This is the extreme, but I wonder if this and other gym class traumas make it worth it. All gym ever seemed to me was an opportunity to play silly games like dodgeball and real games that would let those who were already athletes flaunt themselves and make unathletic kids feel bad about themselves and get made fun of continually.
I think there are few people who became athletes because of gym class. Let me state that I think grade schoolers should have gym so they get used to physical activity and like it and that I think health classes up to high school are very important. But when kids are going through the already stressful period of adolescence, isn’t gym class the last thing they need to worry about?
I’m glad I took gym class in Grade 9. But my gym teacher was terrific and took the approach of “teach them as many specific sports skills as possible.”
So we spent a week learning how to throw a football. I don’t mean we played touch football and the football players all dominated; I mean we learned how to throw a football. By the end of the week the least athletic kids were all throwing footballs with perfect spirals.
The following week: This is how you PUNT a football. By the end of the week every kid in class could punt a football at least 25 yards.
The following week: This is how you serve a volleyball.
This is how you volley a volleyball.
This is how you pass a basketball.
This is how you execute a backwards somersault.
There were also the standard classes on nutrition, rules of sport, proper exercise, stretching, the whole nine yards. All expertly taught according to strict lesson plans.
It was like that all year; all the students learned sports skills they’d never had before. Terrific class. I lucked out, I know, but I’m glad I did.
Well, that OP story is rather horrible. But gym class does serve a purpose.
We’re a rather overweight, sedentary country, statistics tend to indicate. Even our kids. Does that problem get better or worse without gym?
And gym class provides a great deal of social interaction and ‘teamwork-teaching’ in addition to plain-old good exercise.
Like any other subject, if it’s taught poorly, it won’t be worthwhile. If it’s taught well, it will be a positive thing for young people’s development.
Gym class in theory is important. In practice, it can suck.
If we all could have had instruction like in RickJay’s example, it would be great. Sadly, it wasn’t like that in my schools. We recieved almost no instruction on any sport. It was assumed that the kid would be familiar with the rules and intricacies of a particular sport. Gym class was basically an hour-long pick-up game. The only thing the ‘teacher’ wrote down in his book was dress-cuts (showing up without proper gym attire). I clued into this right away. If I don’t show up at all, I don’t get a dress cut. I skipped every class and got an A.
At least at our school, the old saying was true. ‘Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. Those who can’t teach, teach gym’.
Team sports aren’t the only way to keep physically fit. I hated gym because I was lousy at organized sports and I usually got picked last for teams. Hell, they would sometimes get into arguments over which team would have to take me: “We got him last time, dammit you take him!” Then the coach would have to assign me, and I’d meet with groans of disappointment or outright threats: “You better not fuck up this time, loser!” My teammates would make sure to assign me to a position that required the least amount of participation in the game so I couldn’t fuck things up. Then I’d stand around the whole hour watching other people exercise. The coach was no help either. He was a laissez-faire coach. He’d stand there with his thumb up his ass staring at the clouds while we “settled our own disputes”. Gym was a nightmare for me and about ten other “losers” who couldn’t catch a ball or kick a goal. At least we didn’t have to take showers.
I was overweight in high school and I suppose that gym could have helped me lose weight had I been given the opportunity to actually work out. I would have preferred jogging around the track the whole hour. Anything was preferable to those damn sports. I did lose weight during my junior and senior years, no thanks to gym. I ended up taking matters into my own hands and getting my exercise after school.
Every once in awhile we had a kind of “free-for-all” day when we were allowed choose any activity we wanted as long as we kept active. Some people would form teams and play football. Many of us would jog around the track, play tennis, use the weight equipment, or do calisthenics. That was the only time I ever enjoyed gym, and I usually got one hell of a workout. Why can’t gym be like that? Let the team sports be extracurricular, for Christ’s sake.
Ugh, gym class. While I agree that something should be done to stop the ever-increasing obesity of Americans, I don’t think it’s the answer.
Like, who wasn’t traumatized in some way by gym class? In high school, I was in excellent physical condition - I studied ballet, jazz, and modern dance & swam on the swim team. But I have asthma & I can’t run very fast, & while I do very well with activities requiring endurance and control, I’m not very strong. Because of this, I sucked at just about everything we did in gym class. (I have served a volleyball over the net exactly one time in my entire life.) Doesn’t mean I’m a couch potato, but gym class has very little to do with physical fitness.
P.E. (as we brits tend to call it, or Games) is a bit like English Lit. If E.Lit is taught badly it can turn people off reading good books. Gym done badly it can reinforce a negative image and lead to kids avoiding physical exercise.
My own experience is of teachers being only interested in team sports like rugby. I sucked at rugby 'cos I was small and if I ever got the ball all these big kids would jump on me. I got quite good at being where the ball wasn’t. I was actually quite good at cross country running but we only did that when the rugby pitch was frozen over. If only the p.e. staff had bothered to cover a wider variety of sports I am sure many more would have found one that suited them enough to actually enjoy it.
I hated gym class, had to take two years of it and I always got in fights. Stupid jocks always thought they were so hot, which was just annoying, bu then they had to give the rest of us shit for it, which was infuriating. Nothing funnier than seeing a football player cringe from a skinny runt like I was, but man was I pissed. Rick, if my class was like that I would have taken it no problem.
Never had the communal shower problem…sheesh. I can’t believe that. No penis?!?
I’ll go with Stella, gym class isn’t there to keep us in shape. If it was it would be aerobics class or something, not “flag football” and volleyball. Gym class is there…well, I really don’t know why its there. I hated it. If my kids hate it I’ll understand. F gym.
The OP is moot here in my downstate Illinois school district, where the voters have turned down, for the second time, a proposed tax increase to pay for school improvements. One of the first things to be cut for next year is The Cat’s high school Phys Ed program. No great loss, IMHO.
Ah, gym class. Didn’t Calvin once call gym class, “Contemporary Studies in State-Sponsored Terrorism”?
In spite of the Jeff incident, I didn’t mind gym class all that much. What bugged me about it was that the teacher never got to know my name–I was neither good enough nor bad enough to stand out. And after that one teacher, the rest of my PE teachers were pretty harmless.
The early years of high school were fairly standard, but in the later years of high school, the gym teachers at our school rotated around the classes so you got something from all of them. IIRC, there were three male teachers and three female, and we had each of them for some point of the school year. Some of them taught us skills, as RickJay mentioned, and those were useful in another way too–you got to know just what went into the pro sports we watched on TV. Others let us play the games the skills came from, and those were kind of fun as well. Still others gave us more individual things like track and field. We even had a few co-ed gym classes, for things like tennis. It was interesting to be able to learn about and try all kinds of different things, and I’d recommend the same kind of approach today.
However, I’d temper that attitude with a condition: if a student is participating seriously in some other kind of physical activity, that student can be exempted from gym class and get a PE credit for their outside activity. My sister, for example, was a serious figure skater. She would be at the rink for at least three hours a day after school, and more on weekends, and she hated gym class. She would have preferred to get a PE credit for her skating instead of suffering through yet another basketball or volleyball game sandwiched between Math and History. My parents and I tended to agree with her point–20-plus hours of figure skating per week sure seemed to be more physical activity than a couple of hours of gym class. But not in the eyes of the school, apparently.
In theory, physical education is a good idea – teach kids some body skills, the importance of both halves of “mens sana in corpore sano” and all that good crap.
In practice, it nearly always turns into the sort of thing that has inspired threads here and in the Pit about how awful it is/was.
If a math teacher focused on his brightest students, ridiculed the stupidest and encouraged the bright students to do likewise, and told them they just had to grin and bear it, he’d be out the door in less time than it takes to hear a parental complaint. And good riddance!
So why do we allow it to happen in phys. ed.?
My experience was of being by 20 months the youngest kid in my classes, and of fairly small and puny build for my age on top of that. Hence, the song and dance you’ve all heard (and most have said) a hundred times before: last chosen, ridiculed, always picked on, etc.
I agree that a teacher who focuses on individual students and tries to teach skills is a valuable thing, in phys. ed. as in other disciplines. I had one in fourteen years of phys. ed. (it was a junior college requirement too). The rest of it I might better have simply painted a bullseye on me and offered potshots to all comers; at least that way I’d have at least initial control of the terms on which I was to be tortured.
RickJay, I would have loved to have had a gym class like that. Since I was asthmatic as a kid, I never learned those skills and learning them in high school would have been a great self-esteem booster. Sometimes I wonder what I’m going to teach my kids to do since I can’t do any of it myself.
The only good thing about my gym class was the teacher. He also taught freshman history, which I excelled at, so he liked me a lot. He even put the smackdown on some kids who were picking on me in class. And he’d joke around with me when I was just standing around during the games, because, of course, I was put wherever I’d have to do the least. Shockingly, he was also the varsity football coach.
But as I stated in the OP, I really don’t care for this class. Make it an option, yes, but don’t require it. Or totally revamp it to a system like RickJay’s class, with some weightlifting and aerobics thrown in. If I have any choice in where I send my kids to school, I will ask about the PE program. I don’t want my kids picked on, nor do I want them to pick on anyone else if they’re blessed with physical talents.
I can’t believe I am about to say this, but … I do think schools should require some sort of phys. ed. class. This from the girl who claimed to have her period continuously for three straight years in order to skip gym. This from the girl who graduated without knowing where the school’s pool was located. This from the girl who selected her college because it didn’t have a gym requirement.
The key would be to eliminate the traumas associated with phys. ed. as we now know it. The getting picked last for teams, getting picked on by other kids, teasing in the locker rooms … I think I’m having a retroactive anxiety attack while typing this.
In my perfect universe, all phys. ed would incorporate the following:
– all teams picked by alphabet order, birthday order, something, anything other than letting kids pick their peers.
–focus on specific skills, as described by RickJay.
–teach the rules and general history of the sports. This does not mean the teacher stands around for the first 5 minutes of class and recites the rules. This means that a class time is scheduled to sit down and learn actual information.
–have options available for students, including team sports, weight lifting, track, and other more recreational-type activities, such as ping pong and archery. This would give students the ability to select an activity that doesn’t involve changing clothes (and yes, I know you can break a sweat playing table tennis, I have watched the Olympics … but I’m talking about the level of ping pong played by me).
–for students who don’t want either the sweaty team sport, or the less active recreational activity, give them something sport-related to do, like organizing an elimination tournament. (I was going to add something about how to figure out a point spread, or setting up a football pool, but then I realized I was getting a little outside the realm of what can be taught in schools.)
I don’t think phys. ed. has much actual use in making kids healthier or losing weight. As Caliban mentioned, this will most likely happen outside of school. But when I was teenager, I don’t think I appreciated how much I needed a break from the more intellectual parts of my school day.
And a final thought … sports are a part of our society. It’s not required in my office that I play golf, but I wish I did when I see other people accepting the boss’s invitation for a golf weekend. I think girls in particular might be quick to wiggle out of phys. ed. requirements in school. I certainly did, and I think I would have done that differently if I realized how often in life one encounters sports and recreation. It might not be fair, but I think it’s realistic to say that it often plays a key part of social and business interactions. Being able to participate in sports in even the most minimal way gives people one more skill they can use outside of school.
As a student, I hated gym. I hated having to run laps. I hated participating in stupid team sports. I hated the boys hogging the ball and never passing to girls. I hated hated hated having to put on polyester gym shorts and get all sweaty in the middle of the day.
And most of all, I hated learning to square dance in junior high.
However, I think physical education, properly done, is important, and I’m glad I was forced to go through it. I had to do a lot of stuff I hated, but I also did some sports and activities that I enjoyed. I got some exercise, but I don’t think that should be the primary purpose of phys ed. It should be learning the fundementals of team sports and sportsmanship, and also learning how to do things safely, like stretching out ahead of time, tracking your heart beat rate, and so forth.
That having been said, having a phys ed requirment in college is ridiculous. It exists only to employ phys ed majors.
For the record, our football coach from my freshman and sophomore years was really pretty nice too, and VERY understanding.
I hated gym class, though. Most of the time, we had jock teachers who didn’t get why we weren’t very good at throwing a ball, and who forced us to lift weights without even training us first, who made us run the mile run after walking up two very steep hills, etc etc…
Gym was evil.
Staying fit is key to becoming a well-adjusted individual. My biggest problem with phys. ed. is the fact that it seems to have teachers that are the most sadistic, unimaginative people around. My experience with phys. ed. goes back to the 1970s, so maybe things have changed, but it seemed in those days that gym class was given by whichever teacher drew the short straw. That was junior high (ages 11 to 15 or so) - by the time high school (ages 16 - 18) rolled around I was skipping pretty much every phys. ed. class I could without actually failing.
By all means teach kids to stay fit, but give them some options. I was never a sociable kid (I’m not a sociable adult either) which means I never got into team sports. I didn’t hate them, I just couldn’t see the point. But, if my jr. high phys. ed. teacher has given the class the option of splitting into two groups (this group works on basketball, this group works on track,) things might have been different. I enjoyed the solitary stuff - shotput, sprinting, discus, even lap running to some degree, but the forced comraderie and the expectation that I was supposed to give a rat’s hind quarters whether my floor hockey team won or lost - forget it. I just didn’t care. I enjoyed aspects of the games, just not playing the actual games themselves (if you see what I mean.)
Keep the classes, upgrade the teachers. Replace them with people who care about the kids and realize that different people are into different things. It seems so obvious.
I hated gym class. I was one of the first to develop, I was overweight as it was, and I lacked self-confidence. Naturally, I dressed in the bathroom.
In high school, I had the fortune of being in the same class with other girls who felt the same way as I did about the whole thing, so it was a little more bearable. In Texas, just about any extracurricular activity will earn credit for gym, so we didn’t have the problem of truly athletic people in the same classes with us peons. Later on, when I joined ROTC, we got dressed at home, so the problem was eliminated.
Consequently, I think that schools should offer alternatives, whenever possible. Allow marching band, ROTC, team sports, cheerleading and drill team, and if indicated, ice-skating, gymnastics, dance, and other competitive after-school activities to earn gym credit. Perhaps offer yoga and relaxation or a healthy-lifestyles class.
And, as for the OP, the kid’s parents could’ve talked with the school and inform them as to their son’s condition, and possibly gotten a waiver from showering.
First things first, I was by far not the most athletic kin in school. By far.
But, I adored Phys Ed. It was the one class I could blow off steam. I had fun playing sports, and I wish I could stop in the middle of my shift at work and pelt the guy at the desk next to me with a dodgeball. Ah, the memories.
We had a crazy teacher too, but we regarded him rather humourously. He was in good shape for a man in his sixties, and his vocabulary for obscure cursewords is unparalled by any person I have met since (he called me a Bloody harpooned piece of meathead once, for missing a pass, and I missed the next few plays bent over in laughter). We were an ethnically diverse school, and very competative with each other, and much posturing went on after class, but mostly in good humour.
And as for horrible embarrasement, the kids at my school didn`t need to be in gym to get any of that.
I’m sorry but I doubt the ops story about the kid named jeff.
Anyone disfigured like that could easily have obtained a MDs note to not take gym class. Or mearly not take showers.
When I was in Jr high in the catholic school we didn’t
have gym class. I was a tall wimpy kid when we went to public school when I was in 8th grade. Gym class was hard and I wasn’t very coordinated because I had no muscle tone. As the years went by I toned up. When I was in 11th grade I was a starter on the schools first football team. I still got beat by the opposing teams players but guts and determination kept me in there.I started both years and was in the best shape of my life when I graduated from high school.
Physical Education is supposed to be just that. How to get fit and how to stay that way. Tiddley winks may be a physical skill but it does not use much of the bodys muscles. Playing basketball uses many muscles and the harder you play the more good it does. If you hurt ,within reason, you are doing your body good. Too bad if you don’t like to exert yourself.Perhaps you should ask yourself if you are just lazy.
As far as showers go why should you be ashamed of your body? You’ll get over the embarrasment. If you are grotesquely obese as someone mentioned maybe you should begin getting serious about doing something about it.
Justwannano, I think the problem that myself and other posters have with gym class is not that we’re lazy, it’s that no effort was ever made to teach us anything. As for your doubt of the Jeff story, that is between you and Spoons.
Making me play basketball when I don’t know the basic rules and techniques involved is not going to make me a better athlete. It will only mark me as the kid who should never touch the ball. Thus begins the vicious cycle.
I don’t agree with some of the posts saying you should be allowed to do non-physical activity in gym class. However, I think requiring sports that require a great deal of prior knowledge and experience should not be part of a required class.
You don’t go into a basic, required math class expected to already know what you’re going to learn. But having to play team sports in gym requires exactly that. In being taught to play basketball, most gym teachers already expect you to know how to play basketball. This is a fundamental flaw of educational philosophy that needs to be corrected.
But everyone can figure out how to lift a weight, or do aerobic exercises or run. And everyone can be taught how to live a healthy lifestyle. As it stands now, most gym classes inherenly favor those who need them the least – the athletic. That is wrong from a health, educational and social perspective. And it has to change.