So, basically, middle school/junior high was hell on earth for nearly everyone, and we all took turns making hell even worse for each other.
… sounds about right.
It went both ways, and every direction. I occasionally couldn’t help myself and acted like a brainiac in class. Not that I cared about the dumb jocks, but for that sense of superiority. I had no advantage in gym class but also avoided attention. And I liked dodgeball as a game when the participants were willing.
When my kids were in school it was different for them. The schools were big on teamwork and kids using their strengths to help those who needed it. So it can be different.
My college required 2 credits of Leisure Science. A new name for PE.
I took a semester of Bowling and a semester of Tennis. Fullfilling my requirements.
I continued playing Tennis for many years. Good way to make business contacts.
PE in school would have been better with bowling or rollerblading. The sports we did were lame.
My most enjoyable moments in PE were when we had to wrestle. Our gym teacher was also the HS wrestling coach, and he would make us wrestle for like a 3-week stretch which he basically used to try to find recruits for the team.
So, me being fairly small back then and having no interest in wrestling, would have to get on the mat with the person closest to my size, which was almost always the guy who was the 105 lb. wrestler already on the team.
Very fair match. We’d get in position, gym teacher would blow the whistle, and in about 6 seconds I’d be configured into some sort of pretzel-like object and pinned. That was great fun and I learned a lot. And, I got to do it twice a week until we changed sports.
My favorite sports were tennis and badminton. I was actually fairly good at them. I didn’t love volleyball, but I had a killer serve, so I was adequate.
I was lucky to go to a highly academically oriented public high school, and most of our sports teams sucked, so, there was a never an overbearing jock culture. Our quiz bowl team (proud member!) was probably our only winning “sport.”
Just as an aside: when I was a kid reading English kids’ books, they called PE PT (Physical Training). When I’ve read any in recent decades any mention of PE was PE. I wonder why/when the transition happened.
I think educators as a whole viewed PE as a waste of time and poured resources into it accordingly. Fifteen or twenty years ago, I read an article about physical education in schools, and the PE teachers they interviewed very much echoed your attitudes. The PE teachers spoke a lot about making sure to teach kids the fundamental skills and the rules associated with various common sports. But I don’t know what age ranges they wer talking about. There’s a big difference between what you would have 1st graders doing and what you might have 5th graders doing.
It’s been so long since I was in elementary school that I can’t honestly remember what we did in PE on a day-to-day basis. In 1st - 3rd grade, I remember we had a parachute we’d bust out on occasion and play some games with it, in 1st grade we did some square dancing, and on occasion until about 4th or 5th grade there was a little dogeball. But i can’t honestly remember if we played dodgeball in PE on a frequent basis or if it was an occasional treat. In 4th grade I climbed the rope to the ceiling of the gym and ran laps around the school but I’m hard pressed to remember anything else.
What the heck is a parachute?
I suspect you’re overthinking this, assuming that ‘parachute’ is an obscure term for a piece of athletic equipment. But no. It’s the thing that people hang from after jumping out of an airplane.
We had parachutes in our elementary gym classes and I mostly recall some sort of game where all the children form an evenly spaced ring, holding the parachute taut. On a signal, all the kids lift the parachute up, duck under it, and pull the edge down behind them as they sit, creating a domed stadium effect for a while. Maybe someone had to run around the outside, duck-duck-goose style. I don’t really remember. But I do remember I loved parachute day.
Just what you’d think it is. WWII Surplus no doubt.
Like so.
To a certain extent PE teachers have done it to themselves by being lousy teachers, and prioritizing athletics over PE. That was another factor that led me to leave the field - most everywhere there is an expectation that PE teachers will coach one, or preferably, two or three sports. I found that onerous because coaching is itself a full-time job, and I defy anyone to tell me with a straight face that they could coach and be as effective a teacher at the same time.
I’d go to PE conferences and learn all about great new teaching techniques and activities (as I say, there were people trying to do it right). And I would stand up and ask, who’s going to do the coaching? If we do all this great new stuff, which I’m very much in favor of, we’re going to need to be full-time teachers and not run out the door to coach for four hours after school. Nobody ever had an answer for that.
There is, but there’s a bigger difference between PE at the elementary (K-5 or 6) and secondary (6-12). At the elementary level I taught a lot of the same activities to all grades, but with significant modification. There’s a term called “vertical curriculum”, which describes a progression through subjects as kids get older. For me as a PE teacher, that meant introducing things simply to the younger kids and then presenting more involved versions as they progressed through the grades.
At the secondary level, frankly, PE very often breaks down in even in good programs. Again, it can be done well, but it gets more and more rare at the middle and high school levels. I was at one conference where a well known presenter in the field (he had written some of the textbooks used in teacher training) essentially sad, “PE at the secondary level is a failure and we should probably just stop doing it.” I found that startling to hear, although I largely agreed.
Someone mentioned earlier that PE would have been better with more activities that weren’t so typical. I used to teach roller blading and mountain biking at the secondary level. One school I worked at even did cross country skiing, which was a logistical feat. At all levels I taught circus skills (juggling, manipulation, unicycles) and I did a lot of “integrated” activities - PE games that involved content from other subjects. I had a lot of games that reinforced math concepts, art, science and other stuff. I really enjoyed teaching that.
All this to say… elementary school PE need not be insane.
Still don’t understand how a parachute is used in gym class. I see some kids sitting under one, that must be tied to the ceiling or something. Perhaps an air blower keeps it up. Are they having a meeting of some sort?
An I being whoosed?
When I was in junior high and high school, the PE teachers doubled as sports team coaches and the latter were supposed to coach the team to win competitive events, the latter’s participants were the same jock kids that the damn PE teachers abandoned the rest of us to, and the latter was what the school administration hired them to do, with teaching PE (and often some other “unimportant” academic classes – in Los Alamos, those were History and English) being ancillary responsibilities at best.
Christ, I hated PE. I was one of the fat kids, and in the 70s in Texas, even the coaches were making fun of me. At least I wasn’t referred to in jocular fashion by one of the coaches using an ethnic slur, however, so I suppose it could’ve been worse….
No, none of that. A parachute pulled down to the floor like that will hold a bubble of air for quite some time. Then there are various games you play that involve running under the canopy our outside around it. Nothing fancier than that.
I’m not terribly athletic, but I enjoyed PE. I didn’t have it until 7th grade. I could mostly hold my own with the jocks, and I was one of those kids who got along with everybody.
We weren’t exactly breaking a sweat.
I waxed nostalgic about it a while back. It was a fun “treat” day, at least as far as I was concerned.
Count me as another who was never taught how the fuck you play baseball, so I’d hang out in left field where nothing happened, picked wildflowers, and waited till everyone wandered back inside.
Fairly certain I “played” for the wrong team sometimes. Missed the switching an’ all.
Man, don’t get me started on volleyball. One of my middle school tormentors deliberately served a ball directly into my lower back. Thirty years later, I haven’t forgotten the smirk on her face, suddenly understanding the phrase “getting the wind knocked out of you,” the sound of the world’s most insincere sing-song “ooops, sorry!” nor the indifference of the “coach.”
I guess you never saw me play second base.
Another person amazed at the ropes to the gym ceiling. The canvas mats were so thin and hard I think the main purpose was to protect the gym floor from scratches when you fell.
Climbing them was trivial for me. The real challenge was to climb to the top without using your legs, arms only. I managed to get all the up this way once … almost. To finish you had to tap the ceiling beam. I misjudged and clamped the rope with my legs. But I was about two inches short of the beam.
I really don’t understand the issue with tetherball. Yeah you could get sort of hurt if you weren’t paying attention but I never saw anyone get bonked by the ball. Compare to baseball, you could get really hurt if as a batter you stepped onto the plate as the pitch is being released. So, don’t do that.
No gym class through 6th grade.
Don’t remember much about junior high gym class, other than playing softball in 7th.
High school. Only thing I liked was swimming (six weeks every year, nude). Showers were required after class (except after swimming). Gym suits had to be taken home to be washed every Friday – since I hated most of what we did , I often “forgot” to take my suit back to school on Monday, and occasionally on Tuesday as well. 
This resulted in my failing one semester in 10th grade – and the school required four years of PE, so second semester of 12th grade I had to take an extra PE class to make up for the one I’d failed. This was a major component of my dropping out of school.