Hated gym class.
Got beat up in the locker room after class every day.
Coach went off to his office, to put his feet up.
Later, I had the option of joining JROTC. I thought that was a big improvement! ReD Cross First Aid/CPR, map & compass, military history (not the weenie PC stuff from history class), & learning to fire a carbine.
My grade seven Phys Ed teacher (nicknamed Boner because he always had one) overheard me referring to him as an asshole in a discussion with another student in October of that year. He yelled at me in the hallway outside the door of the next class I was entering saying it was rude.
For the next four years, he then managed to switch his schedule during the first week of school so that I had him as a teacher, and make my life somewhat annoying.
I was short-- one of the three shortest kids in the school until grade 10-- so he’d put me and the other midgets on the same three-man basketball squad, claiming it was ‘random selection’. Have you ever seen three kids under 5’ tall play basketball against normal-sized teenagers, let alone boys who have had their growth spurt and top 6’2"? It makes for an amusing SNL skit, but like SNL, it drags on far too long when this happens three years in a row.
I’ve always been a decent athlete, but I squeaked by in Phys. Ed. with a barely passing grade except for two semesters in grade 11 when I somehow managed to get a different teacher. My phys. ed. mark shot up 35 percentage points since I no longer had an official scorekeeper who was fudging the records…
At one point the student-teacher of my weight-training sessions asked me if I’d hit a growth spurt in grade 11, since I could now leg press the entire stack. I told her I’d been pressing the stack for three years-- but when she went to check the records, they indicated otherwise.
I didn’t particularly hate gym, but I never understood why the hell they were constantly giving us fitness tests (how long it takes for you to do a mile, how many pushups or situps you can do in a minute, etc.) without bothering to have us actuallyl prepare for them. It’s stupid to grade students on how fast they can run a mile if they only cover a mile without stopping twice each year. Same for pushups and situps.
The only reason I didn’t flunk the mile test was because I was on the volleyball team all four years during high school.
I skipped through a lot of the thread. I have noticed that few posts have been made about non-sanctioned activities in gym class. Did no one else ever get games of spades started up during high school gym class? Or just have plain old bull sessions for the hour?
I guess our gym teachers never looked around too hard for non-participatory students. Our gymnasium, like many, had a stage and curtains built into one side. There were a lot of nooks and crannies backstage, and it was more well-lit than you’d expect. Great place for an impromptu card game.
The bleachers in our gym were pretty high, and it wasn’t hard to just climb to the top and sort of tune out the activity below. Same went for the outdoor grounds, which were spacious and had lots of sitting areas. Class might be on the football practice field, while you and your buds could be hanging out in one of the baseball field dugouts 150 yards away.
…
All that said, I enjoyed participating in many of the sports, especially volleyball and basketball. Since I played on the football team, there was also weightlifting at times. It wasn’t at all bad.
I hated Jr. High school gym class. I received an F in it in 7th grade because I did not meet the minimum requirements (i.e. get dressed in my gym clothes every day). I signed up for ROTC in 8th grade because it was an alternative to gym class. What I failed to realize, however, was that ROTC had the same requirements of gym class with the extra bonus of being screamed at, degraded and humiliated by fellow students under official sanction. I transferred back to gym class, where I received an F again. Then, I broke my wrist and was transferred to remedial gym class. This was great! No gym clothes, no showers! Perfect!
After six weeks, the cast came off, and the teacher told me she was going to transfer me back to regular gym class. Then, a miracle! The teacher, who was pregnant, left to have her baby! The new teacher had no information on the reasons each person was in her remedial gym class. When I was asked, I opted for the bald-faced lie and claimed I had asthma. Bingo! Permanent membership in remedial gym!
High school gym was a joke. My gym teacher didn’t care what we did, so I and three other people, as soon as attendance was taken, would go off to a relatively private corner of the yard and smoke cigarettes for 45 minutes. Not so unpleasant, except for my lungs.
Very impressive. I benched 225 my senior year and that was a source of pride for many years. (Especially now, after 25 years and mumblety-mumble many more pounds added to my waistline…)
I only had to take a year of gym. And I waited to my last year of HS.
I can’t remember much that first semester except that the coach warned the girls not to play the “menstruation” card to get out of dressing out. Which isn’t something I would have purposefully done, but I still. Bad cramps are bad cramps. All the jumping jacks in the world won’t make them less bad. We had to do a lot of running up the stairs, I think. And I remember a boy in the class making fun of my hairy legs (it had never occurred to me that I needed to shave them).
Second semester was the absolute worse. We played such games as golf, badminton and tennis, and bowling. I could understand the badminton and tennis and even golf, but bowling? How is that athletic? I always wanted to know why we had to bother getting dressed out for bowling. It wasn’t like we were breaking a sweat. And yet I still sucked at it!
We had to take a test on the scoring for bowling. I remember actually being scared I’d fail it because I hadn’t bothered studying for it. Why were we being forced to learn such useless information? It was such a drag.
It didn’t help that the coach was a goddamn racist, and the class favorites (the ones who got to lead exercises) somehow always managed to fit the same profile. She was yelling at me one day (for a reason I know was unjust but can’t remember) and I burst into the most embarrassing tears. I mean, I was horrified for the rest of the day about it. About midway into the semester, I just stopped going to class all together. This was a Big Deal for a goodie-two-shoes like me, but I had had enough. The teacher didn’t even know I was gone.
PE in middle school was bad (with the bullies and teasing and physical awkwardness) but the coolness of my teacher made up for it.
I absolutely hated it. I am not a team player, and I do not enjoy sports of any kind. As an adult, I have always worked out on treadmills and such, but I want nothing to do with gymnasiums or basketballs, volleyballs, or any other kind of sport.
I HATED swimming. I had it first period. In high school, girls like to look nice and do their hair and makeup. Swimming pretty much ruined this for all of us. I don’t know one girl who enjoyed swimming. You had like 15 min. to get ready afterwards, and that’s not enough time to take a proper shower and do your hair and makeup again.
Screw gym class. It’s an exercise in embarassment and torture, nothing more. And I cannot imagine why this is something kids get graded on. Health class, sure, but gym? F no.
I loved gym class. I’ve always been a little hyper-competitive, and I always liked sports.
We ended up doing a lot of the “throw three basketballs in the center of the gym” -type classes, but every once in a while, we’d play something like dodgeball that would make it worthwhile.
The Presidential Fitnes thing…meh. More dull than anything. I’ve always had a weird athletic gap in regards to chin-ups. LOVED the shuttle-run, though.
Would I have liked it better if there were more one-on-one sports involved? Sure.
The things in gym I hated most…the “must-have-been-obligatory” dance sessions and the flippin’ parachute. Lame in the extreme.
I didn’t particularly mind gym calss. The only thing was, I didn’t care for sports, so playing basketball was more of a chore for me than any fun. the worst thing: the doofus gym teacher would sometimes keep us too long, so there would not be enough time to shower. Then you spent the whole afternoon hot and sweaty.
Very unpleasant.
Awful, awful, awful.
I was (and still am) horribly un-athletic and uncoordinated. Also nearsighted. And the youngest in the class because of skipping a grade in elementary school, so the least developed.
They never TAUGHT us anything. Those who didn’t already know how to play a sport just ended up looking even dorkier than we already were. Do gym teachers still encourage the humiliating practice of having the most popular and athletic kids be the team captains and take turns picking their teams, leaving the same couple of pathetic losers standing out there at the end, for the inevitable, “You take the fat one, I’ll take the skinny one?”
The uniforms were horrible one-piece affairs, especially for a skinny, undeveloped girl. And we were required to shower together in a group shower while the creepy phys ed teacher checked off her list. Unless you were menstruating, which she also checked off on her list. I don’t know whether that last was to see if you lied and claimed to be on the rag all the time so as not to half to undress in front of her and everybody else, or to see if anyone was “late” nudge, nudge, wink, wink.
We got letter grades, too, based on how well we did. I was supposed to count myself fortunate that I was given a C, but it kept me off the honor roll all the time.
Yeah, I hated gym class.
Oh, I forgot the other thing. Being nearsighted, I wore glasses. Problem is, for safety reasons we were not allowed to wear glasses in the gym, lest they break and blind you. [Plastic lenses would not be invented for several years.] So of course, I couldn’t see anything smaller than a basketball. The alternative was wearing a dark, heavy, padded “protector” sort of like half of a catcher’s mask but less attractive.
I thought it was a stupid waste of time. I had to take two years of gym in high school and while it wasn’t a traumatic experience, it was pointless. Although I’m not an athlete, I was in great shape in high school, on the X-Country team and the Swimming team. Of course, the three hour practices before and after school didn’t release me from classes in powerwalking or tiddlywinks or whatever little game we were wasting time on.
My P.E. had nothing to do with physical education. Didn’t learn shit about physicality, just developed scars that still exist today. It took me ten years to realize that it’s OK to not like sports, that unathletic doesn’t necessarily mean unphysical or uncoordinated, and that physical activity doesn’t have to be competitive, and can be fun and healthy. Stuff I should have learned in P.E.
What kind of sadistic asshole would insist on having the same “star athletes” pick the teams every class, so the same non-athletic dweebs, like me, invariably got picked last, and taunted and humiliated because of it. Why not have one of these geeks pick the teams instead, just once? Why do these “star athletes” get to sit out gym class and still get an A, while I’d get consistent Bs whether I changed and participated, or skipped out. Just because I was in the half-time show didn’t mean I could sit out band class.
Ugh. Hated it, hated it, hated it. I hated the oblivious gym teachers, I hated the arrogant “star athletes”, I still hate sports, and I still hate the obese, ignorant sports fans these “star athletes” have become.
Ahh, time to do yoga! 
Looks like MLS beat me to my gist.
I had always thought high school PE was horrible, but looking back on it, it really wasn’t that bad. One of the teachers was kind of skeevy, looking at the girls and all, but other than that, it was ok. We had a 3-year graduation requirement, and because band and chorus screwed up my schedule, I ended up in Freshman gym twice (although there’s not really that big of a difference, and sometimes the other Juniors in the class and I got to do stuff seperately, like play golf and chase the geese off the field).
My favorites were cross country skiing (although it sucked if you forgot mittens), ice skating, bowling (I still love it), tae-bo (it was during the big craze), lacrosse, tennis, soccer, and volleyball. Oh yeah, and the “group activites” we had to do–like trust falls and “try to make it so everyone can stand on this box at once.” Step aerobics weren’t that bad either.
My least favorites were basketball, weight lifting, and RUNNING. I loathe running more than anything, which sucks, as I have to do it all of the time still (I march drum corps during the summer). We had to do this thing they called the “beep test,” during which you have to run back and forth in the gym between the beeps from the tape player. I’m not fast, nor do I have very good physical endurance while running.
Luckily, one of the teachers I had was very understanding and caring about all of us. Each year I took it, as long as you tried, you were ok. I tried, and scored in the A-/B+ range all three of the required years.
Psht, I wish that we could have gone swimming. By my senior year, I had given up on make-up and basically brushing my hair as well (but it was short enough, and I used enough conditioner, so that you couldn’t really tell).
I’m not athletic…at all…even vaguely. I don’t think we usually picked teams, and when we did, people in my class had the decency to not be jerks.
I would have absolutely DIED if I had been subjected to that!!!
As long as it taught you what it did, it was serving its intended purpose.
Yes.
I’m overweight, hopelessly out of shape, and incredibly uncoordinated. High school gym wasn’t nearly as bad as middle school gym as far as mocking by other students went, though.
Junior and senior years were better than freshman year (sophomore year I did an alternate PE program where I had to write a lot of papers so that I could take an extra class) because we got to pick what we did (so no more volleyball for me!) I did a lot of walking.
Once last year (senior year), though, I was playing floor hockey, and the teams were pretty much evenly split between nice girls and insane, competitive guys with way too much arm strength. I was sitting on the bench waiting for my turn to play, and as soon as I got up to go play, I got smacked in the nose with the ball from across the gym. It didn’t break it, but my nose hurt for several days and my paranoia of things flying at my head increased hundredfold. For the rest of the semester I was really bad at floor hockey because I would stop to bring up my hands in front of my face every time anyone hit the ball.
I have to take two PE classes to graduate college. I don’t wanna!
Some of it did, and some of it didn’t. A few things:
-Our teachers always picked our teams for us, so we didn’t have to worry about being picked last.
-I was in the so-called “Jerry Gym” (gym for the athletically challenged), so we all knew we sucked and made fun of ourselves. I think we kind of banded together, knowing that we all hated it. So at least we really didn’t have any jocks harassing us. And sometimes the football coach would come along, and he was a really nice guy, and he’d joke around and tease us, but it was all in good fun.
I HATED swimming-the pool was freezing, smelly, and oily. And there was sludge on the bottom. Plus our one gym teacher would wear WHITE swim trunks and you could SEE EVERYTHING! (Eventually, someone complained and he stopped wearing them for the rest of that year-but they were back again the next!). And he never let us have enough time to change back into our clothes, so we were always late for the next class and he refused to write late passes. Thank you SOOOOO much, Mr. Phelan, you fucking jackass. And he was such a moron, he’d pester us girls why we sometimes had to “skip swimming”. Once, I came VERY close to snapping, “Because I’m on the rag, jackass!” I wasn’t doing it to get out of swimming-because I’d still have to make up my laps.
We didn’t have to take showers-the only time we ever used them was after swimming-and then we WANTED to to warm up and wash the chlorine from our hair. But we were all in our bathing suits so it didn’t matter. Of course Mr. Phelan would sometimes stick his HEAD in the shower room (which was right off the pool) and even though we were in our suits-HELLO? He’d come into the girl’s locker rooms once or twice to go the “office” that was for our two female gym teachers.
Seriously, for those who are saying, “How could you have HATED swimming?”, believe it. Honestly, I LOVE to swim-but swimming class sucks when you only have five minutes to suit up, jump in a freezing pool in the middle of winter, a pool that’s really slimy and gross (and they couldn’t use chlorine-it was bromine or something else), and then have three minutes afterwards to clime out, get warmed up and wash your hair, (which looks like absolute shit now), get dressed and get back to class. And you REEK of chlorine. It was completely impractical.
However, I DID like snorkeling. That was fun. Oh, and slacking off at weight lifting. Mr. Phelan would leave the girls in one weight room and say, “oh, do fifty reps,” then go spend his time monitoring the boys. We’d sit around and bullshit, he’d come in, and tell us to do fifty more, then go back to the guys.
I liked some stuff-batminton, and tennis, even though I sucked. Gulf, hockey, handball, volleyball, weight lifting and the mile run blew donkey balls. Dancing was kinda cool-polka, line dancing, and the Electric Slide. (Anyone remember that one?)
So basically, it COULD have been good-teaching basic fitness habits, first-aid, self-defense (we got a little bit of both), and swimming, (which I think should be taught), but the actual execution of it sucked.
Now, gym class at CATHOLIC school-that was a different story. Oh, was that a hideous experience, I was on and off the class reject, so I got picked on a lot, until I finally stood up for myself and told off the entire class.
Except for 8th grade, my last year, it was torture. Try running the mile in the freezing cold and then going back to class sweaty, but freezing and lightheaded. Ick ick ick.
Dammit, I’m rambling.