What did you think of PE class when you were in school?
Interestingly last Sunday on NPR a lady was discussing her experience while researching the idea is if PE classes in school were worth it? (in todays test driven schools time is critical - maybe PE isnt worth it?) Well sadly she reported being bombarded with answers from people who described PE and 'gym class" as hell with drill instructor evil teachers, horrid uniforms, forced showers, bullying, being not chosen first, and such that leads many people even into adulthood to where they now hate exercise because what its associated with.
Some good articles about the issue:
How a negative experience in PE class in school can effect lifelong exercise habits. LINK
Gym class can be so bad kids are skipping school LINK Note - Atlantic paywall
Yes, I can remember gym class both being terrible and good depending upon the teachers. Some gym teachers were mostly hired because a. they can coach say basketball and b. they were the school “enforcers”.
IMO it was about 30 years ago this began to change. Nowadays most PE teachers are professionals and take their classes seriously.
So what do you all think?
#1. Was gym class in your day good or bad?
#2. Did a positive or negative experience in PE set you up for how you exercise or be physically active later on?
The class was good; the guys in the class were horrific little shits that didn’t want to have anything to do with me, so class was staggeringly unenjoyable, regardless of how good the instruction was.
I’ve actually done really well in exercise classes from college on, provided they aren’t social at all: show up, do what the teacher says, leave. No team sports ever. Solo exercise doesn’t work as well for me because I do kind of need the drill instructor telling me what to do.
The class was bad, in that sports are bad and exercise is bad. I don’t recall getting a lot of crap from my peers, but I do rather vividly recall being forced to run a mile, which took me half an hour because every time I tried to go fast I devolved to a rasping wheeze in a few dozen seconds and then had to trudge while recovering. Rinse, repeat, trudge.
The class was decent. I was not very athletic, so a lot of it was beyond my abilities. However, the coaches didn’t allow bad sportsmanship – if you said anything even mildly insulting about someone else in the class, they’d call you out on it. The coach was big on the exercise part of it (one reason our school didn’t play football was because he didn’t think it was good exercise, and we fielded a soccer team instead). While I didn’t much care for the exercise at first, the social part of it was never more than innocuous.
It had no effect on my exercise. I find it boring, and I don’t like getting short of breath. I played tennis in high school and did some cross country skiing, but that has nothing to do with gym class. I get most of my exercise from walking – I’m a very brisk walker and it works as exercise.
It was horrible. Constant bullying and attacks, with the response of the teachers ranging form indifference to actively encouraging the bigger kids to beat on the smaller ones and “keep them in their place”. That’s a quote. I consistently got an F because I reached the point where I’d entirely given up and was just trying to keep from being hurt or killed.
PE in my first high school (freshman year) in Tennessee was awful. It consisted of the boys being given 45 minutes to play basketball. That’s all we did for the entire year. The small nerds like myself were bullied and elbowed out of the way, and I spent the entire period being allowed to sit in the bleachers and read a book – for the entire year. :rolleyes:
At my second high school in Illinois, it was a much better program. Over the course of three years, they took us through a program that included instruction in just about every sport imaginable, plus other activities like square dancing. For example, we spent a few weeks in gymnastics, and had to be able to perform a basic routine on each of the pieces of equipment. Another module was in swimming, and that one was taught by the school’s varsity swim coach. By that point, I had actually been on the swim team for two seasons, so the coach used me to demonstrate all four of the competitive strokes to the class (which was an ego boost for me), and which everyone in the class was expected to learn. We also did modules in tennis, track & field, cross country (which I hated), volleyball, racquetball, badminton, etc., plus more that I don’t remember. Overall, it was a good experience for me.
Generally enjoyed gym. I was a typical nerd who was mostly uncoordinated but possessed above-average size and height. Consequently, I rarely got picked on and was usually of some use for most activities and sports. It was a break from sitting at a desk all day learning mostly-tedious subjects. Honestly, the one semester I didn’t enjoy gym was when got a teacher that actually taught gym and graded appropriately based on written tests and demonstrations of physical skills learned. I just wanted a period to run around while avoiding getting hit in the face by a ball.
PE has no bearing on on my exercise habits, I don’t think. It was mostly just a break from schoolwork for me.
I used to be a PE teacher (for ten years), and when people find out they usually want to tell me their horror stories.
And they’re often not wrong. PE is an important subject, always has been, but unfortunately has more often than not been taught by idiots. I’m speaking of the people who exist only to coach the basketball or football team, and give nearly none of their attention or energy to teaching PE.
Also a big difference between PE at the elementary and secondary levels. Much more of a success with younger kids, who usually are happy to be active and doing physical things. Much harder in some ways to design a good curriculum for middle and high school kids, though I have seen it done well.
There are good PE teachers, people who buck the terrible traditions and do it in a thoughtful and modern way. I believe I was one of them, but two factors made me give it up. I got tired of pissing into the wind, and I had another career option which I’m in now. That said, I still believe in PE in principle. It definitely needs to be taught, and taught well. Unfortunately, not by me anymore.
I hated it, other than a few activities. (Playing with the giant parachute was fun, and I was OK at dodgeball, because my natural instinct when I’m in a space where balls are flying around is to duck and cover my head, and that was the one game where it was an advantage.) But mostly, it consisted of all the other kids being better at stuff than I was, and a bunch of very confusing games where nobody ever explained the rules – you were just supposed to know, and I didn’t.
No effect on my exercise habits as an adult, except that I’m still astonished that people actually do such things of their own free will. (So, maybe it did affect them? But I can’t imagine that I would like either organized sports or exercise-for-the-sake-of-exercise regardless of my childhood experiences.)
I didn’t like gym class because I am a terrible athlete with very poor coordination. I wasn’t bullied though. If anything, I was cheered by the other students on the very rare occasion when I did well at something. The teachers weren’t any better or worse than the non-gym teachers. That was Jr. High.
My final year of required PE was my first year of high school. The class was people who didn’t play on a team because they sucked or their grades were too bad to get to be on a team. They didn’t care what the fuck we did so long as no one got hurt. A few people played baseball kind of halfheartedly, some people smoked weed and I shot the breeze with the stoners. I wasn’t much of a stoner yet and didn’t ever smoke during school.
It had no bad or good effect on future exercising. I’ve done yoga, hiking and casual bike riding as an adult. Never team or competitive sports that require coordination.
Elementary and middle school weren’t too bad. Our teacher actually taught basic sports fundamentals, like how to dribble, pass, and shoot a basketball. How to serve, set, and spike a volleyball. And various other sports. Even though I was never very good at them at least I felt like I was actually being taught something.
High school was horrible. It was basically what robby described above. The teacher just had us pick teams and play basketball for the period. Or sometimes it might be baseball, or football, or whatever sport she decided to have us play that day. But was always just “Go play a sport for 45 minutes.” with no actual instruction. As the unathletic nerd I was of course always picked last. And as I really had no interest in playing anyway I mostly just stood around. Maybe if I was in the mood I would make a sort of half-assed attempt at playing defense when we were playing basketball. As far as I could tell everyone got an A just for showing up. Like the OP mentioned our PE teacher was probably just hired to coach the girls basketball team.
Did it affect my attitude towards exercise? It may well be responsible for my dislike of team sports. I done some individual activities like bicycling which I enjoy. But I detest participating in team sports.
I went to a gigantic high school, so my PE class had over 100 boys and maybe two teachers. They knew that we geeky Jewish Honors class kids were never going to be jocks, and so they didn’t hassle us. We had to do the Presidents fitness test, but they gave us the basketball shoot one first, which we all flunked, and they didn’t bother making us do pushups and that kind of crap.
I spent most of PE running around the track (untimed) with other kids editing the school science magazine.
Not bad at all.
I haven’t thought about it in decades, but I think it was basically good. I was small but reasonably athletic and fairly popular. I did not love wrestling, track, climbing ropes or gymnastics. I liked soccer, football, running, floor hockey and weightlifting. But the instruction was okay and I got through it without problems. I might like these sports now more than I did then; but probably not.
Neither all that great nor all that bad. The absolute worst was dressing for the first class of the day then being sent outside at 41.44° North Latitude in April.