Jock straps on the floor, towel smacks on the ass, huge gang shower with 12 shower heads, naked testosterone fest every single day at my ultra-expensive previously-military prep school. Hairy manhood vs bald childhood at every turn of the locker room. Very Sketchy Indeed.
Coach: Every man in line for hernia check! NOW! Drop your shorts, turn you head to the side and cough while I grab a handful. Yeah.
Later, big surprise, Coach is a molester perv on trial in front of the whole town, got himself 25+ years, died in prison (he was however, the best teacher I ever had…weird). Headmaster blew his own brains out, seems he was in on the whole decade long perv fest.
California, high school class of '65. Showers were large with free standing pillars with four nozzles each. After initial embarrassment as nearly hairless freshmen, most everybody adopted a so-what attitude for the rest of their high school career. Anyway showers were mandatory, and the PE teachers gave enough time for them to get done. People who avoided the showers were thought to be a little weird.
Class of 2003. I had gym from grades 1-10 and in 12th. Not once did me or anyother boy in my class ever use a shower. Hell, even having both your shirt and pants off at the same time was unusual. Some of the sports teams (football, basketball, wrestling) did however shower after practice and once in a blue moon a jock would shower if he had a morning class. There was no pool (the district decided to build a cocktower instead :rolleyes:).
Also the female PE teacher had a habit of coming into the boy’s lockerroom when she thought we’d all left (or right after class). The storage room where the balls were kept was right past the toilets (no doors on the stalls :eek:) She caught a couple guys on the toilet and once walked in on 3 naked football players coming out of the showers.
Huh. As opposed to you free-swingin’ Europeans, the American boys locker room doesn’t live up to MY fantasies. (These stories, of course, must be a coverup for what REALLY goes on there.)
My daughter said they never showered after gym class in high school. No time! Of course the school she went to was the size of a shopping mall and the only real exercise the kids got was running running running from class A on the East part of the first floor to class B on the West part of the third floor…etc. etc. - carrying a 50 lb. bookbag AND their winter coats. (Lockers for extra books and winter coats were too far away to go back to during the day. They had to carry their winter coats because some worthless piece of human filth called in bomb threats almost every day for over a month. Everyone had to drop everything and evacuate the building.)
She did enjoy gym class. They taught lots of folk dancing!
We had gang showers in junior high and they were required, but everybody held their towel up to themselves right inside the shower and kept it up. The teacher didn’t complain about it. Yes, that meant we all came out with sodden towels, but…yeah. We just picked up a new towel on the way out.
In high school it wasn’t required. I don’t remember if anyone did it–I certainly didn’t.
I will concede that there are some sub-standard/ kickball-every-day PE teachers in the system. I’ve had a few myself. But PE is very likely the only physical education most students will ever have. Fast food, inactivity, and obesity are bad enough right now, how much worse would it be if a middle-aged overweight individual wanted to begin to get fit but knew nothing about target and resting heart rates, burning calories, proper and common weight training techniques, healthy/sustainable life-long diets, running routines, etc. et al.?
A decent PE course at a public school at least arms students with the knowledge for how to maintain and measure fitness. How can Straight Dopers be blowing off the importance of learning and shared knowledge? Perhaps, many of you had exclusively bad PE coaches, but there are many great ones that are outfitting young people with the know-how and skills they need to live a fit life. --and this is to say nothing of building competitiveness and teamwork.
If you say this is common these days, I’ll take your word for it and good on modern PE teachers.
But when I went to High School…let’s see…a quarter century ago, now - this wasn’t even remotely the case. I don’t think I ever heard any PE teacher talk for more than five minutes at a time in a “class” and I knew all half dozen or so ( most were football coaches I met in my sophmore year ). No dodgeball, but just one activity to the next ( softball, soccer, volleyball, swimming, tennis, the dreaded and pointless running of the laps, basketball, a little boxing when the girls had a seperate activities, etc. ). We did have the annual mandated physical fitness tests, but there was no discussion about any of that either - they just wrote down how many chinups you could do or how much you bench-pressed and moved on.
Hell I might have actually enjoyed PE, or at least disliked it ever so slightly less, if they had actually discussed health. And most of the gym teachers were even nice enough guys. A couple were even science teachers.
You seriously think we learned any of these things? We played semi-baseball, semi-basketball, semi-football, ran laps, did basic calisthenics, did the mandated physical fitness tests, and in younger years, had a lot of free time. That was pretty much it. We didn’t even have tennis or soccer (forget about swimming). Not that I wanted any of this, you understand; I’m glad that it is not required past middle school (and to my knowledge, absolutely no one does it) as long as you play a sport for two semesters (I play tennis). There was absolutely no “education”. Of course, my mileage may vary because I go to a private school, but I don’t think the local public schools’ programs are any better.
Is this a whoosh, or do you honestly believe kids learn these things in gym class?
Here’s a story about my high school gym experience. This is far from the worst story I could tell about gym, but I think it demonstrates how very much my coaches cared about teaching me about sports, fitness, competitiveness, and teamwork.
At the beginning of the tennis unit (I had never played before) I was judged to be so bad that I was told to go practice hitting the ball against a wall with one or two other rejects while the rest of the class played against each other. Those of us assigned to wall practice were left largely unsupervised and spent a fair amount of time “accidentally” hitting our balls off into the empty soccer field and slowly walking out to retrieve them.
Yeah, I sure needed a shower after that. :rolleyes:
After several weeks of this, the unit concluded with an all-class tournament. At this point my partner (another reject) and I had still never played any tennis game ever at all in our lives. I couldn’t even hold a racket properly. We were promptly beaten by each of the other pairs we were assigned to play against in the tournament and came in at the absolute bottom of the final rankings. Our failure to score meant we also failed the unit, although we were offered the chance to write a short paper about the history of tennis in order to make up the points. I think my partner blew it off, but I did write the paper. Probably my best ever gym grade.
It’s a shame they didn’t just let me write the paper at the outset. I’d have learned exactly as much about tennis and could actually have done something useful with all that time I instead had to waste hitting (or not) a tennis ball against the wall.
The only time I ever had to deal with showers after gym was in 6th grade when I spent about 6 months up in Oregon. Most horrible experience of my life. They MADE you take a shower. As in the gym teacher was watching to make sure it was actually done. I was so super shy in those days, the thought of flashing my bra while changing shirts was enough to cause panic. Stripping down nude to shower? No way. I refused. Absolutely refused. Well, ended up failing PE that term because if you didn’t shower you got your grade docked. Assholes…
Strangely I don’t remember there being much of an outcome. The truth is that with all those students crammed into a small lawn probably only a few people could even see us there in our towels. Like much of high school I think it was the fear of what other people *might *think that really stressed me out, not the reality.
At my high school (Australia, class of '07) we didn’t even have a locker room. Students simply wore the school P.E. uniform (polo shirt with school logo, tracksuit/shorts) to school on days when they had P.E. lessons.
When our school netball team had practice after school, we changed from uniforms to P.E. uniforms in the toilets - inside cubicles, that is. Oddly enough, despite a certain percentage of the student body being in P.E. uniform on any given day, the teachers were quite strict about how after school practice wasn’t regular P.E. and didn’t give rise to the ‘privilege’ of wearing P.E. uniform. Teams who had practice before school were allowed to be in P.E. gear through shrugs.
Our lessons weren’t usually hugely rigorous either, but in general things were better than what those in the U.S. are describing. We did at least have one ‘health’ theory lesson each week to match with what we were doing - i.e. the rules of the sport we were learning, or some basic biology about the cardio system, a bit of first aid, etc. Occasionally we did exert ourselves much more, like when we were running trials for sports carnival events, or something. I guess it would have been more hygienic to have showered after those lessons, or at least to have changed afterwards, but I guess you just get used to what you get used to. I don’t remember sweating a great deal, anyway - being temporarily red in the face was more my concern. Our lessons were generally co-ed, although there were times when we would combine with another class and separate into male and female groups - usually if we were doing a sport like football or something where the guys would have just dominated in a co-ed group.
Just my Aussie $0.02! For what its worth, I went on exchange to a German school for a few months, and took compulsory P.E. while I was there. The girls and guys were separated, and since the girls had to do things like ‘Turnen’ (gymnastics, like jumping over saddle-horses and stuff) instead of sports games, none of us really worked up a big sweat there either. There were change-rooms, but I don’t think they had showers in them.
I just want to reiterate what others have said. Admittedly I have been out of school for awhile but we never, and I mean never, learned anything useful in gym.
The only good thing was as long as you showed up it was essentially impossible to fail. The minimum level of participation required was ridiculously low. We didn’t have tennis but I suspect as long as you held the racket in your hand and swung in the same area code as the ball you would have passed.
I’m pretty sure gym was Pass/Fail for everyone, if you showed up breathing (and dressed out) more often than you didn’t show up, you passed.
I’m also confused about everyone saying gym was “always” before lunch, or “always” last period. How does this work, does the whole school have gym at the same time for all four years?
We could have gym pretty much any time from maybe 2nd period to 8th (last), and it varied from year to year and maybe semester to semester, depending on the schedule of your other classes.
(Pre-soaped disposable sponges? The mind, it boggles.)
- this wasn’t even remotely the case. I don’t think I ever heard any PE teacher talk for more than five minutes at a time in a “class” and I knew all half dozen or so ( most were football coaches I met in my sophmore year ). No dodgeball, but just one activity to the next ( softball, soccer, volleyball, swimming, tennis, the dreaded and pointless running of the laps, basketball, a little boxing when the girls had a seperate activities, etc. ). We did have the annual mandated physical fitness tests, but there was no discussion about any of that either - they just wrote down how many chinups you could do or how much you bench-pressed and moved on.