Another last-picked-for-everything checking in.
My middle school teacher wasn’t a total asshole like many of those mentioned here, but he was a strange fellow. He graded us entirely on whether we remembered to bring our gym shorts, whether said shorts were actually clean, and whether you took showers when required to do so. He’d actually stand outside the shower, checking off names from a list when students entered the shower. Many of the worst athletes would get A’s just because they kept themselves clean. Some of the good athletes never washed their gym shorts and got D’s and F’s.
This teacher also made us play every stupid game he ever read about, invented, or, possibly, hallucinated. Two that I remember were American Ball and Trash Can Ball. Of all the sports we played during those three years that in some way involved trash cans, Trash Can Ball was arguably the best. There were many more forgettable games that didn’t seem to make much sense, and that we only tried once. Sometimes the rules would change as the game progressed. Invariably, the revised rules only made the games stupider.
For some reason, the gym and music teachers decided to get together once a year for two weeks to teach us all to square dance. Yes, square dance. In a suburban Pennsylvania public high school in the 1990s. I still can’t fathom a reason for them having wasted our time in such an profoundly stupid way.
Since it took over both the music and gym classes, that meant that we spent an hour every goddamn day for two weeks listening to “Sixteen Tons” and “King of the Road” (played on a record player that was really LOUD, but sounded really BAD) while do-se-do-ing, skipping around like idiots, and forming up in bizarre little clusters of backwards-walking teenagers. Surreal. It didn’t help that everyone else seemed to possess enough coordination to do this adequately, but I was a lanky, stumbling lummox.
Except for square dancing, though, I was always optimistic about an impending gym class. I might be last picked and taunted relentlessly, but I knew I’d show them when I hit that game-winning home run, or tossed that red, rubber, playground ball smack dab into the geometric center of the cafeteria garbage can. Of course, those moments pretty much never came, but that never made me stop trying.
Mandatory weightlifting in high school gym class was what made me stop trying. Adament refusal to lift weights by myself and a couple of other misfits who could barely bench press the empty bar finally convinced the teacher to put us in an alternative program. That meant that we got to spend the hour walking the partially-wooded trail around the school, completely unsupervised. Our alternative athletic activities consisted mostly of seeing whose lungs could hold the most pot smoke.
