Was HS gym class unpleasent?

We must be about the same age – those were my high school years too.

Anyway, I don’t remember PE being all that bad. Boring, sure, but not all that bad. I went. I did whatever it was that we were supposed to do. I had no personal issues with locker rooms, or showers, or uniforms. The uniform was just shorts and a t-shirt and sneakers, anyway, so no big deal.

I wasn’t much of an athlete, but I managed to enjoy a few things in PE. There wasn’t much of a jock culture at my all-boys high school. Nobody cared if I wasn’t into sports.

So, mostly, it was just boring.

Yeah, we had shorts and T-shirts too, for boys and girls. Bright yellow and green for our school colors. I think the teachers did the best they could; we played lots of Red Rover and Ship, Shore, Wave, and even double Dutch. Lots of running around in circles and push-ups and sit-ups.

We did have a boy’s gym and a girl’s gym, although around 1985 they tried to change them to North or South gyms or something. Girl’s gym was smaller, of course.

Heh. Now I don’t feel too bad that we couldn’t go outdoors. Freezing in the winds off the reservoir and listening to the subway trains in the railyard right next to us would have made gym really suck.

I won’t say I loved it, but it wasn’t actively unpleasant. We’d complain about standing out in shorts aon a cold spring morning, or doing 200 situps in a week, but the coaches kept control quite well. If you said something nasty about another person, they’d make it quite clear that they didn’t tolerate that.

Changing into gym clothes wasn’t a problem, since we never stripped down (and were not required to take showers afterwards). (It was also at a time when you made it a point not to pay attention to other guys if they were in the shower; if you tried to tease, you’d be the one that was considered weird for even looking.)

I was always the last one chosen, but so what? I always figured that the reason I was chosen last was that they didn’t know how good I really was. Managed to get on the top gym squad in the school my freshman year (You scored points over the year for your record, and the team with the best record from each class went into competition for the honor).

I also always scored low on the Marine Corps Physical Fitness Test – I was slow and weak and near the bottom of the class all the time. I can’t recall anyone every making a big deal about my lack of ability.

There were also good moment:

[ul]
[li]The time the coach put on Alfred E. Neuman’s “It’s a Gas!” during calesthenics.[/li][li]Square dancing with the girls class – we’d complain, but secretly enjoyed it.[/li][li]The time they combined the girls and boys classes. We were going to play basketball, against the girls, and one of our players cried out to the, “You play skins!”[/li][li]My making two consecutive saves on point-blank shots in soccer.[/li][/ul]

We went outdoors often enough. My high school was a block from Central Park, on 84th Street on the east side. Occasionally we’d go out to run on the track around the reservoir in the park. There was softball sometimes, too.

Of course, some of us saw being told to run around the track at the reservoir as an opportunity to get out of sight of the gym teachers and get high.

I’m not particularly afraid of heights or anything, but I was always worried that if I grabbed the top of the rope I might accidently unhook it and either get stuck in the rafters.
I got kicked of class one day when volleyball competition got a little heated. I violated the “no spiking” rule and the ball took a crazy bounce and drilled this girl in the head (she didn’t get seriously hurt or anything). I felt really bad but basically I just spent the rest of the class wandering around the school with this other girl who also happened to get kicked out (our teacher kicked people out a lot).

I think by senior year “gym” was basically the teacher tossing out a few basketballs and we could shoot hoops, wander around grabassing or whatever.

In life, I am that girl. :smiley:

I have been drilled in the head with more balls than you can imagine. (God, that sounds pervy, but you know what I mean). haha.

I beg to differ. The required four years taught me nothing but to hate athletics and physicality (not to mention the reenforcement of a poor self-image). It took me 10+ additional years to unlearn that, before I could begin to learn the benefits of such, and from completely different sources. If P.E. had served its “intended purpose”, I’d have learned the benefits right off the bat.

Well, you might have been disappointed, because at least at my school, ‘relaxing’ and ‘solitary’ were generally not features of swimming class. On Fridays, the teacher would break out the pool toys and we could do what we wanted, but other days were things like relay races and water polo, which were both team efforts. Water polo is also physically exhausting, and can be pretty rough to boot.

Our pool, though, was beautiful, and not the stinky slag heap others have described.

I must be one of the few athletic people who hated gym in high school. I was on the swimming team and did springboard diving in high school. I also did a lot of other sport type activities outside school. Of course, you can probably see a pattern. All the things I did even as a kid were individual sports, not team sports. Gym in high school wasn’t 100 percent shit, but it wasn’t that much fun.

In middle school we had a couple of good teachers and they separated us by ability; A, B, and C groups. A group had the kids with the best fitness, based on various tests, while C group had the worst overall fitness. I had been doing gymnastics for a couple of years at that point so I was in great shape. Group A did things like cross-country runs, archery, and sometimes team sports.

I didn’t like most team sports very much because, although I was very strong and fast, I was about chest-high to most other kids my age. I didn’t grow hardly at all until eighth grade. One of the games that was most fun was crab soccer. In crab soccer you weren’t allowed to stand up, you had to move around in a weird face-up crawl. It put all of us on equal footing (so to speak) because no one, including the jocks, was practiced at moving around like that.

In high school, on the other hand, there were more kids and what seemed to me to be a higher proportion of jerks. I was still on the small side and since I was never all that interested in team sports I was not good at them. I was usually picked last for most things. This was especially ironic because I was usually one of the top scorers on the fitness tests and because of gymnastics, swimming, horseback riding, archery, running, climbing, etc. I was stronger than boys who were much bigger than me. In a weightlifting class, I leg-pressed a weight that one of the football jocks, who had legs the size of my torso, could barely move. I did ten reps.

High school gym undercut my confidence. I wasn’t that confident to begin with because of being undersized for so long, but doing sports that other kids had been practicing most of their lives made me feel kind of inferior even though, looking back, I can see that I was probably in better shape than most of the jocks even. Personality and dominance had a lot to do with how things worked out.

To top it off, I had my first serious fight close to the end of freshman year. The prelude was when this guy came up behind me before class and slapped me in the back of the head. He said that I had touched him during a game and that he was going to beat me up after class for it. Basically, he was reaching for some excuse to beat someone up, though I didn’t realize that at the time. I hadn’t done anything to actually warrant his attack.

After class, he and two henchmen, members of a wannabe gang, did try to beat me up. I ran, and they chased me through the halls until one of them got close enough to grab my pack and pull me off my feet. The main guy was a head taller and close to two years older than me. Gotta love the bully mentality. I managed to keep his buddies from holding me and I was fast enough to dodge most of his hits. A couple of teachers finally came, broke it up, and he was expelled since he had already been in trouble a few times before that.

While I didn’t get beaten up, and while I should have given myself more credit for how I handled the fight, it undercut my confidence. It was a shock to me that someone would want to fight for no particular reason and I was so upset by the unfairness of it and the stress of the fight that I cried when I got to my next class. That didn’t help the whole social-standing thing. This fight made me more cautious in my interactions with others, particularly during gym. Of course, it also made me determined to learn how to fight. If I hadn’t been an outsider of sorts in gym and if I hadn’t had that fight, I might never have started taking martial arts. So at least one good thing came out of it; martial arts training has become a more or less permanent part of my life.

I think that gym was one of the reasons that I was pretty anti-social for my sophomore year. It wasn’t until the end of my junior year that I got some good friends, built up my social life and my confidence, and started to feel like a person instead of a loser. I’m very glad gym was only required for two years.

Speaking as a current high school student, I have to say that gym isn’t nearly was bad as I thought before starting as a freshman. I was particularly a bit anxious about having to shower in front of other people (especially because my school has one big, communal shower), although I soon found out money towards fixing said showers was put toward a new fitness center.

We always get choose what activities we want to do, as opposed to going by the whim of the gym teacher. I’m rather glad this system works, as I probably wouldn’t have found out that I am a sheer beast at Pickleball. Of course, I eventually realized that the gym teachers didn’t care what you did, so I started leaving class early and going home. :wink:

Pickleball?! Do tell!

Pickleball is basically a scaled up version of Ping-Pong (except for the paddle, which is only slightly bigger). At first, I assumed I would suck hard like a did at tennis (I got a lot of heat from my friends about being the only Asian guy at our school who was lousy at tennis), but I inexplicably started doing well.

It’s a really easy game to get into; all you need are some rackets and wiffle balls. You can play anywhere as long as you can bounce a wiffle ball on the floor, and it gets really competitive really fast.
(I can’t help it…)

I hereby challenge any Doper to a good old-fashioned Pickleball showdown! Any takers?

HS gym was mostly idiotic. Dancing was fun, inside the gym, but that was about it.

Otherwise, I just have bad memories. For one, we were never given enough time to clean up afterwards, leading me to dab desperately at my sweaty self with a wadded-up t-shirt and feeling even more disgusting when I was done. The showers went unused.

I once asked the teacher if we could go inside and work out, since it was excessively hot that day, and the beetch replied, “It’s NEVER too hot to play outside!”

Another moron made us run around the field during a first stage smog alert. I wound up being out sick for a week with bronchitis.

Man, was I glad when I didn’t have to take it anymore.

No problems for me (graduated in 1969 in New York.) In my immense high school there were 200 boys per class. The gym teacher didn’t bother with the losers like me and my friends. When fitness exam time, they gave us the hardest test first (shooting baskets) and when we failed that didn’t bother us again. We ran around the track and edited the high school science magazine. Enough of my friends were there that we had a good time.

Oh - we got dressed for gym, but no showers. :slight_smile:

No showers for us either. I’m in Illinois, where 4 years of gym is required for graduation, but only 2 years of science and 3 years of math. It’s nice to see the government/CPS have their priorities straight, huh?

Gym was pretty awful. The worst part for me was, as many have already mentioned, the fact that teachers seemed to expect you to already know how to play various sports, and would only give the most cursory of explanations (if any). Swimming was pure hell. I was one of those 85 pound weaklings, short and skinny. I also have glasses so thick I can look at a map and see people waving at me. I also had a previous experience where I almost drowned, so I’m not really all that fond of water. I also had no real experience (other than the drowning) with pools. I was that lame-o kid who wore panties underneath her ill-fitting swimsuit. Imagine having to get into a swimsuit in a cold large vat of water with about 45 other teenagers. You’re already afraid of water and you don’t know how to swim and don’t reallly want to learn. Not only that, but you can’t wear glasses so you can’t see shit. I spent the swimming portion of PE in a perpetual state of terror.

The irony is that I wasn’t particularly weak, just not very coordinated. I was barely sweating after those sessions of step-aerobics that left everyone else breathless. I did fine on those cheesy physical fitness tests where you had to do like, 50 push-ups in a minute. I was one of the few girls who could actually do the chin-up test(hold a chin-up for 60 seconds). The other girls who could were all jocks.

I can’t help but wonder if part of the problems with my coordination had to do with a bad or out-of-date eyeglass prescription (one of my eyes is much weaker than the other). Stereoscopic vision is kinda necessary for successful sports participation.