Least favourite: The endurance run, with a lot of things tied for second place.
Favourite: I don’t think I had one. Maybe curling.
I was a big fan of PE, but this was absolute torture. Running sprints wasn’t my favorite thing, but at least running is a natural motion. I could never figure out what the hell was the point of contorting yourself into that position in the first place and then, to add insult to injury, trying to kick a ball! It seemed like most of the students (me included) ended up falling on their asses every ten seconds. Total waste of time.
My favorite activities were archery, volleyball, dodgeball, basketball, kickball, and floor hockey.
I loved PE!
How else was I gonna get to play ice hockey in Houston?
We never had swimming, wrestling, archery, hockey, etc. It was either running or ballsports. I sucked terribly at both, having no endurance and no coordination. My favorite part of P.E. was rainy days where we were allowed to use the weight room usually reserved for the wrestlers and football players. Now that was some useful physical education that actually had some bearing on real life exercise that one might do as an adult.
I am in the group of people that gym was both physically and emotionally scarring for me. I have a genetic spinal disorder (my spine is much longer than it should be related to the rest of my body, and the vertebra are not shaped right) In early school all we did was calesthenic…jumping jacks, sit ups (which I was not supposed to do, twice I had a vertebra dislocate and had to be taken to hospital, I could have been paralyzed…and they were PAINFUL) running laps and push ups (also not good for my back)
Later I hit puberty (HARD) 3 years before anyone else. Needless to say running and jumping jacks were mortifying and humiliating. When we began doing “tag” football I was always tagged by being groped (hard enough to leave bruises sometimes, I went through a lot of sexual assault and harrrassment)
Dodgeball the kid who was behind three grades (thus much bigge and stronger than anyone else) grabbed a basketball (by “mistake”) and hit me in the face as hard has he could from three feet away. Broke my glasses, broke my nose, broke my right orbital eye socket and right cheekbone and some of my braces snapped and actually cut through my lips and cheeks and were sticking out of my face from inside my mouth like sick parody of cat whiskers. I also had a double concussion from the basketball and from impacting my head into the bleachers behind me. I was hospitalized fo a week, had two surgeries, and he didn’t get in any trouble (he was good at basketball, and in Indiana if you are good at basketball you can do no wrong.) I took to purposefully eating gross massive breakfasts and taking syrup of ipecac before gym class and vomiting all over the teacher.
The only game I liked was volleyball because I could get away with elbowing people in the face really hard on pretext of trying to hit the ball. (more than a few of the sexual harassers wound up with broken noses)
I probably would have enjoyed swimming if our school had cleaned the gyms as they should. Instead I wound up with a severe case of plantars warts on my feet third week in (everyone got them but I was evidently very susceptable to them) I had to basically have the bottoms of my feet skinned to remove them and spent five weeks in a wheelchair.
The only reason I never made honor roll was gym. I quit even trying around sixth grade because it was never going to happen, I didn’t give a shit about GPA because that class would always insure that I never got a good score.
Gym class should be non competitive. Competitive sports should be volunteer after school activities because it’s a bunch of shit to expose students to even more bullying and to physical abuse and assault and then grade them based on how they do compared to other people and not on their own merit. (i.e. you show up and try, you should get an A for the day)
There are plenty of non contact non competitive things kids can do for physical activity.
Yeah, a very sore subject for me.
I’d argue that running and ball sports are a part of many, if not most adult exercise regimens.
as for sidhechaos and others with just absolutely horrifying gym stories, I am baffled and aghast. Maybe I’m too young but gym was never graded by performance. Gym was 100% participation and health could be aced with minimum effort. The only way you didn’t get an A was if you didn’t dress. If you showed up, you could trudge and lean your way into an A, no questions asked.
Also, if a guy slammed a girl in the face with a utility ball, much less a basketball, it would be a borderline hate crime, even if it was done by a 3-sport letterman. Again, my experience is tainted by my own upbringing, but the coaches where I grew up were very active in the disciplining of their players. The took it as their own personal responsibility to govern the athletes. An undisciplined student (who would even think of assaulting a girl with a ball) is an undisciplined player and undisciplined players make for shitty teams.
That’s my recollection as well. Pretty much just show up and you get an A.
Again, also mirrors my experience. Additionally, harsh as school could be, after about 7th grade or so if a boy, any boy, were to go after a girl with the intention of injury, even if that girl were particularly unpopular, he would have had a hell of a lot more to fear from the other boys than from any adults. Not that we were necessarily paragons of chivalry or anything, but there was at least some minimal modicum of general respect.
Anything that was just straight running. I was tall and fat, with enough dexterity to hold my own at just about anything else, but pure running always left me at the end of the pack. I hated that, but there were worse things- my grade school had all the second-graders do an annual dance festival, the preparation for which involved three straight months of square dancing (Illinois’ official state dance) to old records from the 50’s that were viewed as lousy even by the artists who made them, so I was not looking forward to second grade- but that is not what we got. That year was the height of popularity for “Achy Breaky Heart”. Some day, I will meet Billy Ray Cyrus and punch him in the face, and he will have no idea why.
I, however, will be exchanging high-fives with my seven-year-old self until the police drag me away.
When it comes to gender relations in PE, all I can recall is that the female teachers never encouraged bullying, and that on especially hot or cold days the girls all got to stay inside while the boys baked or froze.
My favorite was dodgeball. I love that game. Swing dancing wasn’t bad, either.
My least favorite was anything that involved the whole class because usually more than half the people didn’t want to participate, and that ruined the entire game. At least with dodgeball people were forced into participation if the didn’t want to get hit with a ball.
That no longer is the case (the latter I mean).
Anyways, I never really enjoyed any activity in PE except maybe basketball which was the only sport I wasn’t an EPIC FAIL at. I got used to lifting weights (although we never really continued it except for a few months last year) and running although I didn’t really like it. But the thing I especially hated are push-ups which I simply cannot do.
Loved football, softball, and gymnastics; and to a degree, basketball, archery, and swimming.
Hated running and soccer.
Our school had an outdoor skating rink in winter, so we’d bring our skates to school for PE. The guys would play hockey, but the girls didn’t. The female gym instructor would try to teach them ice dancing on the other half of the rink. Since I could figure skate, and had done a lot of ice dancing (more than the PE instructor, apparently), I would help the female PE instructor teach the girls how to ice dance.
Hmmm … play hockey with the guys, or hold pretty young ladies in the dance?
No brainer. 
I liked handball, four square, capture the flag, dodgeball, volleyball, and ultimate frisbee (we didn’t do tennis, but that would be on the list). Despite being obese in high school, I was good at sports. I have a bizarre athletic talent that I never quite figured out nor put to much use. I would show up varsity members of the volleyball team, and kids would stare at me wide-eyed as I pulled off acrobatic rolls, cartwheels, jukes, and feints in capture the flag. I won more ultimate frisbee and handball games than anyone else and playing four square with me meant you lost 7 in 10 times. Frequently I would be single-handedly pull a dodgeball victory out of what seemed like a certain loss. I was the obese kid that people picked first for their team, sometimes even above members of the actual sports team.
On paper I wasn’t super fast (though I did have decent natural endurance, I frequently lapped people during warmup runs), or incredibly tough, but I had an okay deal of finesse and even if I wasn’t fast, I was agile and had the mind built for planning a route and reacting to other people on the fly. Undoubtedly part of it was how into it I could get, I had no qualms about diving for the ball or running full speed into a wall if it accomplished my objective (my nickname was “Suicide <Jragon>” for a while because of how much I didn’t give a shit about getting injured).
When I was little I liked soccer, but it’s a fairly weak sport of mine. I mostly didn’t have the attention span to stay at the ready while the ball was on the other side of the field for 5 minutes. I was also miscast as a striker/forward, when I think I’m really meant to be a defender. I’m great at gaining possession of the ball, but crap at keeping possession and I’m definitely not a finisher. I was never into American Football, and very meh about basketball, though I was usually surprised by how fun it could be sometimes. Baseball bored me to tears, though (which is odd since I love kickball, maybe because I’m better at it).
Add me to the list of people who hated pretty much everything about P.E. We seemed to mostly do sports that involved a ball. I was not good at any of it. Like others have said, there was never any discussion of technique - it was just expected that you’d already know how to do that sort of stuff.
The sad thing is that I’m really pretty good at athletic stuff that doesn’t involve throwing, kicking, or catching a ball. I spent years doing gymnastics, I dove in high school and college, I love stuff like rock climbing, yoga, and martial arts, and I’m pretty happy just lifting weights or doing other sorts of strength training. We never did any of those sorts of things in P.E. class that I can recall. P.E. was the only class I ever got Cs in.
My favorite part of the year was the presidential fitness test. Remember that? The nine-minute run sucked, but there were two areas where I was finally the best in the class. The sit and reach test was fantastic - I could curl my fingers around the end of the box. I could also do more pull ups than anyone else. They made the girls do the flexed arm hang in grade school, which I thought was ridiculous, but even in high school I could do more pull ups than the boys. So, basically, my favorite parts of gym class were accomplished in about 5 minutes per year.
Oh, the sit-and-reach! That and archery were the only things I was ever good at in P.E.
I was another one who was always picked last. And made fun of(by students and teachers, alike), and pushed into the mud, and just generally everyone’s favorite target.
Another thing was, the teachers always seemed to be more interested in the entertainment of watching the talented kids play the game, and never actually helped those of us who didn’t even know how to play. They’d tell us what game we were playing, divide us into teams, and assign positions, and just assume everyone knew all the rules.
I remember being very young- maybe first grade, and there was a girl with a broken leg who got to go to the library during gym class. My mother would make me “say my prayers” every night, and I actually prayed to god that I’d get a broken leg, too.
P.S. sidhechaos that is just absolutely terrible, but not at all surprising to me, based on my own miserable experiences.
In elementary school I liked dodgeball. I was think enough that I was hard to hit. I even got a silver medal in it, my only sports medal ever.
I totally forgot about rope climbing - ick. Never got very far though. I also did not like shooting baskets or pull ups.
In high school we had at least 200 boys in gym class (I went to a big high school) so the teachers didn’t bother with us geeks. They had us try to shoot baskets first, we failed, and then they didn’t bother us with the other stuff for the president’s medal. Instead we ran track and edited the science magazine while doing so. Never had any problems beating the required time for that one.
With that many kids we did not have showers, so I was spared that indignity.
Favorite: Cageball. If you’ve never heard of it, there’s this jimungous ball about 5 feet across. It’s soft, but pretty heavy due to its size. You have two teams and you try to kick the cageball up against one of the end walls to score a goal. But you have to do it while crabwalking on your hands and feet, face up. No standing up, no running. It was great because we played boys vs girls and even though the girls always kicked our asses (they seem to take naturally to crabwalking), the close contact with the cuties in their short shorts seemed to take the sting out of it.
Dodgeball. Great way to get back at the kids you can’t stand.
Worst:
Volleyball. Christ, I can still hear the little pricks bellow “ROTATE!”.
Wrestling. I’d always get the guy with tremendous body odor and dripping in sweat. G-R-OSS.
This is about what I was going to say. Dodgeball (known as “murder ball” in my school) was the bane of my existence in junior high. All I could do was hope to be on the winning side, because my only throw was a high lob that barely made it across the width of the gym. Whereas the athletic guys, some of whom had stayed back a year or two and were already shaving, would be slamming the balls one-handed into the opposite bleachers so hard it was a wonder they didn’t explode.
My favorite was fencing, which we got to do as an elective in 12th grade.
I liked most things. I didn’t like team sports too much, though. I have a clear memory of being in seventh grade and playing basketball, and one of my teammates getting red-hot pissed because I missed a pass. We were playing in gym class. No one even care if we won or lost. She was furious, and that’s how it was - you couldn’t play for fun, or to learn the game. You’d better be damn good at it or you were just a bitch trying to mess it up for everyone.
Even that young I remember thinking, “Who cares if we win or lose? Can’t we have fun? Want to win? Join the damn basketball team. This is gym class.”
ETA: I did like sports, and playing…but there was a fair bit of racism and exclusion. None of the non-white kids ever got picked first. (We only had a few black kids in my school, so I’m talking about Asians and Hispanics, etc.) And if you weren’t popular you were always second class…I was always a little bit foreign because i hadn’t grown up in the community like most people had.
It’s a good thing high school is over!
Yes; it made me develop quite a lot of resentment towards the President as a kid.