Horrible high school phys ed teachers

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

In this thread it sounds like a few people had as negative an experience as I did with high school gym classes.

I wasn’t an athletic person. I’m still not. I participated to the best of my ability, but I’m just not good at sporty-type things. The teacher for my gym class stressed winning and skill, not participation and effort. On top of it, she was simply a horrible person and should not have been in the position that she was.

One of my friends in the class had athsma. The teacher would force her to run laps, and every day she would collapse in an athsma attack. I kept an eye on her, and when I would see her drop, I’d stop running and hustle back to the locker room to get her inhaler. We would both be reprimanded.

I was 5 feet tall in grade 10. In a track and field type class, the teacher pointed at the track, and said, “Go run and jump hurdles.” IIRC, the hurdles came up to about my mid-chest area. I explained that it would be practically impossible for me even to jump over ONE hurdle, much less a bunch of them in a row. I volunteered to do anything else…ANYTHING…and she refused. So I left and went to the library. :slight_smile:

We had two weeks to learn gymnastics from scratch (from scratch for ME anyway), put together a routine, and perform it in front of the class. This, I had no problem with. The teacher thought it would be a great idea to videotape said routines, and show them to the entire school. I refused. I was already a social reject, no need to be a laughingstock. Another “F” for Alex.

At the end of the year, the teacher pulled me into her office. She said she was going to fail me and would be my gym teacher next year as well. She said, “Are you going to keep pulling the same shit as you did this year?” You betcha, I said. She passed me just so she wouldn’t have to deal with me for another year.

So…do you guys have any stories?

2

For the most part I got on okay with PE coaches but I had a mortifying event in 7th grade. We were playing volleyball on a rough asphalt parking lot. I forgot my shoes and wasn’t about to play in bare feet. Coach Gann made me wear my street shoes.

I was wearing boots… Cowboy boots. Black ones. High stirrrup heels. Pointed toes. Real roach killers. Sonofabitch started calling me “Tex.”

3

Gym teachers are usually failed athletes… They are all pricks… and lesbians…

thats the way it was in my school… seriously… I have nothing against lesbians… I had 4 female gym teachers who were all “out”

My favorite was the scoliosis tests that they gave… it was incredible… you woudl stand in a line… touch your toes when asked, and they would say your fine…

although they did somehow miss my brother… who had a shoulder about 4" lower than the other one…

4

I had a PE coach who was also the cross country coach for our school that would make us do (not surprisngly) a ludicrous amount of running, which was absolutely exhausting for me.

One thing we had to do frequently was a 2 mile run in which we would get graded based on how long it took you. The run was along this dirt road uphill to a flag which we would have to touch then run back; the TA was there to make sure people didn’t cheat and just turn around and go back in any arbitrary place. While the second leg was downhill, the first mile was so exhausting that it was really hard for me to still run the second mile. To get an A, you had to run some ridiculous time like 14 minutes…this was back when it took me at least 9 minutes to cover ONE mile.

Another thing we had to do was run for endurance basically get graded on how long we could run before we’d get too tired. I really wanted to get an A so I tried to pace myself and not run too fast but after running for 40-45 minutes straight on the track I was so tired. I did get an A but I could barely walk the rest of the day.

Despite this rather spartan treatment of middle schoolers it did make me a pretty good runner and unlike some of the other geeks who I was lumped with(who would avoid this stuff any chance they got) I kind of just rolled with it. I probably could have been on the track team if I had the motivation. In high school my best time for the mile was 7 minutes flat probably not that substantial but it was for me. Later in college I tried to go back to that level of fitness but found that I couldn’t…Even training all spring on a treadmill and doing regular excersize I still can’t run the mile faster than 8 minutes now :frowning:

5

I guess I was one of the lucky ones. I have bad memories of mean KIDS, but not teachers.

I was big into some sports, but because I was painfully short, and the girls in my grade seemed to be unusually tall, it caused me problems once I got halfway through highschool. The kids were nasty, not the teacher.

I remember my highschool teacher. She was also our soccer coach (I was short, but I was fast). At one point, we were doing the unit involving volleyball. It used to be one of my sports, but the net heights went up after a certain grade, and I became terribly uncoordinated - so team those two together and you have disaster. What the teacher did was split the class: those who were fiercely competitive on the one side, those who were just wanting to have fun on the other. In the “fun” crew, we had a few young girls from Somalia who had never played before. We had a LOT of fun. We bent the rules. We improved our skills significantly. And god did we ever laugh. The teacher had a blast playing with us, too. We helped each other out. The teacher spent time helping us improve, while we laughed like idiots, uncoordinated as we were…

On the other side of the gym, the competitive kids played and enjoyed themselves. They were rough with each other, though… but hey, different strokes…

My fondest memory of that class was the track stuff. Our teacher was kind to the short ones among us - lowered hurdles, “relative” measurements for long/high jump. When it came time to do the endurance runs, one of the nasty kids in the class made fun of one of the newly arrived Somali girls who was unsure of the whole details of the event (running around a track - had never seen one before). I helped the girl out, the teacher gave the nasty (but highly athletic) kid a stern glare… and off we went.

Well, Fatoumata outran us all. By about three laps. And for far longer. The teacher praised the hell out of her. It was great.

Our grades were based on “improvement”, and “effort”, not skill spare for some of the basics required by the ministry of education. Interestingly enough, we were also marked on “sportsmanship”, which a lot of the athletic kids did poorly on. We also got to pick five units out of seven on which to be graded (good if you’re particularily lousy at one sport and can’t get the basic skills down.)

I guess I was lucky! :slight_smile: I have great memories of this teacher. She just rocked.

6

I was very small in school and was always used as the “demo” in gym class. The teacher would pick me up by the back of my gym suit and fling me over the parallel bars or something. I didn’t mind it, but I always felt sorry for the fat kids, because they never got a break. I do think that it’s necessary to push people a little bit (just to make them see their capabilities), but usually it was just so embarassing for the bigger girls.

7

I got 2 B’s in high school. One of them was in gym. It’s not because I didn’t care, because I am hugely into sports. It’s not because I was uncoordinated, because I tend to do really well at whatever sport I try. It’s not because I was a troublemaker, because I never got in trouble.

The reason?
I beat the teacher at Horse. Repeatedly. Often in majorly one-sided wipe outs. At least once a week, he would challenge me. He would lose every single time. For this, he slighted me and gave me a B. Since the nature of gym grading was based less on tests and more on effort, ability, etc he was able to say that was what I deserved with no backing documentation.

Jerkwad.

8

I well remember the high school phys ed teacher who took us out to the football field one day and announced, “We’re going to get two games of touch football going today. He-men will play their game at the south end of the field; wimps will play at the north end.”

Didn’t scar me for life or anything like that, but it was interesting to see how the class divided itself up!

9

I had the elementary school gym teacher from hell. Two of them, actually.

One was a psychotic former Marine who seemed to feel that telling war stories about how much fun it was to kill people in Vietnam was good for children. He got fired, at least partly due to that situation, and partly due to getting caught cheating on his wife. He wasn’t a particularly good teacher… I seem to recall that his idea of “phys ed” basically involved having everyone run laps all period.

Oddly enough, aside from being kind of a mean bastard, I don’t remember him as being particularly sadistic, though. He honestly thought he was doing GOOD for the children… “making them tough.”

The other one, now… the other one was a gleeful prick who very much enjoyed being a gleeful prick. He thought it was great fun to have the children pick on one another, and would designate “targets” for dodgeball, enjoyed calling “DOGPILE” and having thirty or so children promptly fling themselves onto one child, and generally did his best to intimidate, humiliate, and otherwise generate misery in those he wished to abuse.

He never laid a hand on anyone, though. Other children were his willing weapons. He was a smiling fellow with ever a quick word and a quicker putdown. No doubt, he felt very big and bad, riffing on a bunch of eight-year-olds.

I am a gentleman, a parent, and a taxpayer, an educated professional, and a role model for the future, but if I ever meet that sonofabitch on the street, I’m going to kick his ass until they pry me off his crumpled weeping body.

…because now I’m a grown man who can defend himself, and he’s an old man, long past his prime.

Be interesting to see how he takes that…

10

One of my favorite all-time quotes came from a coach back in 10th grade:

“If I want any crap from you, I’ll squeeze your head!!!”

11

My P.E. teacher was found nude, bound back to back with another male, gagged and his with his throat slit in a Holiday Inn.

I can remember only one thing that he said to me: “Don’t wish your life away.”

12

Being a fat kid, gym was not one of my favourite classes. Don’t get me wrong, I played several sports (softball, volleyball, basketball, soccer/footie), but gym was humiliating (ever see a fat chick on the balance beam? 'tain’t pretty).

One coach/pe teacher loved to pick on me. He was another who loved making everyone run - for bloody ages. I would start gasping after a while, get queasy and light-headed. Nosebleeds were not uncommon. But still he called me names and made me keep running.

One day I was feeling particularly poorly but he accused me of faking and made me run anyway. I warned him if I did the result would be my thowing up. He said tough, so bugger him, I ran. The queasiness kicked in. He followed me around the field, shouting at me. Told him I was going to puke. He said run. I ran another 100 yards or so and stopped, doubled over and dry heaved. He laughed at me. I ran another 100 yards, and stopped. He stood in front of me, giving me hell. I bent over and puked on his shoes. Told him what he could do with his job and left the field. Never went back.

Another coach and I had similar issues. Though I didn’t puke on him, his assistant coach was a complete goober (sorry almost thought this was the Pit). We would argue, call each other names. I got sick of him. Told him where to go. He threatened to flunk me. After I had a ‘chat’ with a counselor friend of mine, I got an ‘A’ even though I never went back to class.

I did have one coach, that even though he pushed me to the point that I called him some nasty names, he did get me into power-lifting and loved to show off my strength to the lads - which was a LOT of fun :smiley:

So not all PE teachers are horrid, just 99.6% of them.

13

:eek: How horrible!
What a sad quote to be remembered by…

14

I had a horrible PE teacher 4 out of my 5 years at highschool. The other one was good (no particular comments about her), but Mrs. V. was AWFUL! She essentially hated everyone who wasn’t a total jock - if you weren’t on every possible sports team, then she didn’t want to waste your time with you. Every time we divided up into teams, she put all the jocks together, and all the rest of us together, and would tell us to “go play” while she would spend time with the jocks and coach them and teach them everything she could. We had fun playing by our own rules, but I didn’t learn a damn thing, which is a shame, because although I’m not really athletic, I would have liked to have learned a bit more about how to play volleyball (for example) beyond the basic instruction to “hit it with your hands”.

She was incredibly condescending, and somewhat sexist…AGAINST females! She didn’t believe we were able to play ANYTHING, so why should she teach us? The boys (although with a different teacher, the class was semi-co-ed) played touch football, and softball, and even did a bit of wrestling. The girls? Soccer-baseball, which is when someone rolls a ball towards you, and you have to kick it, and then run a measly 4 metres to “first base”. It was actually kind of degrading and humiliating. I mean, that;s something you play in KINDERGARTEN to improve coordination and team-work! This was an excuse to keep us off the damn baseball diamond, because the boys complained that “the girls suck”. GREAT way to teach sportsmanship there!

I can’t tell you how many times Mrs. V. told us to go do “whatever sport we wanted” when the pregnant-half-drunk-chain-smoking girls would complain about having to do gym. She’d go off with the jocks and play a game with them, and leave the rest of us standing there. If you went and tried to join them, you were essentially benched the whole time, and she would ridicule you if you DID get to play but weren’t all-star calibre.

I really, REALLY hated gym class. Add to that the fact that our school was next to an experimental farm’s cow field, and we were often outside, and the air was smelly enough to make anyone gag…well, it wasn’t all that great an experience.

I kind of wish it would have been different, because I LIKE sports, even if I’m no good at it, and I would have enjoyed being allowed to play if anyone had cared to show me what to do, and let me TRY.

15

In elementary school, I was your typical geek. Big glasses. Liked to read. Terribly unathletic. I couldn’t run - at all. I would cramp up after a lap. I was also disproportionate, lanky, and terribly uncoordinated. My dexterity was next to nil. Endurance- what’s that? Strength - I was the perfect model for a stick figure.

Needless to say, I hated gym class.

But there was one sport… one golden game in which I would suddenly rise to perfection. I became agile as a gymnast, balanced as a tight-rope walker, as precise as a laser-guided missile, and suddenly gained the strength of an olympian shot-put champion.

That game was Dodge Ball.

Sweet God, I was good. I could dodge with the best of 'em - unless I was attacked simultaneously by multiple opponents, I would not get hit. I knew when and where to strike, too - my throws were never caught, as I typically nailed people right in the shins. Once, after my team launched a volley at the uncrossable “middle line,” we beat a hastry retreat. I tripped, and fell. My arch rival sprinted to the front line, and hurled the ball as hard as he could. I caught it - with my feet. He was out, and I proceeded to nail another one with his captured weapon.

I loved dodge ball. Every couple of months we’d get to play, usually on the last day of the quarter - and I had my moment to shine.

One day, I was implementing a new tactic, adapting to a rule change. Every five minutes of game play, the P.E. teacher would blow her whistle, and the uncrossable boundaries would change. At the outset of the game, center court divided the gym into two halves. After the first five minutes, we would instead use the next line on each side - you could cross the line on your team’s side, but not the other team’s side, creating a no-man’s land in which both teams could travel. Eventually the entire gym would be accessible, which would hopefully result in a stubborn team being obliterated so a new game could begin. So, I would procure a ball, crouch against the wall in the no man’s land, and not move. Children can be horribly unobservant. It wouldn’t take long for one of them to run into the no-man’s land, to the uncrossable boundary- and expose their back to me, at which point I would smite them with complete surprise. I had already picked off two of the athletic types, much to their dismay. I was preparing for a third- and our gym teacher blew her whistle and called me over.

Apparently, although she had made no such rule or prohibition of my tactic, I was “cheating” - and had to sit out for the rest of the day. We only got to play four times a year, the class had just begun, and I had to sit out for the rest of the day. She took my moment from me. The only sport in which I thrived was stripped from my hands. That heartless bitch destroyed me. I was forced to sit on the bleachers, and watch my classmates cavort about, hurling inflatable spheres at one another with reckless abandon, lost in complete and utter bliss- and know that this was a joy I would not experience. She knew of my love affair, knew that this was the only time in which I actually enjoyed the tortuous hell that is otherwise known was physical education. And she sat me out.

I hated her.

16

Back in Grade 7, at the beginning of high school, I came out of one class, and commented to another student that I thought my teacher was a real asshole for something he did. “Teach” happened to be right behind me, and proceeded to lay into me in the middle of the hallway that it was extremely rude to say bad things behind other people’s backs. Other students were impressed that I never even blinked under this dressing down.

I then proceeded to have this same teacher for my entire high school career, and he never forgot that comment. He lived up to it.

I was the shortest kid in the school, so of course I got put on the ‘random’ basketball team with the two other guys under 5 feet tall for three-on-threes… and had to compete against the 3 guys who were 6 foot 6.

He would throw lacrosse balls at the back of my head from off field when I was goaltending.

He would choose mornings in November for my chance to do the 12-minute run outdoors. Usually there was snow on the ground. (And I’ve always been a sprinter, not a distance runner.) Everyone else got to go in September or October. I was routinely last.

But he wasn’t just a prick to me. His office had a window that looked into the girl’s locker room. It was a habit of him to open his curtains while girls were getting changed.

17

My high school PE teacher was nice enough. She was unfortunately, an alcoholic, who would quell the tremors by guzzling bottles of mouth wash. Her office was littered with dozens of empty mouth-wash bottles at any given time. To this day when I smell a minty mouth-wash I still think about her.

Sadly, she died shortly before I graduated. She was probably in her forties.

18

Well, most of them in HIGH SCHOOL weren’t so bad, but the pair of middle school gym teachers we had were horrible. One of them was the biggest sexist I’ve ever met in my life, and every week he would give a peptalk about how girls suck and how they are trying to gain too much power, both in the school and in the country. And then he would invite the future high school football players into his office after class to drink vodka with him. And the other one was this ancient bitch who never TAUGHT anything…just brought everyone outside to play flag football while she sat there and smoked.

Both of them got fired before I got through middle school…I’m surprised they both actually held a career so long. Maybe they were on their way out anyway?

19

Dodgeball, I think, was the absolute worst. We played it every rainy day.

The object of Dodgeball is not to get your opponents out. The object is to cause pain, and if possible, lasting physical damage by using the (overinflated, hard-as-a-rock, HEAVY rubber ball) as a projectile weapon. You get as close as possible to your target, aim for the head, stomach or crotch, and hurl that thing hard enough to break bones. Extra points if an ambulance had to be called - which happened, though not to me.

I would sometimes even win a game of Dodgeball by being an essentially invisible noncombatant. Nobody bothered to get me out, and I’d be the last kid left standing. I never once caught or threw the ball.

There was also handball, involving racquetball courts and those even-more-weaponlike racquetballs. There were penalties, for which the victim had to stand still against the back wall, and the strongest opponent got to throw the ball at the victim, aiming for maximum physical damage.

That’ll show you to suck at handball!

Of course, only last names are used in gym class, the better to make you think you’re in Army Boot Camp. Some 7th-graders were slightly freaked out by this, wanted to be called by their first names, and were ridiculed by the gym teachers as a result.

Then there was the President’s Fitness Test, done yearly. Can it get more humiliating than that - I couldn’t do a single pullup, and the fact got reported to President Reagan? What must he have thought of me?

(Flash on The Simpsons - “We’re gonna stay here, until this CHRISTMAS HAM gives me a pullup!”)

I’ll be eternally grateful, though, to the 10th grade gym teacher who took roll at the start of class, and then looked the other way as the nonathletic kids snuck off campus, or back to the changing room. 10th grade was the last year of required P.E., and I managed to escape it through the kindness of a stranger.

Still can’t do a pullup, though. What must President Bush think of me?

Remember the quote:
Those who can, do.
Those who can’t, teach.
Those who can’t teach, teach gym.

:smiley:

20

My 7th grade gym teacher was a male pedophile. He liked to take boys on vacation to hiking trips, the beach, etc. He never married and was never seen with women…one day, the parents of one of his victims complained to the police department…and mr. Lewis promptly disappeared!
I later found that the man had been arrested in several states for the same thing!