What I am still sporadically furious about concerning elementary school gym class—literally half a century later—is the outcome of our gym teacher’s plan to teach the boys to play basketball one day and then teach the girls to play basketball the next day, so the two groups could take turns having basketball games.
Now, it’s not so much the fact that the teacher decided, completely unnecessarily, to gender-segregate playground basketball games for prepubescent elementary schoolers. Of course, there’s no physical reason that kids that age can’t play on coed teams, because the real impacts of sex-based average strength and size differences don’t kick in until puberty. But what the hell, the teacher was an old ex-military guy and he just assumed playground gender segregation as the universal norm, I wouldn’t stay mad at him for fifty years on that account.
No, what still chaps my hide whenever I happen to think about it is this: Guess how often the girls actually got their basketball instruction or a chance to play basketball in gym class? Can you say “never”? That’s right: after promising that boys and girls would take turns at basketball teaching and playing, the old jackass just decided never to bother at all with teaching or training the girls. Not once.
Every fine day, the boys would be out there on the court doing drills and learning skills and playing games and scoring points, and the old jackass was having the time of his life helping his players develop some real basketball ability and blasting his whistle at them as he refereed the games, and we girls just hung around. Maybe played hopscotch sometimes.
I mean, it was gym class, we knew we were supposed to be doing what the gym teacher told us, and we had no template for what to do when a teacher just consistently ignored the whole bunch of us, very evidently because we weren’t worth bothering with. We also had no template for protesting or lodging any kind of official complaint about how a teacher chose to run a class (early 1970s rural elementary school? fat chance), so there we were. It was my first unambiguous encounter with institutionalized sexism, and yup, still scarred.
Sorta silver lining department: I remained so (silently) mad about this injustice throughout elementary school that whenever I had a free recess period and there was a basketball available, I just went out on the court by myself and practiced trying to throw the ball into the net. I had no clue what I was doing (BECAUSE NO FUCKING INSTRUCTION, OF COURSE), but I did at least over the years develop a certain amount of coordination and muscle skills relevant to basketball. So later when I went to small institutions for high school and college where the standard of competition for girls’ sports was not high, even my very mediocrely athletic self was able to play on the basketball team.
Not that I was ever anything more than a very mediocre player, and tbf I doubt I would ever have been a good player even if I’d had an early start at instruction and training. But I have my college letter sweater for basketball, and can even still wear it, which is probably more than any of the old jackass’s cherished boy athletes can say. Fuck that old dead jackass. Hmmmmmmph.
