PE was frustrating and disappointing for me. There was no division based on ability, which brought the level of play down to the lowest common denominator while at the same time hurting the feelings of the less athletic children. The activities usually involved little physical exertion (e.g. indoor dodge ball or outdoor softball). Most significantly, it was held so infrequently (twice a week for half an hour at a time) that there was no ongoing athletic development.
For a few years, however, I was fortunate enough to attend a private school that had all students participate in sports for at least a couple of hours each day, offered a variety of sports that actually required continuous physical exertion (e.g. cross-country running, soccer, rugby, etc.), and dived students by ability so that even the worst athlete (me at first) would have a lot of fun playing with students of a similar ability.
That resulted in a fat, uncoordinated kid such as myself learning to like and then thrive at athletics. My first mile took me 14 minutes and fifty-six seconds. Thanks to my school offering daily participation with students of similar ability (or lack thereof in my case), I eventually got that down to four minutes and twenty-seven seconds. I went on to place internationally in one sport, nationally in another sport, and hold instructor certifications in two further sports. Participation in sports remains an important part of my life, and in all honesty, will help me live healthier and longer than will the benefits from what I learned in any number of academic courses.
In shot, an hour a week of activity is not enough to develop and train a body. Without development and training, it is hard to succeed enough at a sport to feel the tremendous joy and exhilaration of a strong physical performance. Without the reward of such good feelings, the practice is reduced to tedium and frustration. PE limited to a couple of half-hour sessions per week, as it was for me in the public system, is a recipe for failure in athletics, and more importantly, is a recipe for failure in long term general health.
I’ll trade your headlights for the problems 10th-grade boys have when they jump into cold water… “I was in the pool!!!”
I generally disliked PE. I hated it in grade school because the other kids in my class were busily shunning me and a couple of my friends; I transitioned from always being picked last for teams to not getting picked at all, so I’d either append myself to whichever team I should have been on, or just didn’t play at all. I’ve never been good at team sports.
In High school, there were some times that we played non-team sports like badminton or judo, and I did pretty well at those. Then in College, I took tae kwan do, swimming, weight lifting, aerobics, and a bunch of other PC classes and had a blast.
So, on average, not a lot of fun when publicly-funded.
I hated PE in High School. In Fall it was Flag Football (and occasionally soccer). In Winter iot was three basketballs thrown out into a roomfull of guys. In spring it was baseball. Very rarely they tried something else, like wrestling. But only for one day, with virtually no training. The gym teachers were an odd and vengeful bunch. “Happiness,” I recall one of them telling us (I swear without a touch of irony) ,“Is when you hit yourself on the head with a hammer 50 times, then stop.”
I always pulled a “B” in gym. One time, I decided to try and pull it up to an “A”. I participated powerfully and obviously. he gym teacher told me that he saw me out there, trying my hardest. I still got a “B”. After that, I saw no point in putting extra effort into it.
In my first year of college I did rowing, sailing, judo, and fencing. I loved it.
Most of the time PE was OK, especially when we had trampoline class. We also did archery, that I turned out to be pretty good at. I didn’t love PE, but it was no worse than the rest of my school day.
Then I reached my full height of 5’11" at 17. Being a tall chick, I constantly have to tell people, “Actually, no, I’m crap at volleyball/basketball/track.” My gym teacher Mrs. Albert decided that there was an athlete buried somewhere in this lanky body and that she was going to discover it. She constantly singled me out to be the first person in the class to jump the hurdles when we did track activities or demonstrate to the class how (not) to shoot a basketball properly. The absolute worst day was the day we played volleyball, and Jeff, who was a very good server, slammed that ball at me 21 times in a row, me missing every single time. I think Mrs. Albert’s heart was in the right place but I grew to dread that hour every day: the hour I would be made to look like a complete idiot in front of my classmates.
There was no pool. There was a pond in the woods out back, and a stream further out, but nothing you’d want to get in.
There were no showers. They existed, but for the sport teams, not PE.
There were no uniforms. Most people just wore shorts and a T-shirt. For games that needed something to tell teams apart, we had pull-on mesh shirts in various colors.
Teams were chosen more or less at random. I say “more or less”, as the teacher did try to even out the ratio of strong-to-weak players on each side.
Class was 50 minutes two or three times a week (depending on the block–it was block scheduling).
PE was only freshman year, except for the few sophomores who failed it the first time around.
There were no “seasons” of any one game. The activity usually changed daily, but when it didn’t, it lasted no more than a week.
Dodgeball was forbidden (too violent), but we did play it in middle school, albeit with wads of paper rather than balls.
Verbal abuse was grounds for removal from the class. Physical abuse was unthinkable.
Stuff like nutrition and sex-ed was covered in health class, not PE. Health class was also where new-agey meditative exercise was done.
Some of you actually had time to take showers? I wish we had. But no, we were left with maybe five minutes before the next class, scrambling to get the uniforms off and maybe dry our armpits with a towel and rub on some deodorant before putting our clothes back on. The showers remained dry much of the time.
Yeck.
Overall, I loved PE. In elementary school, I disliked gymnastics (while I was a very active kid, I was never ever very flexible) but I could normally get out of participating somehow. I did like when we had all the even/uneven bars, vaulting house etc out however because it seemed cool. And running the mile sucked. Other than that, I loved it. Basketball, football, soccer, volleyball, softball, kickball, ‘crab’ soccer, dodgeball, some game with scooters (laid on your belly on them and scooted around), the big parachute. I did intramurals in 6th grade too - came to school at like 6:30 am and play sports. I did soccer intramurals in junior high too. Gym glass started being semi-segregated in junior high because we had to dress out (white t-shirts with your name on them in sharpie, gym shorts, sneakers) but boys and girls played a lot of games together - like handball (my favorite). In high school gym was completely segregated minus a couple days when we played softball with the boys. We had to swim freshman year, for 3 weeks. We had an olympic sized pool at my school. While I didnt like swimming in gym, it was great exercise. And I had it the last hour of the day so I could go home and shower (we had showers but no one really used them druring gym class). We also did stuff like Tae Bo and line dancing (boring to me). But I loved PE because it was a class where you get to play sports (I was decent at all) and talk to your friends without getting in trouble. And it kept me active.
At my high school, you could take additional PE credits in things like lifeguarding, weighlifting, and ‘outdoor’ stuff like fishing. I guess they went to one of the scummy ponds around and fished there, I’m not sure.
I think it was Sophmore year, I had gym second period. This litterally stunk. Sweat through the period and then the rest of the school day without a shower.
One year gym was the last period, this was so much better.
I utterly despised PE. I saw, and continue to see, school as a place for academics, not sports. Fortunately, despite my awkwardness and obesity, my physical strength (demonstrated in those few relatively enjoyable sessions we had in the weight room) earned me enough respect that I was not harassed. What bothered me most was the fact that all the other gifted students, the ones who I had all my other classes with, my friends, by and large were involved in competitive sports of one sort or another. They got to avoid the suffering of being under the thumb of a coach who clearly felt this was a filler course taking his time away from his competitive coaching duties, and being in the company of the various cretins who composed the bulk of the class. The whole thing seemed demeaning: forcing physical labor on the unwilling, stripping to one’s skivvies in front of others, and being made to chose between marinading in one’s own sweat for the rest of the day or baring it all in the communal shower. Barbaric and absurd, to say the least. Oh, I understand the public health reasons for PE. I just think that the school is the wrong place for them, as well as competitive sports or anything else that does not serve to further intellectual growth.
I liked it because at my high school it was basically completely unstructured and was just like a free period.
Except for the first year of high school, we had a PE teacher that was really the stereotypical PE teacher-sadist. Nothing he did bothered me but I can imagine his class was something like hell for the unathletic kids.
I find the state of PE education quite sad in the United States. We’re a country plagued with obesity and heart disease. Tons of people who don’t really understand eating correctly or how to maintain a healthy activity level. A comprehensive physical education curriculum from K-12 could, if done correctly, have an amazing benefit to lots of students and society at large.
The PE instructor I had in grades 11-12 was a good example of how great PE could be in “theory.” He used to give lectures about how, without good health, it didn’t matter if you were a genius or a millionaire, you won’t be able to fully enjoy your life if you can barely walk from point A to B without getting winded.
His classes were pretty great in that he offered lots of instruction on how to do proper cardiovascular and weight training.
The point in which the class didn’t quite meet expectations was the fact the guy was like 69 years old (was in very good shape for that age, though) and had no interest in structure of discipline and seemed to have come from a better era. He honestly didn’t think students had to be forced to do anything, he just assumed everyone would try their hardest. Everyone was guaranteed an A, whether they left the class to smoke a cigarette or took a nap on the bleachers.
I enjoyed sports to a point, but would have rather spent the time reading a book.