On the surface that is all well and good. The problem is that most school systems don’t money or the manpower to have one teacher for each individual section not to mention the scheduling. It’s just unrealistic. Our school didn’t have this but a high school girlfriend went to a school in downtown London, Ontario which did have two streams of phys-ed. One was typical 3/4 gym 1/4 health and the other was an exercise class where you basically spent the class at a local gym after you design a workout program. I thought that was a great idea. Two streams is about as good as you can realistically get at any high school around where I’m from.
Regarding bullying. That is always going to be a little bit of an issue; kids in high school are assholes and the fact of the matter is, there isn’t anything that demonstrates the difference between those that excel and those that don’t like sports. It is just the nature of the beast. Teachers should never tolerate it, however, and a teacher that does shouldn’t be a teacher for very long.
Compared to the above, my PE experience was a piece of cake. Granted, I hated every second and couldn’t wait until Junior year of HS when it was elective and I would never ever have to do it again. (Until college when I stupidly chose a school that required 8 quarters of PE to graduate; I had to break my leg to get a waiver-but I digress.) Anyway, even in HS, we did get credit for trying. I never understood how a friend of mine got a D in PE; I had to be the worst in the class and I always got A’s.
I certainly wasn’t good at any of it. In grade school I hated PE because they made us do gymnastics and I was terrified of doing flips. Meanwhile, I was always second-to-last picked (my friend with CP was last), always the absolute slowest in running, always the least coordinated and the only girl in 7th grade who didn’t wear a bra.
The difference in HS, though, was that we had decent choices. I actually enjoyed taking self-defense, and weight lifting. In fact, the only thing I hated about them was that some idiot decided that at least half of the time had to be spent running around a track and I just don’t run well, or fast, or at all if I can help it. I also remember “playing” badminton, because my partner and I didn’t score one point during the entire class (?2 weeks). My example of how things could be improved, though, can be demonstrated by when I took swimming. The teacher had us set our own goals to reach by the end of the class. I’m a slow swimmer, so I decided that I wanted to be able to do a length (about 1/2 regulation size) underwater. Other students wanted to meet certain time goals. Pretty much everybody worked hard and met their goal and not only passed but gained some sense of accomplishment. Even today, when I know I suck at all forms of physical activity, I still think of myself as a good swimmer.
As to tracking, I even hate the idea of grading elementary school children but the kids are not that stupid. I knew at the age that I was a terrible athlete but at least I was smarter than the other kids.
My best year for PE was the year I tore a ligament playing soccer. When I returned to school, they stuck me in the weightroom with the football players and told me to lift weights as well as I could while working around the injury. The football players were actually really nice to me, and encouraged me to get stronger. It probably helped that I wasn’t in any serious competition with them (I’m female), and that they were there for a purpose of their own other than just to kill time.
My worst PE experience, on the other hand, was in junior high. I got whooping cough and missed six weeks of school, and then was out of PE for another six weeks. The day my doctor’s note “expired” happened to be the last day of the “track and field” unit. My teacher ordered me to run a mile, which I did as best I could, although I had to walk the second half in order to be able to breathe. Once I finished, she announced that that had been my “pre-test” (that everyone else did on the first day), and that I could now do it again for my “post-test” - and that I would be graded on my improvement. I’m embarrassed to say that I did it (walking most of the way), rather than telling her to go piss up a rope. I’m pretty sure that my mother complained to the school administration, although I don’t remember if anything happened because of it.
I agree with the poster who said some of those teachers should have been fired. Although most of these stories seem to have taken place a long time ago. I wonder how kids feel about gym class today.
This thread makes me really glad I attended the school I did. Each gym class had three teachers who ran their own units, which were rotated to increase the number of options (golf, swimming, bowling, tennis and snowshoeing were some of the more off-beat choices).
I graduated in 2003. AFAIK most(all?) of my PE teachers senior year are still there. I’m surprised that so many schools actually seemed to have different types of PE classes :eek: . The only choice we ever had was when the male PE teacher and the female PE teacher did different activities and they gave us a choice (I always picked the her).
I always hated PE because whenever we’d play a team sport, I’d always be stuck with the apathetic kids who’d rather sit down. Why waste a perfectly good day playing a sport to sit down? And I didn’t care about winning, but they could at least put some effort into it so it didn’t seem as if I was running around for nothing.
I played field hockey in high school. This is to note that while PE was not fun for me, I did eventually get to be physically able enough to participate in a team sport for five years, and I was a useful member of the team, first as left half and then goalie. However. I am physically pretty clumsy and I had moderately bad childhood asthma.
In sixth grade, for some reason my school decided it needed to send some kids to the ‘special’ inter-school track meet. I was picked to be one of those kids. We had a couple of ‘training’ sessions that mostly involved a PE teacher I didn’t know yelling at us for being uncoordinated, and then the meet.
I didn’t really have running shoes and didn’t ask my parents to buy them for me because I was painfully, excruciatingly anxious about our financial situation and didn’t want to make it worse. So I turn up for the track meet in white lace up flats. Except for the kids from my school, all of the competitors were developmentally delayed or seemed otherwise mentally, rather than physically, challenged. I was entered in three, I think, events. I came last in all of them, wheezing and staggering with my unhappy asthmatic lungs across the finish line.
Seriously, I still have no idea wtf any adult in that situation was thinking. It’s completely surreal. Even at the time, while I was horrified and embarrassed I just had to find it funny too. Thankfully it didn’t put me off for trying out for hockey next year (high school being grades 7-10 where I grew up) and thus having a fine motivation to own real running shoes (and shoes with cleats!) and manage my asthma better.
The rest of PE classes were pretty horrid because of the whole crappy coordination thing, but really no one much teased me and I always got A for effort, even when pulling in straight Ds for being unable to, oh, hit the ball in any sport where it wasn’t moving along the ground.
A) Horror, I suppose, although funny in retrospect:
Middle school gym class, taking turns on the rope climb. My turn came and I struggled about halfway up the rope when suddenly there was a horrible wrenching noise as the rope (and I, dangling) began shuddering and dropping groundward. It didn’t detach and I didn’t fall, but at least a couple of feet of exposed chain were visible at the top of the rope where it had slipped from its fixture in the ceiling panel, and I jumped to the mat.
I wasn’t the heaviest kid in class (and by today’s standards, probably relatively slender) but I was overweight for my height, so much mockery was made over my fat ass having “broken” the rope.
B) Non-horror yet gym-related:
For reasons I can’t remember there were always a number of orange road cones present in the gym, which students would occasionally pick up and blow into like a bugle. One of the gym teachers (who, as a group, always seemed to favor creative, ad-hoc forms of punishment more than did other teachers) announced that the next person who did that would be made to stand in a corner of the gym and blow into the cone for the remainder of the class period.
Unfortunately nobody took her up on the offer. I really wanted to see someone forced to stand in a corner and honk into a pylon for nearly an hour. ( I suspected that the gym teacher would’ve quickly regretted the idea.)
*C) Gym-related honest question for research purposes: *
Did anyone have a female gym/PE teacher who didn’t seem like an obvious lesbian?
I must say I did enjoy my PE class in 11th grade. The class always started with everyone dressing out, then roll call, then a lap around the parking lot. During the lap around the parking lot, my friend and I would slip into his car, wait until the other kids went back in the gym, then drive to McDonalds. We passed PE, too, because our grades apparently depended on attendance and dressing out, and we were right there, wearing shorts, during the roll call.
PE wasn’t that fucking bad. Yeah, I sucked at basketball, excelled at baseball, and came in in-between in most other sports. Is it really all that traumatic to have some dumbass pe teacher yell at you?
Does PE deserve a “horror story” thread?
Anyone over the age of 20 who is still harboring PE disenchantment may have some serious issues. It’s just fucking PE.
Imagine, if you will, that rather than being (as you describe) pretty decent at every sport but one, you are a young person with zero athletic ability who flounders at every sport, who is embarrassed about his body appearance, for whom tests of physical strength or endurance inevitably lead to public humiliation and laughter.
Add to that the certainty of being picked last for any team sport, and the occasional overt derision of the teachers themselves, many of whom display obvious favoritism (at best) or outright sadism (at worst).
If you have enough imagination to place yourself there, the word “horror” might seem less hyperbolic. I wouldn’t say I “harbor PE disenchantment” now that I’m in the hale, hearty, healthy prime of my manly life (wish I could take that Presidential fitness test NOW!) but I also haven’t forgotten how many of my most miserable school experiences took place in the gymnasium or on the field.
No real horror stories here. Our PE classes seemed to focus mainly on playing team sports, which weren’t my first choice in things to do. But while I obviously wasn’t going to go on to a pro career in anything, I also wasn’t the worst in the class. I was squarely in the middle, ability-wise. Because I was neither a standout athlete nor a total klutz, no gym teacher ever learned my name, and if by chance some gym teacher needed my attention, I’d end up being called “You There.” As in, “I want Smith and Jones on this side of the gym; and Brown and You There on that side.”
I do remember one day when the teacher–who wasn’t the most tactful person in the world–decided we were going to play touch football. To his credit, he did try to separate us by ability, but his way of doing it was not to everybody’s taste. He basically said, “Okay, we’re going to play a couple of games of touch football. He-men will play their game at this end of the field; wimps will play theirs at the other end.”
I would have expected the teacher to make the offending student wear one of the orange cones on his head as sort of a dunce cap. That’s where I thought this story was going, anyway.
Back when I was in High School, you first attended as a 9th grader. I was short for my age back then, so it was not uncommon for me to be stuck in a towel hamper, covered with wet towels, then being pushed into the girl’s showers.
Ah, the memories…
We also played a version of Dodge Ball called Killer Ball. It was reserved for rainy days. The coaches would herd everyone into the gym, close the divider, and put out a couple of large bags of half-inflated volley balls.
The welt that resulted from a ball thrown by a Senior would take a couple of weeks to go away.
I had a similar situation (in a non-gym class). Several years before I encountered him, my brother and my cousin (among others) had this teacher at a high school and his “methods” got him brought before the school board at the request of (among others) my dad and my aunt. When this teacher read my name on the first day of class, I noticed that he looked at me kind of funny. I asked my mother why he would have done that & she gave me the background story. I got an easy A in that class!
I have to give a shout out to my PE instructor, Mr. Orwig, from 2nd through 8th grades. He was the best teacher I’ve ever had, bar none. And I hated PE. I was a fat, lazy kid with zero interest in sports. But Mr. Orwig didn’t mock or bully kids like me, and he wouldn’t allow other kids to do it, either. He’d encourage us, but he wouldn’t shame us. And wasn’t just the PE teacher. He was also the chess coach, arguably the best middle school/Jr. High chess coach in North America, to judge by the number of trophies we brought home for him. Plus, he ran the school sci-fi club, and was the substitute science teacher. I’ve never met another teacher who cared as much about his students as he did. Simply an amazing guy, and still teaching at the same school.
I sure did. If all of my (admittedly few–I think only two) female gym teachers weren’t, I’d be very surprised. One of them was very nice and a great teacher–the other one was older and very drill-sergeantish.
As far as my story goes, I hated PE in grade school and junior high. I was terrible at it–a lousy runner, not good at any team sports (being an only child with an overprotective mother will do that to you) and hopeless at things like chinups, situps, etc. I remember the horror of taking the President’s Council tests and not even scoring in the 50th percentile. I wanted one of those patches so badly (you got one for 50, 80, and 99, IIRC) and it seemed like everybody but me got at least one. I suppose in a way it was my fault, since I could have practiced on my own, but exercise and sports weren’t things that were valued or encouraged in my family so I guess it never occurred to me.
On the plus side, I don’t remember ever being picked on–just yelled at by a tool of a junior high gym teacher who was obsessed with running. I couldn’t (and still can’t) run even a quarter mile. I tried, but I just couldn’t do it. He would hassle me until I got out there and ran all the way around the track and was practically dead by the time I got done (walking as often as I thought I could get away with it).
I guess my gym-related difficulties were mostly personal, though. I’m grateful that I didn’t have to endure some of the crummy behavior that was experienced by some of the others here.
I didn’t really get to like PE until high school (tennis, bowling, and golf–the latter two of which we got to leave school and go to the local alley and course for) and college (fencing).
(edit to change “didn’t” to “did” in first sentence)
We passed PE, too, because our grades apparently depended on attendance and dressing out, and we were right there, wearing shorts, during the roll call.