Two semi-organized sports, dodgeball and kickball, where you get people out by hitting them with a big red rubber ball.
Climbing the cargo net and the rope from the floor to the ceiling with only a couple of mats between yourself and the gym floor.
Balance beam.
To say nothing of recess, with the hot metal slide, the dome, swing set, monkey bars, and merry-go-round.
It’s all kinda Darwinian when you think about it.
I still have nightmares about tetherball.
Yeah, but all that was mitigated by Parachute Day. How the fuck that was any semblance of exercise is beyond me, but that shit was fun.
You want insane? Go watch *Penn & Teller: Bullshit!, season 8, episode 1, which covers the not really a sport, cheerleading, now known in some circles as cheer.
Of course it has occurred to me! I hated sport in school and have never praticed any proper sport since. The exercises were sadistic, I did not enjoy a single one. Most were thinly concealed military training exercises and probably still are: I felt I was being educated to become cannon fodder.
There was a game called 4-square I think. It involved a ball. I never understood what I was supposed to do.
It mortified me to have to participate.
Having to wear your “gym shorts” underneath your regular pants all day was… unpleasant.
I went to a Catholic elementary school from '60-'68. We didn’t have gym class. One year, someone’s mother tried to organize calisthenics during recess, but that went over as well as you might imagine.
Recess was held in the church parking lot - no playground for us - so anything involving running inevitably ended up with someone going to the nurse for a band aid. I have a scar on one knee from a dodgeball game gone bad…
I still remember my first grade P.E. teacher telling us it wasn’t “gym” class, it was “physical education” (aka “P.E.”). Because we wouldn’t always be in the gym; sometimes we’d go outside.
I mostly liked kickball and dodgeball (aka bombardo), because even though I didn’t like and somewhat feared getting hit by one of those red balls, it wasn’t that bad; and even though I sucked at most sports and physical activities, at least it was a game, and therefore less boring than some of the things we had to do in P.E., like run around the school building, or climb a rope (which I could never manage to do at all), or wait for our turn to be evaluated at some physical skill like how many push-ups we could do.
In elementary school, we weren’t expected to wear anything special, or change clothes (that came later, in middle school)—just wear gym shoes.
We didn’t have an organized gym class in elementary school. They just called it “recess” and turned you loose outside to create whatever playground mayhem you chose.
Junior high was where the torture of gym class began. Stripping naked in front of other kids, being singled out for dodgeball bombardments, being less athletic than stronger kids who then decided you were easy pickings elsewhere. Oh, and make sure you hire sadists to conduct the merriment. What sickos came up with this as a good plan? I was damaged goods starting in 7th grade and my self esteem suffered until I finally graduated high school and could reinvent myself in college. On the plus side, I’ve never taken shit from anyone since, and have done what I can to protect others from bullies.
I remember an annual event using little wheeled scooters. It was just a 12"x12" square plastic board with 4 casters on the bottom and handles on the sides. What the hell was that anyways?
Gym class was pretty normal for me. Everybody seemed to like it; many called it their favorite class. (I was a math and science nerd, and it was definitely tied for favorite class for me.) It was just organized recess. We played soccer, volleyball, Chicago 16" softball (with the big ball and no gloves), kickball, dodgeball (one of my favorites), volleyball, basketball, “steal the bacon,” and I’m sure many other games I’m forgetting. We always started with warm-up stretches, jumping jacks, sit–ups, that sort of stuff. This was in grammar school. High school actually wasn’t all that much different, though I did not like swim class at 7:55 a.m. every morning for one semester each in freshman and sophomore years.
Interesting. We didn’t have a gym class until 7th grade. There were calisthenics to warm up and we usually played something like soccer, volleyball, or basketball. We only did dodgeball once or twice in all the years I was in gym.
We also had square dancing once a term. We pretended to hate that because it was corny.
There also was the Marine Corps physical fitness test, which we did hate. I was usually at the bottom.
I still laugh when I recall the week in HS when we had a substitute P.E. teacher. He was a tiny man with wild, pure white hair. He was 90 yo if he was a day and shuffled around like Tim Conway doing his old man character—in very sloooow-mo. They must have dug this fossil out of retirement from eons ago. But, he was cute and meant well.
On his first day, he stood before the class scratching his head, looking befuddled. Finally, he said, “alright kids, everyone gather behind me in single file and follow me.” He then began walking around the periphery of the gym, around and around, taking tiny baby steps as we waddled behind him like baby ducks. We did this for the entire period, then again for P.E. 2 days later.
We didn’t get much exercise (in fact we may have even gained weight), and it was boring as hell. But, it sure was funny.
We were all sad when our regular P.E. teacher returned the following week. He made R. Lee Ermey (Gny. Sgt. Hartman from Full Metal Jacket) seem like a pussycat.
P.E. itself wasn’t so bad when I was in middle/high school in the early-mid 00s… It was changing in the locker room that was brutal. I was shy and awkward and nerdy and painfully obviously queer - asshole boys knew I didn’t belong there. (Turns out y’all were right, guys! I am in fact both gay AND a girl!) I got rocks chucked at my head, got barricaded into bathroom stalls, nearly got drowned during swimming-week… That on top of the constant sexual harassment, homophobic slurs, etc.
Good Times, Good Times. I rather enjoyed gym and recess!
Some aspects I hated but some of it was fun. I was in school in the mid 60s-70s. I loved floor hockey. I’m guessing now IF they even play it anymore the kids are required to wear protective equipment. Not us! In elementary school we didn’t have gym uniforms, so it was a pair of tennies and whatever clothes we wore to school. In 6th grade we did square dancing for awhile. That was a blast. I was a good rope climber so I liked that. I also liked dodgeball and trench. I didn’t care for basketball, softball/baseball.
In junior high we had swimming along with gym. I like to swim but not in school. It was always cold, hair and makeup were issues, and the old swimsuits we had to wear disgusting.
I think in high school we were only required to take physical education as sophomores. It wasn’t as fun anymore. We were tested on rules and terms of the different games. Blah
I used to be a PE teacher, and I mostly worked at the elementary level. This will be a bit long…
It’s true that PE has been taught stupidly for many years, and by some very stupid people. But the fact is, it’s an important subject and can be well structured and well taught. I was one of the people trying to do it differently. Spoiler alert: I left the field because I grew tired of pissing into the wind of that stupidity.
I grew up a very physical kid in the 70s. Rode my bike everywhere, spent every afternoon and weekend playing every sport and game imaginable with my friends at the park. And I had a very forward thinking PE teacher in elementary school. She would be considered really good even today, ran a very well structured instructional program, and I loved it. It’s why I wanted to be a PE teacher.
What’s a well structured PE program at the elementary level?
Here’s what it’s NOT… It should never include team sports, including kickball. It should never include traditional “dodge ball”. More on that in a minute. But done well, it should involve activities which encompass skills from a variety of sports and games. Rather than a team sport format, in which very few people touch the ball / puck / whatever, it should take the form of small-group games and activities.
The idea is maximal participation, or what we called “time on task”. If I’m teaching kids to throw a ball, I want them to throw dozens of times in a single class period. So I would design games involving two or three kids that allow for many, many repetitions after they’ve been instructed in the desired technique. I divide the class up into those small groups (they never get to “pick teams” themselves because of the many problems that brings up) and start them off. Then while they’re playing I go around and provide feedback.
That’s good PE. Everyone has been taught something, everyone is active and practicing, everyone is actively supervised by an involved teacher. I was trained at a very good program, felt very well prepared and needed.
Why no dodge ball or kickball?
Having a class play kickball is useless because everyone is standing around mostly. Same goes for any team sport, which is why they should never appear in an elementary PE program. Yes, I used the word “never”. Any PE teacher who “throws out the ball” for any team sport at that level doesn’t know what they’re doing.
As for dodge ball… I was one of the kids who LOVED dodge ball, and I’d play all day if you’d let me. But I was also aware, even then, that some other kids not only weren’t learning anything, it was a living hell. So that’s gone from any good PE program, at least in the traditional way. It can be adapted to be made appropriate, but the result bears little resemblance to what people think of when they think dodge ball.
Astonishingly, I still get pushback about dodge ball whenever this comes up. But the fact is if I want to teach a kid to throw, I have ways of doing it that don’t involve being painfully pelted with balls. Incredible to me that people think this is an appropriate game for teaching. Recreation? By choice? Maybe. But it’s not good PE.
So I was hired at a school district that had a poor PE program. The PE director was an old-school guy who had no idea how to structure a modern program, but was smart enough to realize that he had to bring in people who could. So I was given a lot of freedom to turn things around at my school and was quite happy for a while.
My favorite thing… When adults would visit my gym and say, “This doesn’t look anything like gym class from when I was a kid.” Thank you, that’s what I was going for. I actually taught something, and did it in a way that served everyone, not just the naturally athletic kids.
Of course, that didn’t last. Eventually, I was interfered with and left the field after about ten years. I’m now many years into a different career, but I still feel PE is a subject that’s badly needed, and desperately needs teachers who can think about it in new ways. But it’s not my problem anymore.
This is fascinating to read, thank you for sharing it. Even during the class time where I wasn’t being actively tortured by my peers, I never really learned anything or became more physically fit. I was thinking about why that was. The “three weeks of a different team sport followed by general physical fitness tests (8-minute mile was an “A”) at the end of the year” did nothing to increase my actual fitness… The class had nothing in common with, say, a couch-to-5k program, which is designed to train your body and build the muscle you need to succeed in the task. In other words, the contents of the class did not prepare our bodies to succeed at the eventual exams. What you describe seems much closer to that.
a) I didn’t mind the rough-and-tumble stuff like dodge ball or the risk of falling. We did all that kind of stuff during recess in 2nd grade when left to our own devices anyway. Also tackle football and the simpler Tackle Whoever Has the Ball. And freeze tag which got pretty intense the way we played it.
I didn’t have PE (aka “gym”) between 3rd grade and 8th grade. It was a shock when I got dumped into it in 8th grade in 1973, a newbie just moved to the new town which totally didn’t help. I hadn’t been a picked-on outsider queer boy in 2nd-3rd grade but I was now and that made a huge difference of course.
b) What I hated: gym teacher encouraging the jocks, then letting them run the class, dividing us into teams; gym teacher not freaking TEACHING us, so those of us who didn’t do sports were ridiculed and dumped on.
c) →
This was a thing? Nobody did that when I was in school. But
d) Having to be naked in front of hostile jocks and other same-sex people in the damn locker room, showering and all that. I was body-shy and other male people were totally Other, totally Them. I’m not saying it would have been more appropriate overall to put me in the girls’ locker room, but I would have preferred utter privacy for changing and showering.
e) The whole “sports are important” bullshit.