High school gym was much better in my school district than in junior high. First of all, for some reason it was deemed necessary that all the girls wear gym suits instead of T-shirts and shorts like the boys got to wear. I hope they’ve changed that ridiculous rule by now. Also, you had to go along with whatever the gym teacher decided to do that day, which a good bit of the time was something either sucky or boring. There were also those 2-3 girls in every class that were jocks, and absolute ball hogs, so if you ended up playing a team sport involving a ball, you typically didn’t end up with much to do.
It was a great revelation to go to high school and actually get to pick something to do. The first day of class, we’d all meet in the gym and the teachers would tell us what our choices were and we’d sign up. Every semester you got to pick two things. I took swimming for the entire semester, because I was good at it. It also didn’t hurt that there were only three girls in the class and 17 boys, some of whom were on the swim team. A little eye candy to go with your exercise doesn’t hurt, though those guys would cheat outrageously whenever we played water polo.
The second semester, I did weightlifting and tennis. I was a 95-pound weakling, so the weightlifting was interesting. I had band right after gym class, and the first couple weeks I could barely hold my instrument up to play because my arms were all trembly and wobbly. I also sensed that the teacher for that class was not all that thrilled that he had to have girls in the class, but he did give me a fair grade so it was all right, I guess.
They must have decided I was undersized, because starting about half-way through the seventh grade, they put me in “bodybuilding”. Bodybuilding was for guys who needed to build some strength and endurance, and we did weights like three days a week, and ran on the other two. This was years before bodybuilding became a well-known phenomenon in the culture at large. Although most of us were skinny or fat or otherwise out of shape, there were a couple of guys in the class who were more like today’s idea of a body builder.
In the large gym classes that most people were in, they had to play team sports according to season–and I was terrible at all of them so being in the remedial class wasn’t too bad. In no gym class was I ever the target of abuse or mocking.
I had to take PE every year of middle and high school.
I loathed P.E. class. My freshman year, the gym teacher was the same gym teacher my mother had in high school, and Mom said that woman was old when she had her, 35 years before! At least that meant the class wasn’t very strenuous. But she required us to take showers after certain activities, and she stood there in the locker room, checking off each girl’s name on the list to make sure nobody skipped the shower, and rather obviously checking out the naked girls.
Sophomore year, the girls’ gym teacher left and a super-athletic guy took over the class. I swear he thought we were training for the Ironman triathlon, the way he ran that class. No more of the fluff like archery and modern dance that we had with the geriatric freshman teacher; he was into cross country running, basketball, etc. I got whacked in the face with a volleyball, breaking my nose. Some giant basketball forward stepped on my hand and broke two of my fingers. I nearly flunked P.E. that year. I think he only passed me because he didn’t want to put up with me again the next year.
I managed to get out of swimming both years by convincing my doctor that I was allergic to chlorine, so he wrote me a doctor’s excuse. No way was I getting in that nasty pool after four hundred other people had been in it that day.
We had to do one unit a year of square dancing. So you have:
The inherent joy and trancendent coolness of square dancing.
The bracing challenge of an activity involving a) keeping a beat, b) being somewhat physically coordinated, and c) interpreting and following rapid-fire commands from the caller. Show me the high school student who excels at all three. And when you mess up, of course, you fuck up your whole square and 7 people are pissed at you.
The delight of forced physical contact with the opposite sex, which ranged from disgusting (when it was a boy you didn’t like) to absolutely mortifying (when it was, heavens forfend, a boy you did like.) Of course, we were all feeing at ease, comfortable and confident because we were all tricked out in our stylin’ . . .
Gym uniforms. Yes, we had to turn out in uniforms. Because in order to square dance to the best of our abilities it was vitally important that we be dressed in polyester double-knit shorts and 50-50 T-shirts. In the dead of winter. For square dancing.
My P.E. classes sucked big red rocks. In junior high we were expected to be able to use the gymnastics equipment, such as the pommel horse and the hanging rings, like Olympians. Well, I exaggerate, but as a non-athletic person I hated and still hate those things.
In high school, gym class was a poorly planned waste of time. Class was 45 minutes, which by the time you allowed time to changed clothes, to take roll, showered, changed back into street clothes allowed about 20 minutes of actual class time. The actual class time was a joke. The instructers assumed a basic level of ignorance for all participants and so spent too much time teaching basic skills such as dribbling a basketball or kicking a soccer ball, which by the time you’ve you’ve either mastered by high school or else don’t give a damn about. I suppose the idea was to give everyone a taste of many different sports, but having the same 2 week unit on basketball every year which consisted of dribbling and the two handed chest pass didn’t do anything for me.
Heh. Showers? Only the teams (few as they were) were allowed to use them. So you wore the same underwear all day. Locker room I didn’t mind since I had a rockin’ bod, and like I said nobody’s underwear came off. There was no budget for towels or equipment or anything like that, no outdoor activities (no fields of any kind, just the concrete yard), no fancy stuff like football or dodgeball, no pools, and a couple of lifeless basketballs for 40-girl classes. So we mostly did calesthetics in our classes. Wait, I do remember we did have gymnastics–post '76 Olympics, a rich Bronx Science alumnus gave us a bunch of nice equipment, and I was OK on the balance beam and the uneven bars (although I did have glasses, which limited me a lot). The neighborhood was far too dangerous for us to leave campus and jog or anything either.
Four years of this. Going to school during the Fort Apache “Drop Dead NY!” years sucked.
In my home state, basketball was the big sport, so that was the default activity in gym.
In junior high, I didn’t know the rules of the game (beyond the basic idea that you were supposed to put the ball in the basket), so they were always blowing the whistle on me and making these arcane hand signals, which I later learned stood for ‘walking’, ‘three-seconds’, etc. The ‘teacher’ and his sadistic assistants enjoyed their power too much to actually explain what these infractions were. The fact that I was one of the shorter kids didn’t help my basketball game either. So yeah, I hated gym in grades 7-9. A lot.
High school gym started out the same. But they had a weight room, and usually allowed us to choose it over basketball. A few of us started out going simply to get out of basketball, but I ended up enjoying it and got pretty serious about it. So high school gym was better.
Loved it, and this from a guy that went on to do engineering.
I sucked at volleyball and basketball but cross country, broomball and soccer were a blast. A great break from math, english and the rest. I don’t remember too much hazing of other students but if you didn’t at least try you would’ve taken a bit of flack.
Ninth and tenth grade gym sucked dingoes’ kidneys. The teacher favored the athletic girls and had a thousand creative ways to make life miserable for the rest of us. Pity she didn’t put that creativity to use in coming up with more things for us to do; it was volleyball, volleyball, volleyball, three times a week for weeks at a stretch. Hated it, hated it, hated it.
Eleventh and twelfth grade was quite different, with another gym teacher who believed that P.E. was for life, not just for high school. She made an effort to encourage the less athletic girls to try new things, to find something they could enjoy doing into adulthood. She worked hard at being fair. We played basketball, softball, flag football; we ran, lifted weights, and tried our hands (or feet) at soccer and field hockey. Unfortunately, because she was middle-aged, clearly loved sports, and had never been married, the in crowd decided she was a lesbian, which was not at all a pleasant thing to be accused of back in the '80s, kids. Anyone who professed thinking she was a nice person or a good teacher was suspect, so that included me. Frankly I didn’t care if she was a lesbian - she never made a pass at any student, male or female, and I figured as long as she didn’t do that her sexuality was none of my business. But the rumor made me angry - I liked her - and that stole some of the joy from gym classes.
Gym class in the 70’s wasn’t a great experience mainly because of the way the instructors ran it. In jr. high, it was mainly a venue for the athletically talented/skilled to show off. At the high school level, the coaches were great believers in running. So, unless there was a visible funnel cloud or other such inclement weather, we were outside running. On the few occasions that we stayed indoors, we enjoyed such pursuits as rope climbing and the President’s Council on Physical Fitness test.
Stuff I liked: parachute, bombardment, XC skiing, basket shooting, chalking the field with the little cart.
Stuff I didn’t: timed or lap runs, square dancing, wrestling, anything designed to inculcate or socialize.
Secondary school is boot camp for life in the post-WW2 industrial age workingclass, citizen-soldier, organization-man culture. As part of the ethos, Phys Ed stresses concepts like “one screws up, everybody pays,” “the strong boss the weak,” and “no pain, no gain.”
I’m suspicious that a lot of the ethos originated with WW2 veterans going into teaching in the 50s era, and that PE changed the slowest because it was the least “theory based” of the teaching disciplines.
I can’t believe how many people got to swim in gym class (and hated it, no less). I would have loved it if my high school had a pool. Nice, solitary, relaxing activity, and something I’m actually competent at.
About the only thing I found semi-tolerable was long distance running. At least there was no teamwork involved, no rules everybody assumed you already knew, and despite being clumsy and slow I could usually manage to finish somewhere in the middle of the pack by sheer force of will. Pretty much everything else was an exercise in abject humiliation, with the possible exception of dodgeball, where my instinct to duck and cover any time a flying object approaches my head actually came in handy.
I was painfully shy and had an impossible time changing in front of everyone. So I didn’t. And they made fun of me.
I was fairly good at playing, but for whatever reason the girls were very competitive even in innocent little things like volleyball. So say you missed one ball in one game. Well for two weeks they’d be sniping at you, jumping in front of you, and hitting the ball for you, knocking you aside.
While it wasn’t hateful, it wasn’t the fun it could have been. I liked team sports, but gym kind of burned it for me.
I went to a private high school and didn’t get to have gym class; everyone was required to do at least one sport/athletic activity after school each year as a physical education requirement. I absolutely loved gym during elementary and middle school, but anything I missed about it in H.S. was made up for by how much more convenient it was to do all the sweating at the end of the day and then just go home and shower/change afterwards. Our school was really small (~225 students total, 9-12), and I doubt something like that would have worked on a larger scale, unfortunately. The people who weren’t particularly athletic did either cross country or track, and for the most part as long as you made some sort of effort at the basic requirements of the sport (i.e. you were willing to run and sweat a little on a semi-regular basis), everyone got their P.E. credit and went home happy.
Junior High PE wasn’t too bad, because I was fairly competent as a wrestler, so I had some cred. Running I hated, and actually pulled a “D” on semester because I couldn’t do a mile in the requisite time. In high school, I quickly transferred from PE to Athletics, where I could spend my required 3 years of PE as a swimmer/water polo player.
I think required PE as it exists in the public schools today is a joke of monumental proportions.
And, as far as fitness goes, it didn’t do any good. We all would have been better off in an actual fitness center lifting weights, walking on a treadmill, etc.
I hated it because I could never figure out how to play all those games. It seemed like one day most of the kids just showed up at gym class and started playing football, basketball, etc. It was as if they all came out of the womb with these skills. I didn’t have the slightest idea how to play these games aside from what little snippets I saw on television as I was flipping through the channels.
Never did the “teacher” sit us down in a classroom and discuss football theory or explain the rules of baseball. At no point was I ever offered a textbook on basketball strategy. It took me several semesters to figure out that in basketball you weren’t supposed to run with the ball unless you kept bouncing it on the ground. To this very day I have no idea what the hell a scrimmage is, except that I know it’s some sort of line.
It depended on the circumstances. If it was badminton, tennis or rounders I quite enjoyed it. And if we had a substitute teacher it was good too. I’d just not do anything. I met a good friend through this. We had a substitute and were supposed to be playing hockey. We got talking and wern’t playing. Every now and then the substitute would call in an overly happy voice at us “Run for the ball girls!”
I am extremely unathelethic and we had the kind of PE teacher who just didn’t understand that anyone would have any other reason for existing than being fit.
He pushed me way too hard. I used to regularly have a headache for the entire day. When I was twelve I had PE three times a week, first hour of the school. I can still remember the relief I felt when those lessons were over for the day. I didn’t mind school that much, but those made me want to ring in sick.
Later, when I was less shy and more assertive, it was the relentless “you can do it” optimism that got me and I used to get into fights with the teacher.
No, I cannot do a handstand. I tried for about an hour a week, two months in a row for three years. And I really honestly did try for a good while, but then I gave up. Then the teacher said “Don’t say you can’t! You can DO IT!”. I couldn’t. Then after about week four they’d haul me upside down. “You see! You can do it!.” :rolleyes:
And don’t even get me started on the Shuttle test. Evil torture. I did NOT care how I compared to national average. I knew it was going to be bad without all the torture. I have other qualities. Like a functioning brain.
I suppose the message is clear there. I actually do feel that all this pushiness actually worked against my health as I never ever did any exercise whatsoever as soon as I didn’t have to anymore. Zilch, zero, zip.
It’s only recently I have taken up bellydancing and I go swimming once in a while. I find I quite enjoy it, but that has taken me 10 years.
