PE; did you love it or hate it?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

My PE experience was similar to your daugter’s, only we didn’t have first aid. But we did have sex ed where we talked about pregnancy, STD’s and safe sex. I even remember putting condoms on these wooden dildo’s. I also remember one teacher telling us that the rhythm method of birth control was a method, but not very effective. My most fond memory was one teacher teling us about his drug abuses in the past. So I imagine we covered drug education as well.

That said, I didn’t mind PE all that much. Some aspects were fun, like playing dodge ball. I was fairly nimble and liked to see if I could stay in until the end. I only disliked PE the one year when I had it for my home class, which was first thing in the morning. I was going through my mild teenage rebel stage so I was often late to class. That led to detentions that I wouldn’t serve and the teacher would forget about. It finally came to a head when I was suspended for one day for being late so often. It was a lovely spring day. My parents found that punishment amusing.

But yeah, PE wasn’t bad for me.

22

Wow, we had already done away did away with "the testosterone-fuelled atmosphere, the sadistic teachers, the communal showers, the cold and wet and mud, and the violence. " by 1980 in my school. Might I ask what decade you went to school and if what you described is still going on in your neck of the woods?

We had a few over testostreroned gym teachers, Ms. Grant was the worst. Everyone thought she was a bull-dyke and then it turned out she was. :smiley:
Even she was Okay most of the time but some of the girls did complain about her.
Most of our gym teachers tried their best to make gym fun and explained at least a little why we needed to exercise.

Jim

23

I mostly disliked it. (Seems to be the trend here. Yay for Dopers being the nerds!). Sometimes it was manageable, especially the way my high school did it. I was fortunate in that respect. Each gym class would have a certain number of gym teachers depending on the number of students, and each gym teacher would run a unit. Every three weeks we got to choose which unit we wanted to do, out of 3 or 5 or however many choices there were.

That alone is cool, but what made it tolerable for me was, there was usually a rather unathletic choice, like yoga or powerwalking or something. And yes, I still didn’t like gym class. Because I’m whiny like that.

24

Generally it was ok, except for when we went swimming. We had an outdoor swimming pool at high school. Outdoor pool. In England. I think you can see the problem here. :smack:

25

I could have loved it had the other students not been so damned cruel. I actually liked most of the activities even tho I was hardly athletic, and very clumsy. LOVED playing basketball and was fairly decent at it, but I was constantly ridiculed and made fun of , even by my bitch of a teacher in high school. Yup, had the same teacher all thru high school, and she always went out of her way to make me feel useless.

It got to the point I just dreaded it, and did only as much as I had to to squeak by. It is one of my worst memories.

26

I seem to remember not really liking it, but I didn’t hate it.

27

I came out of a private elementary with zero PE training, we just had recess. Then my very first day in the huge public junior high school where I don’t know a soul, we’re playing dodge ball. Not too difficult of a game to understand, and I was actually doing pretty well until there were few enough kids on my side left that the other team started picking us off one by one by throwing all the balls at one kid. I got knocked down, so went to stand on the sidelines with the others, wondering why I was still sweating. I could feel the sweat just pouring off my forehead even.

Suddenly a girl next to me in line starts screeching at the top of her lungs, the teacher turns to look and grabs my arm, visibly paling and telling me to calm down. Huh? I wore glasses and when I’d hit the floor apparently the frames cut my face near my eyebrow, mix head wound + freely sweating and I looked like Carrie.

Took awhile for a parent to be located to come take me for stitching, but the next day everyone knew the new girl’s name, so that was something. My overprotective mother was horrified that gym class was so over crowded and inherently dangerous that the teacher hadn’t even known I was injured and pulled me out of it immediately.

I got to go to the special smaller fat-girls-only gym class the next year to fulfill my required credit and it blew chunks. Like others have said, got yelled at for not already knowing what the rules and procedures were for different sports, the teacher hated even teaching the special class and took it out on us, the locker room was total humiliation, etc.

Bad enough that I went to the family doctor in high school and signed up for aerobics at the local rec center to get the doc to write me an excuse to get out of gym. And yep, I’m still overweight and unathletic.

28

Hated, hated, hated it.

I wasn’t naturally athletic and was slightly overweight, but worse than that, I was, like the OP, not conversant with the unexplained rules. This lead to fights on more than one occasion when I broke a rule and lost points or something for my team; I ended up with a broken nose once because I didn’t “scrimage” before shooting in half court basketball. (I still do not know what this means.) It didn’t help that one year I had class at the same time as an upper division PE class whose star member was a big, linebacker who enjoyed nothing more than bullying softmores–by bullying, I don’t mean name-calling or a little pushing, but jamming people into lockers, kicking them down and throwing a medicine ball at the stomach, picking up and hooking someone on a clothes hook, et cetera. And the asshole coach not only permitted this but actively laughed about it; this was the same coach who would openly call the less athletic members of the class (of whom your humble narrator was one) “faggot”, “queer”, “sissy”, “limpy-[wristed]”, et cetera. (It was so excessive I was then and am now convinced that he was a barely repressed homosexual. It didn’t help that he walked around with one hand down his shorts, including “observing” us take showers.) I had this dipshit of a coach for both years of high school phys ed. This no doubt contributes in no small way to my utter revulsion toward team sports, particularly football and basketball.

The sad thing is, I’m actually pretty good at physical activities I enjoy. I liked playing soccer outside of class, I studied various forms of martial arts for years, and I’m a pretty fast 5k/8k runner, and although distance running will never be my forte, I like cross-country running. I’ve always been a strong swimmer, and a few years ago I started rock climbing. I love sailing, though that certainly wasn’t an option in the land-locked area I lived in. If I’d been encouraged to do any of these things instead of being constantly insulted for not inately understanding the rules of football (I still don’t) I think I would have liked the class much better, and I wouldn’t have had C- and D grades lugging down my g.p.a.

I agree with Omniscient; the people who would benefit from phys. ed. most are the ones who get the least out of it. I think they should give the jocks class credit for participating in varsity sports and having the coaches actually teach the people who need help. But then, most phys. ed. teachers (who also taught health classes) were the worst of the worst in terms of teaching ability and patience. Only rarely have I encountered a math teacher who ridiculed a student who struggled with algebra, and I’ve never seen an English teacher humiliate a student with dyslexia, but most gym coaches seem to enjoy being sadistic littly tyrants.

My favorite moment of gym was being ridiculed by a coach about not being able to climb The Rope, and telling him to go piss up it. I spent two Saturdays in detention because of it, but it was well worth it.

Now you’ll have to pardon me; I’m going to go out for a run.

Stranger

29

Aww, how cute!

I mostly enjoyed it, but I hated running. I loved gymnastics and volleyball. In my district we actually have a fitness class that is gymnastics for adults. I may take it sometime.

30

I hate it. I live in Illinois so gym is required grades K-12. I could probably be good if sports if I wanted to be, but I find them boring and pointless. Besides, I have severe asthma so I can hardly run and it doesn’t seem worth the asthma attack or feeling crappy for the rest of the day just so I can kick a ball in a net.
I took CPR for a quarter this year which, besides passing out once, was useful and not bad at all then next year I’ll be able to take swim and some health or dance classes, so I don’t think it’ll be that bad. Middle school gym always sucked ass though.

31

I hated PE. While I like physical activity, I don’t like most sports, even the ones I was pretty good at. If PE would have been 45 minutes of weight training, exercise, running, etc. I would have liked it. We spent a couple of weeks at a time learning and playing different sports. Spending time learning the rules of and then playing “happyball”(non-violent “touch” rugby,) softball, football, etc. did me no good because I knew how to play them already and didn’t like them.
I’m not anti-social, but I am pro-solitude. The only competitions I like are one-on-one; golf, tennis, hand-ball, and wrestling. PE did nothing for me.

Peace - DESK

32

We didn’t have health education in PE. Junior year we had health class instead of PE. On of the PE teachers taught it and he was a joke. He kept trying to emphasive the “4 aspects of health, mental, physical, social, and SPIRITUAL”. He claimed he wasn’t teaching religion because spiritual health was “the ablity to believe in some force”. I kept defining as a ablity to believe in fairy tales. He couldn’t teach us first aid as he wasn’t certified. The school nurse taught that. Of course be the time we got to it I was an EMT and I wound up adminstering CPR tests to my classmates.

33

Loved it. I lucked out in that my highschool schedule had Jazz band 2 days a week 1st period, and PE the other 3 days. Which meant that the whole band was in the same class. We were a very close knit music department, and VERY competitive in gym class. It was lots of fun to go all out against your friends.

Looking back, it seems our entire music department was unusually athletic. We had our own ski trips, and would frequently rent out the indoor soccer place for our own games. I recall many trips to the batting cages as well.

34

In elementary school I never minded it. We always played fun games and I never minded getting up and moving around a bit.

High school was a different story. PE was hell. Atheletic boys played basketball (teacher was the school BB coach).
Non-atheletic boys and all girls had to run the bleachers or copy sports history straight from textbooks.

Even that wouldn’t have been so bad if the guys weren’t allowed to slap our asses as we ran past or tease us about our bouncing breasts or make fun of the overweight kids.

The coach did nothing but laugh and tell us to “tough up”.

35

Mostly hated it - I , too, ran onto the unexplained rules thing, I have no talent for games involving balls in motion - far less for those where you’re supposed to hit them with a stick (who thought that up, anyway ?). As luck would have it, I could mostly keep a low profile and for some reason was able to maintain a philosophical outlook on being picked last for teams or somesuch. In HS, I jumped on the chance to do any sport not involving a team - I had a modest talent for running and (even better) orienteering, but didn’t bother to put in any effort. I’d been groomed though many years of PE to believe that I sucked at any sport, so why bother ?

Weirdly enough, in the Army - where I could definitely not hide - I took a liking to PE, even of the sometimes dangerous and mostly unpleasant military variety. (OK, I could’ve done with a little less of it, but I didn’t loathe the individual activities…) This may have had something to do with the fact that the instructors were graded as well. Platoons were tested regularly and if there was no progress, it would be a black mark on that NCO’s record - and with PE training being one of the ways new NCOs could get a taste of command responsibility, they were extremely interested in getting the best results possible for the platoon as a whole, not just the best 25%. (Other nerds in the platoon had the same thing happen.) Lots of attention went into improving technique, preventing injury and generally speaking making the best of everybody’s abilities.

If more PE teachers had adapted that attitude, PE in school might have been enjoyable or at least constructive. As it was, it was just boring, senseless and at times somewhat humiliating.

36

While I wasn’t “unfit” per se, I was a skinny goth kid who was sometimes confused as gay and other times confused as a drug addict. Even as such, I tended to have a pretty good time in PE for the most part. I was okay at basketball, not bad at racketball, decent at softball … as a result, the teacher and most of the other kids either left me alone or treated me with respect. So I’d say I didn’t hate it by any means, but I wasn’t looking forward to it every day.

37

When I was in junior high (7th & 8th grade), I loathed PE, but did it anyway. I sucked at basketball (I scored 4 points in two years). At that time, you could get a ‘C’ just for dressing out. As long as you looked like you were participating, you got an ‘A’. When high school came around, I took the classes that required the least amount of effort (like a class that included recreational games like bowling, ping pong, etc. and golf - where we chipped Wiffle golf balls around the park).

38

I loved PE.

In elementary school, I attended a very small school, way out in the middle of nowhere. 50 minute bus ride through the mountains, one way. 9 other kids in my class. There, “PE” consisted mostly of games like Capture the Flag, Dodgeball, Kick The Can, a baseball/softball-like concoction played with a soft “saftyball”, or Ultimate frisbee. Occasionally we’d have running weeks, when during that time of the day we’d have to walk/jog/run a mile. It was fun, but it was basically the same effort level and content as recess. While I started putting on extra weight around 6th grade, I was always a very active tomboy.

I deeply envied the atheletic activities and organized sports of the kids in the nearest actual towns, about 2 hours away, and resolved at a very young age to choose a particular high school from my 3 available options (2 accredited high schools “in town”, each 2 hours away in seperate directions, or the alternative, unaccredited private high school located in my home town, which basically meant more Ultimate frisbee and no basketball team). I chose was the same high school that my older brother had attended 7 years before me, and he had played football there.

I quickly became a bit of an anomaly at my high school, being an uberjock who played on all available inter-scholastic teams (volleyball in the fall, baskeball in the winter, softball in the spring), yet I was in all of the college prep classes and considered a nerdy and brainy geek, while also being one of those backwoods “weirdos” because I hadn’t gone to the same elementary school as everyone else. For the last two reasons I was decidedly unpopular. Aside from me, popularity and jock status went hand-in-hand by default.

But I digress…

Equally as fun and physically demanding as competetive team sports, was the daily hour of PE under the enthusiastic and creative watch of “Mrs. C”. Being a wide-eyed rural kid who had never experienced an organized PE class, I was instantly hooked. She had two favorite outdoor team games that we’d play for “seasons” of a few weeks. One of them was Speedaway. I can’t remember what the other one was called, but it had the same general rules as basketball (without the dribbling, but with traveling, zone or one-on-one defense) but the ball used was a football, and to score, you had to throw the football to knock a large (4ft diameter) ball off of a pedestal that was raised about 12 feet off the ground on a pole. There were two of these “goal balls”, one on each end of the field.

But my favorite PE “season” was net sports, which was basically isolated to volleyball (my favorite of the inter-scholastic sports I played), table tennis and badminton. I was surprised when badminton became one of my favorite games to play in general.

At the end of each school year, the PE tradition was to have a weenie-roast potluck, complete with a warm water homemade slip-n-slide down a small hill beside the gym, made possible by the outdoor spigot that for was patched into the gym’s water heater, probably for hosing off football equipment after games.

It basically errupted into a big mudbowl. And to this day, cross my dykey heart, I have no idea why I still distinctly remember how much I enjoyed those last days of the school year…watching my female classmates slide face-first down a rubber mat, clothes soaking, squealing and slipping around in the mud in a tangle of teenaged limbs…no idea at all. :confused:

39

:confused: sorry, i dont’ get it - what was the problem? :confused:

40

Since school’s out in the summer, I’m guessing the outdoor pool was too cold during the school year?