High School P. E. Requirements

[ellis555]

Your anecdote to the contrary, yosemitebabe, I believe that most children who are picked on during PE are also picked on in other classes. The difference lies in the facts that a)the ‘nerds’ and ‘jocks’ are more likely to be in the same PE class than any academic class b)there is more opportunity to physically pick on some one in PE.

I’m not condoning any of the traumatizing acts that people have related in this thread. But I don’t think that the blame can be laid on PE. The math teacher who lets students flick paper in class shares the same guilt as the PE teacher who let even sven get pelted with rocks.

My high school baseball coach was the Latin teacher, and his classes were, not surprisingly, populated by jocks. They were also populated by nerds, as he was an excellent teacher. The reason the jocks came there was not because of preferential treatment (I witnessed him suspending his all-state thirdbaseman for cheating), but because of his impartiality. He was willing to take the time to help the ‘dumb jocks’ that were completely ignored by other teachers. He’d spend as much time helping a jock conjugate amo-amas-amat as he would helping a nerd translate Virgil.

One my my high school pals was a three sport varsity athlete. He was also not the sharpest tool in the shed, if you catch my drift. Math was torture for him, and he knew that he was just going to work on his family’s farm - so algebra II was not exactly something he needed to master. When he was taking it his senior year, he was in the same class as the freshman ‘nerds,’ who would snicker at him if he couldn’t solve a problem on the board. Math was miserable for him. So should math not be mandatory?

Of course it should, and that was something he realized, and that’s why he and I spent an hour every morning going over his homework. Should it be reformed? I don’t think so; it worked fine for the vast majority. And the rest, like my friend, just needed a little help. If your high school PE program is still dwelling in the stone age and teaching out-dated techniques, then it needs to be reformed just as if your math department hadn’t progressed past Euclidian geometry. But the concept of teaching PE is just as sound as the concept of teaching any academic.

My point is that the suffering you went through in PE is reciprocated in academic classes, with the ‘jocks’ and ‘nerds’ switching places. As MGibson is trying to point out, this is symptomatic of a larger problem, and needs to be addressed on that larger level.

-ellis

[ENugent]

Just to share my experiences in this interesting thread…

When I was in 7th grade, I contracted whooping cough (apparently I got one of a bad batch of vaccinations). I missed 6 weeks of school, and was excused from PE for the following 6 weeks (during much of that time, I was attending half days because a full day at school was too exhausting for me). During that time, the P.E. class was doing track - running, shot put, etc. The day that my medical excuse ran out happened to be the last day of that unit of P.E. My gym teacher made me do a 1 mile run. As soon as I finished it, she told me, “OK, that was your pre-test for this unit. Now do it again for your post-test. Your grade is based on improvement.” I walked most of the “post-test,” and received a D in P.E. (which I later successfully protested with the principal). I missed the first half of the following week of school due to a relapse. Any guesses what caused it??

My understanding is that this P.E. teacher was fired several years later, when a girl suffered a broken bone during gymnastics when asked to vault without a proper mat. (Not coincidentally, the girl’s father was a lawyer).

In general, I nevertheless have to say that P.E. was good for me, even though I hated it bitterly. But that one experience shows how much more power a P.E. teacher has than an academic teacher to torture kids and potentially cause them permanent harm. At the very least, the schools should exercise a lot more vigilance than they do to keep the bad ones out.

[Odesio]

**
You obviously think that because PE was a positive experience for you, it was the same for almost everyone else. It wasn’t. I seriously doubt that the “vast majority” of students had no problem with PE.

**

Ok, would it feel better if instead I said “I doubt the vast majority of students had serious problems with PE?” I might say I had no problems with English but that doesn’t mean it was easy as pie.

**
And even if that were true, does it make it OK that some kids (even a minority) are made miserable? Is it OK that the school system is set up to make some kids miserable, when there is a viable alternative?

**

The school system is not set up to specifically make some people miserable. There’s no malevolent force on the school board having meetings over how to make people miserable.

**
I mentioned the torment of minorities and gay kids previously, and you didn’t see the connection.

**

We all bring our own life experience I suppose. In my school it was the minority students who terrorized the majority. And so far as I was aware there were no gay students. (Yeah, I know they must have been there but I didn’t know of any.)

**
But there is one. It’s the apathy and the looking the other way while these kids are tormented. Let’s say a small amount of gay and minority kids are made miserable in school, by their peers. They are “picked on”. And the school administration looks the other way. Is that OK?

**

No, it isn’t ok for the administrator to look the other way.

Marc

[Una_Persson]

*Originally posted by even sven *
Ummm…It wasn’t the words that hurt me. It was the large freaking rocks hurled at me. It when I told my PE teacher “Mr. A, could you please tell them not to throw rocks at me?” and being told “I didn’t see them throw rocks so I cant do anything” while I pointed to the silver dollar sized bruise that was developeing on my leg. It was marching out of class and into the principles office and being told “I can’t do anything about it” while my friends explained in detail how getting pelted with stones was a near daily occurance. I didn’t even want the kids that assaulted me to get in trouble! I just wanted to it to understood that throwing rocks at geeks was not an acceptable physical activity!

Great flaming 600-foot Jesus! Sure, I was tormented a lot, and beaten on by other girls (until I punched the one in her face - see other thread). But getting rocks thrown at you daily? If I had been your friend, after I learned I could fight back, I would have hurt whoever did that to you!

I’m very sorry for your experience - being stoned by fellow students seems inordinately bad. In a perfect world, you should have reported it to the police, but the results could vary greatly.

[Ben]

*Originally posted by Anthracite *
**[ In a perfect world, you should have reported it to the police, but the results could vary greatly. **

Well, that’s the problem. I know that if anyone treated me now like jocks treated me in high school, I’d get a restraining order fast. You could say that about just about anything people have described here; at the very least, someone would lose their job for the kind of behavior that has been described. But in high school, the coach thinks it’s funny, until it gets out of hand, in which case he says “cut it out.”

It’s simply insane the kinds of things bullies get away with. In my high school, as the students crossed a muddy field on the way to PE, the jocks would chase them in a jeep, slipping and sliding across the mud while people went running to keep from getting run over. Once the coach caught them in the act- he told them to cut it out. They kept doing it, though, week after week until they graduated. And, of course, in pep rallies they put on snappy suits and sat in front of the gym talking about how much the wonderful coach had taught them about Jesus.

-Ben

[Guinastasia]

Ugh! I think it’s just EASIER for the jocks to pick on the nerds there, because it’s more informal than a regular class.
I was lucky-in high school, I was in the “Jerry” Gym class, so we were ALL without ability. The problem was my teacher, who was brutal.
My sister and her classmates went up there for a swim test before entering high school. While one of sis’s classmates was swimming, the teacher that I had was there, and she started making fun of this classmate, saying, “Is there something wrong with your arm? Why do you swim like that?”
Etc, etc etc…
Blech. I almost pulled a muscle lifting my so-called testing weight. The fact is, doing such a thing without proper training can be dangerous.
I had a lot more fun with the unusual stuff-line dancing-believe it or not-.
the funny thing was, our football coach was also a gym teacher my first two years there…and he was the nicest guy! He was VERY helpful and understanding, and very encouraging, and he didn’t push us too hard.

[Una_Persson]

*Originally posted by Ben *
In my high school, as the students crossed a muddy field on the way to PE, the jocks would chase them in a jeep, slipping and sliding across the mud while people went running to keep from getting run over.

Goddamn, man. Not much else I can say about that image.

(Meanwhile, Una pictures herself firing her .44 Mag Super Redhawk into the jeep as it barrels down on her like a Juggernaut of Doom through the mud, while music from “The Road Warrior” plays in the background…)

And, of course, in pep rallies they put on snappy suits and sat in front of the gym talking about how much the wonderful coach had taught them about Jesus.

ROFLMAO! They went to your school too, huh?

[Ben]

*Originally posted by Anthracite *
**
ROFLMAO! They went to your school too, huh? **

Are you kidding? My school taught creation science in science class.

The best part about pep rallies was that every game was special. One week, the senior jocks give teary, treacly speeches about how this is the last homecoming game. Next week, last halloween game. Next, it’s the last game against our rival, then the last thanksgiving game, etc. I think the only game that wasn’t special in some way was, ironically, the last game of the year, which, of course, led to teary speeches about how they’d never play football again.

Ok, now I have to tell my “jocks in quiz bowl” story. The worst bully of all was on the quiz bowl team, because the quiz bowl coach (my history teacher) thought they needed a sports trivia expert. This guy was well over six feet tall, bowl cut hair, tiny, deep set pig eyes, and with a jaw so pronounced that the guy could have been a hoax perpetrated by British paleontologists.

I, as a freshman, was allowed to tag along so that I could “learn the ropes” by watching the senior quiz bowl whizzes rack up the points. Needless to say, they asked no sports questions whatsoever, and the other members of the team couldn’t answer more than a tiny fraction of the questions. Meanwhile I was in the back, taking great delight in telling the coach the answer to every question our team was asked.

-Ben

[Una_Persson]

*Originally posted by Ben *
and with a jaw so pronounced that the guy could have been a hoax perpetrated by British paleontologists.

ROFLMAO again! Nice one!

[yosemite]

I think the distinction between PE and other classes, as mentioned here before, is that kids are more at risk of being physically harrassed in PE. Kids don’t have much of a chance of being pelted by rocks in math class, right? Or being hit by a very fast, very hard baseball, right? They might be teased, but no ROCKS or other hard projectiles are involved.

Also, at least in my high school PE experience, there were standard PE class routines that were set up to be humiliating for the nerds. The “picking of teams”, for instance - where two team “leaders” (invariably jocks) get to pick their teammates…and the nerds stand there and are always picked last, as the “leaders” hem and haw and groan about having to be saddled with the albatrosses. There isn’t such a process in math class…or English class, or Art Class, as a rule. Also, the level of competition, where one team is pitted against another team is not present on the same level in other classes. It’s the attitude of getting more points above all else that leads to much of the torment. As in the incident where I got the baseball in my face. In the frenzy to WIN, no one noticed, or cared that I was stunned and in pain when I got hit by the baseball. So, you get a “double whammy” in PE. Emotional and physical harrassment. And in an environment where harrassment seems to be heightened, and more tolerated.

I take it back about not being tormented in other classes. There was one notable exception. It was in an advanced math class. I was being ruthlessly harrassed by (what a coincidence) some jocks who sat behind me. And yeah, the teacher looked the other way. It was misery. And I was also lost in that class - I was more a “average” math student, not “advanced”. The class was over my head. And you know what happened? I was able to get into an “average” math class the next semester. A class more suited to my level. And no more torment. I actually flourished and learned. WHAT a concept!

At least in my high school, there was no such option for PE. One size fits all. You keep on taking the same type of classes, and if you suck, you suck. And I sucked in all of it. It would have been wonderful to have been offered the option of taking PE that would actually help me get more fit, instead of taking the kind of class where I was assured of being treated like shit, while the teacher looked the other way.

As far as the claim that schools don’t set out to make PE misery for some kids - well, maybe they don’t design it to be that way, but when they look the other way, the result is the same. And by not trying to improve or change policies. By looking the other way, or ineffectually saying “Cut it out!” when the jocks pick on the nerds, year after year, teachers and schools assure that these kids will continue to be miserable.

[Necros]

yosemitebabe said:

[QUOTE]

In the frenzy to WIN, no one noticed, or cared that I was stunned and in pain.
[/QUOTE

Pretty good metaphor for life, don’t you think?

[Guinastasia]

The picking teams thing is why I opted not to participate in 7th grade: because everyone REFUSED to have me on their teams.
In high school, I was lucky, because the teachers by then just counted off 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4…or just divided us by how we were situated…