
A lot more kids would have taken them.
As I got older, most of the girls did take one, or at least did a quick rinse off.
No one was spying on us either. shudder, I still remember that woman looking at all of us naked…she had a beard BTW. Just sayin…
