High school gym for me actually wasn’t as bad as one would have thought. Sophomore year was swimming (“aquatics,” barf) where I learned to swim. I rather enjoyed that class, even though most of the time I couldn’t see that well in it. I hadn’t started wearing contacts yet and it’s a little difficult to swim with glasses on. Junior and senior years we signed up for something new each marking period, with four in a school year. I took fitness walking twice, step aerobics twice, archery, golf, team handball, and something I don’t remember. I loved everything except team handball, where I don’t think I actually touched the ball more than once.
It was hell. PE was co-ed. The boys were unnecessarily rough and forever making lewd comments. I was uncoordinated and shy. Thank og half our grade was Health. I got 100% on that half and ended with a 70% overall. I intentionally “forgot” my gym clothes and wore shoes that were not permitted on the gym floor. The only reason I got any marks for gym whatsoever was because we had a small section with downhill skiing, and ice skating. I did not and will not participate in team sports of any kind.
/Ms Cyros
I guess I’ll be the odd one out and say it was my favorite class after math and science.
I loved gym class. I set a HS record for bench press (315 lbs.) that I believe still stands to this day!
Gah, I went to school in Illinois, so I had to take four years of PE but only two years of science (of course, I took more, I was sucking up for college). The last two years were strange uh, ‘sports’ - I suppose they ran out of things - so I took a ‘class’ on rollerskating, bowling, and my personal favorite, pickleball.
Ah yes, because everyone knows that a deep understanding of pickleball is much more important than, I dunno, chemistry.
PE might have had some value (teamwork, building endurance/ strength) if it hadn’t been such a perverse distillation of everything that sucks about high school.
I have asthma, and to this day my asthma does not approve of running - I was on the jv swim team, and could do that, but running, no way.
I remember having to do that damned Presidential Fitness Award crap - my junior year, I think, I decided to try being serious about PE - really making an effort, and trying to get a respectable time on the mile run - I kept on going once I started wheezing, I kept on going when my face started going numb, and didn’t slow down. I literally saw stars, and the world was spinning when I finished. I didn’t stop panting for a good half hour.
I don’t remember what my time was anymore, but it earned a ‘D’. You probably could have seen any trace of motivation I had left shrivel up and die.
It’s fair to say that gym sucked.
And it really sucked being on the swim team after seven classes of PE students had been in and out of the pool. Nasty stuff.
I never even once showed up for class. And I got an A. The only marks the coach put down were for ‘dress cuts’ which was showing up without the proper workout attire. Since I wasn’t there, I got no marks.
We never did any of that stuff in my PE experience.
Marching band counted for PE, but only lasted half the year. So for the other half of your freshman and sophmore year you’d have to take PE. Marching band was zero period (7-8am), and almost everybody had full schedules for the rest of the year so the makeup PE was also zero period. This meant that everybody who was in PE with me was also in band, and for the most part didn’t want to be there at all at hell o’clock in the morning either. The instructors didn’t want to be there an hour early and drag out all the fancy equiment, so most of the time it involved roll call followed by one of three activities: “walk the track and talk to your buddies,” “play basketball” (aka “stand around passing a ball back and forth while talking”), or volleyball (which, amazingly enough, we actually played while talking).
The pool was broken, the weight room wasn’t open that time of day, and you didn’t build up a sweat unless it was already really hot out. I only ran the mile four times in hgh school.
Actually* Jr * High Gym class was unpleasant for me and I was considered somewhat athletic, I mean if people were picking teams I was one of the first people picked.
In the locker room although we didn’t take showers we did often change in front of each other, I was embarrassed because I looked like a little kid. Then besides that there was a lot of “pantsing” going on and I would see guys getting teased about the size of their equipment and I would join in knowing that these guys getting teased were probably the same size as I was.
I hated gym class, mainly because I didn’t feel like being forced to interact with other people. We rarely had a unit I was interested in (I think soccer and badminton, and everything else blew). On top of that, the entire thing was absolutely pointless–it was only half a year, and there was no actual fitness being learned–and I’d much rather have been in one of my academic classes, pretty much all of which I actively enjoyed.
Oh, also, there were no showers. So if you had class(es) after gym you either had to do your best not to exert yourself or stink for the rest of the day.
Fun fun fun.
(I should admit that I’m not terribly athletic, but I’m not sure that has a whole lot to do with it–my brother plays three sports a year and he detested gym too.)
I loved PE. Of course, I’m in Australia, and we have doors here. I never undressed or showered in front of anyone else.
I’m also a bit of a sports freak. Love nothing better than getting hot and sweaty and tired. Plus, I love a challenge, and I love trying new things. And I wasn’t too bad at most of the sports.
Add that all together and you get someone who loves PE. I guess that’s why I became house captain too.
As unpleasant as some aspects of middle school/high school were, gym was not part of it. In HS, my best friend had the same period gym as me, so we had a lot of fun, actually. I helped teach my friend how to swim. I was such a good swimmer, actually, that I didn’t have to do all the boring leg kicks and stuff all the other people did (I went to a high school that required all students know how to swim before graduating).
Playing basketball/football/hockey was actually quite fun. Sometimes it was crappy, like if I was on a team of rejects who didn’t want to play and made out the whole experience to be much worse than it was.
But then again, at the time, excersize was a great way for me to relieve stress from other problems, like poor grades in other classes, or being bullied, or heartbreak in the romance department. I probably could have been on the track team; I could run, and run, and run. I was light and quick and I think a part of it was the fact that it complimented what I had to deal with day to day.
Nowadays people are much more cordial but that also means I don’t run or excersize more because I’m a lot more calm through the day and don’t need that outlet, leading me to become kind of flabby 
I need a new drive to get fit, damn it! and at least the ‘torture’ of PE did it for me back then.
Hated hated hated P.E. It was coed and the guys would make rude comments and slam into us every chance they got. And the teachers did everything they could to incite the athletic kids into tormenting us non-athletic kids; I guess they thought it would motivate us to do better, or something. Or maybe they just got off on it. My favorite was the sadistic asshole who told the class that NO ONE was going to be dismissed until I ran the 1/4 mile. By the time I got done I was panting and crying so hard at the sheer unfairness of it I had to go to the nurse’s office. She asked me if I had PMS. :rolleyes:
One quarter of the year was given over to Health class, which was okay, except for when the Water Patrol came up and gave us the Boating Accident Slideshow. In color. Cured me of ever wanting to go near water.
See, this is the kind of attitude I don’t understand. How does not wanting to be bullied into playing a stupid game that I don’t know how to play because the teachers have never bothered to explain it and that I suck at anyway because I see no reason to try to excel at something as pointless as sports make me a “reject”?
Not being able to run a quarter mile isn’t just unathletic I’d say that’s somewhat unhealthy as well.
Because by all rights you should be litterally “rejected” from the team. If a bunch of people are playing a game and some people don’t want to be there and aren’t very good anyway, they shouldn’t ruin it for those who do. Now in all fairness, maybe they should split the class by skill level. But I also think it’s a good lesson that sometimes we have to do things we don’t want to do but other people are counting on us anyway.
I had asthma so that didn’t help, but so did one of our best cross-country runners, so it really didn’t help, because if she could manage her asthma then what was wrong with me, huh? Just trying to get out of class?
I really enjoyed the winter months because we’d do winter sport type activities - I played field hockey already so if we played pickup field hockey I wouldn’t, for once, be last picked for a team. And soccer was pretty OK. Run up and down and don’t expect to be passed to. Yeah. I can do that.
On the other hand, I am poorly co-ordinated and although physical therapy when I was a small child helped quite a bit, I was always dreadful at sports like cricket, netball or volleyball where you had to be able to figure out where the ball was going in three dimensional space, not just across the ground like it did most of the time in field hockey. So I was rightfully picked last for those teams and it wasn’t much fun.
Always got points for good attitude though, since I was such a ruddy little swot that even if no one would partner me in tennis, I’d practice up against a wall and so forth.
Yes.
I can’t believe someone complaining about swimming in gym class. I would’ve killed for the opportunity to swim in gym.
Our gym class was bad because it was so damned unimaginative and boring. It seemed as if they were mostly limited to throwing out three footballs in the fall and having us set up our own football games. In the winter (or on rainy days) they threw out basketballs. In the spring it was softballs. There was also a single Universal Gym you could work out on. There were very rare alternatives, but that was about it. The darlings of the gym teachers occasionally got to do more interesting things, but the regular class was a colossal waste.
I always got B’s in Gym. Since I was otherwise an “A” student, I decided to try extra hard one semester. The gym teacher acknowledged this at one point, but he still gave me a “B”. So what was the point? I got the same grade if I applied myself or just slacked off.
My first year at college for gym class. I took Judo, rowing, sailing, and fencing. I loved it.
If a bunch of people are playing a game and some people don’t want to be there and aren’t very good anyway, they shouldn’t be bullied, ridiculed, and labeled as “rejects” by those who do.
Oh, I absolutely agree. But it’s a lesson that can be learned in real classes (those jolly Group Projects teachers are so fond of) without the potential for physical bullying, intimidation, and injury you get in P.E. classes.
And I wasn’t an especially overweight or unpopular kid. I was the weird kid who listened to Weird Al and liked Monty Python and Mel Brooks (late 80s, btw, in Redneck Central). It’s just that I didn’t then and don’t now see any point in forcing unathletic kids into physical competition with athletic kids. I think these days P.E. classes are focusing more on personal health and recreation, which I’m all for; I’m firmly convinced, though I don’t have a cite, that traditional P.E. classes managed to turn whole scads of people off of physical fitness for life just from their sheer hellishness.
Love gym class (had it first period each year - even when I took it as an elective). It felt good to do something active and get my blood pumping, and I was more alert throughout the day.
Why people refused to shower after gym is totally beyond me - who wants to stink for the rest of the day?
I only had to take one year of PE in high school, during my freshman year.
We had a teacher who was just out of college, and definitely played favorites. The popular girls? Those were her ‘friends’ while the rest of us were basically ignored. We didn’t have to shower after class, and since we wore uniforms to school, most of us had our gym clothes on under the uniform.
We had a variety of activities over the course of the year:
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the ‘walk and talk’ around the track at the football stadium (brand new that year. Condemned 4 years later for shoddy construction.)
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Picking up rocks from the practice field. Yeah, that was real physical. We were each given a bucket and told to pick up rocks.
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Oooh, it’s a sunny day! Lets go sit outside in the sun!
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The attempt at aerobics, complete with the Jane Fonda videocassette. That didn’t work.
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Occasional basketball
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The day we all had to run laps because someone was smoking in the girls locker room. Since no one would admit it was them or knowing who it was, we got to run laps.
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Volleyball. Poorly.
For our mid-year exams, we had to write an essay on something we had done so far that year. I wrote mine on picking up rocks.