Was PE class in school good or bad?

In My Humble Opinion
21

I think PE can be valuable and that it has an important place in schools.

But my personal experience with it was pretty bad.

It started off promising. I remember Ms. Austin, the PE teacher I had in the first grade. One day she showed us how to do a push-up and then gave us a few minutes to practice. I remember everyone giggling and goofing off except for me. I could see Ms. Austin wasn’t playing around, so I got to pushing. I wanted to be strong just like her. At the end of the year, I was rewarded with the Best First Grader in PE Award, and I think it was because of my excellent push-upmanship. I probably picked up some other awards that year, but that’s the only one I remember.

It was downhill from there, though. The lovely Ms. Austin was soon replaced with Horrible Ms. Beach.

Ms. Austin could see that I had an athletic heart despite being Super Klutz from Outerspace. Ms. Beach couldn’t see that at all. To her, I was lazy. I didn’t try hard enough. She would demonstrate how to do something (throw a frisbee, throw a ball, skip rope, jumping jacks, hoola-hooping, etc.) and then expect me to intuit how to do it. “See, it’s easy!” she’d say. I’m sure it was easy for her and for 99% of everyone in the class. But her lessons would never stick with me, and all the “it’s easy!” shit would just make me feel like a loser.

Kids who struggle with academic material aren’t constantly put on blast in the classroom. To be sure, there is embarrassment waiting for them if they get called to the board or to read out loud. But generally no one but them and the teacher knows when they fuck up on a homework assignment or a test. Being in the lowest reading group might be embarrassing for you, but at least you don’t have to worry about the smart kids laughing at you whenever you do your reading exercises. You do get some break from the pointing and laughing. You do get enough space away from the peanut gallery to learn.

But in PE, everything was always out in the open. Everyone knew that I would be the last one to finish running laps. Everyone knew that I would be the first to get dodge-balled in the face. Everyone would watch my flailing limbs during warm-up exercises and crack up. Even square dancing, which I actually enjoyed, was a cause of embarrassment for me. Really, the only time I didn’t feel embarrassed in PE was that day we did those push-ups in the first grade. :frowning:

So I don’t have a lot of fond memories of PE. In high school, PE was the only class I skipped unapologetically (I felt sorta-kinda bad about ditching orchestra :)). It was not a source of self-esteem or achievement. I don’t think I learned anything except for maybe how to laugh at myself.

Nonetheless, I still think PE as a theoretical construct has value. I just wish it could be taught differently.

The “tough love” stuff might work with some things. Sometimes kids really are lazy and need a verbal kick in the pants to move their bodies. But I really wish someone had identified my motor skill delay early on and had flagged me for intervention instead of yelling at me. When we see kids struggling with reading, we don’t yell at them to “work harder”. We give them extra help and maybe evaluate them for specific learning disabilities so they can get more tailored instruction. Maybe if we had the same approach to PE, it would haven’t taken me 40 years to find out that I have a mild form of CP. I don’t know how that diagnosis would have changed my life, but maybe the kids wouldn’t have laughed at me so hard if they had known. Maybe Ms. Beach would have been kinder towards me. Maybe I would have had better self-esteem as a kid. Who the hell knows.

22

This. Or those. Whatever.

Some of the basic exercises, such as jumping jacks, I could do all right, but they were boring. Anything involving potentially going over backwards, including somersaults (yes, you do go over backwards even during a forwards somersault, try it while thinking about it) terrified me. Anything involving throwing balls around was awful because I couldn’t catch the ball, couldn’t throw the ball with either speed or accuracy, and ducked if I thought the ball was coming anywhere remotely near my head.

Nobody ever wanted me on their team.

In one high school I went to you could ride horses for gym. That was the only gym class I ever actually wanted to go to. My love of horses was greater than my fear of falling. – I did eventually learn to swim, not well enough to compete at anything, but well enough to enjoy it; but except for summer class that wasn’t a gym option anywhere I was until I got to college.

I do not go to gyms. I do not go to exercise classes. On the other hand, I’m a farmer, of a style of farming that involves a lot of hand work. I get more exercise than most people.

23

I was in dance so I got in the gymnastics classes. In jr. High and Highschool I was a cheerleader so exempt from PE.
Man, was I happy for that little thing
Ball sports and me don’t get along.

24

Gym class was a nightmare for me. I skipped a grade and as a result was smaller and less developed than everyone else in my class. When we had team sports they had the best kids be the team captains and take turns picking team members. The last two chosen were always me and a rather obese girl. The captains would argue over who had to take who.

In addition, I have always been nearsighted, and had to deal with risking getting my glasses broken or trying to play without them. The only sport I had any chance at was kickball because it used a large soft ball.

We had to wear baggy one-piece uniforms, which made my body look even worse than it was.

We always had a unit on calisthenics, including “deep knee bends.” I’ve since read that these are really not good for the knees, which probably has something to do with my chronic knee problems.

25

I despised everything about it, from the worthless activities to the teachers to the uniforms and locker rooms.

I was thinking about something related to this the other day: in primary school, one worthless activity they made us do is jump off things. You would have to climb to increasingly great heights and jump off onto a mat, practicing rolls. Do they still do that? By middle school, a worthless activity was making us climb ropes. You could imb to the very roof of the gym, maybe 30 feet up–you fall from that and a thin, stiff mat isn’t going to save you–do schools still do that? Seems like serious liability issues with both. And what was the fucking point of it? Was it part of prepairing future Good Little Soldiers to go climbing and jumping in war? Cause I gotta say, not once in my life have I ever needed to jump off something or climb a rope.

26

For the most part I found PE quite unpleasant for the usual reasons - bullying teachers, getting picked last. But the bad experiences weren’t relentless; I had a few great gym teachers and encouraging fellow students.

When I was in high school, I had a history teacher I adored except for one thing: the worst insult he had for anyone he disagreed with was to call them a “gym teacher.” Even as a high school student who hated PE, I knew that was unfair and inappropriate.

27

Hated it with a passion. But it had nothing to do with other students, or the teachers. I’ve never had any use for sports, so I resented being forced to take a class where I had to play sports. I always did the bare minimum to get a C.

In middle school, getting in trouble in PE meant one had to “do laps around the field” for the hour. But we would just leisurely walk those laps. I often found it preferable to mouth off to the coach and spend the period walking around the field that playing whatever the sport was.

Fortunately, in high school, only two years of PE were required. At the end of my sophomore year, there was much rejoicing.

28

I mostly hated it. I was a lousy athlete with no endurance, so it was basically hell for me. We had to wear gym uniforms, and I hated those too (blue striped polyester…ugh. I was so glad when they finally went to shorts and T-shirts).

I firmly believe that it’s not fair to subject all kids to the same PE class. Why not put the uncoordinated nerds, who suck at athletics and feel even worse because all the jock kids are making fun of them, into their own class and design a curriculum that actually helps them realize that maybe physical activity might be of some value when doing it with peers reasonably close to their own skill level?

You don’t stick the D-minus jocks in the AP courses, because they’ll fail and everybody knows it. Why stick the athletic equivalent of D-minus jocks in a class where they’re expected to compete with the equivalent of the A students?

The only PE courses I enjoyed were in high school: golf and bowling. I still sucked at them, but at least they were kind of fun and we got to leave the school for a little while.

In answer to #2, I’m pretty sure it had a negative impact on my desire to do any sort of exercise for many, many years.

29

I just remembered… my younger brother hated PE almost as much as I did. He took dance instead of PE his sophomore year of high school. When friends would get wind of this and make fun of him, he would shrug and say “while you’re out there playing with the other boys, I’m dancing with 30 girls.”

30

My gym teacher was the first teaching job for a Big Ten quarterback who never got offered an NFL contract. I was the second-smallest wimp in my class. It wasn’t pretty.

31

I feel like there is no need to remove PE class since more students now are not as active comparing in our age. They usually would just play using their phones so they need exercise. Also, I agree that it is a way for some students to feel insecure especially when they are not picked so what we need to prioritize is helping these students to fight (not physically) like be strong mentally.

32

I played sports outside of school, so gym was goofy, and to be avoided, unless it was floor hockey. Especially gymnastics and square dancing - the latter had the legendary Stan Gill suavely instructing us in his vintage white Fred Perry sweater, oversize glasses, and spiffy black and white patent leather shoes, while I, stoned, showed him a jiggy thing or two, and promptly got tossed.
Any Canucks remember the singularly putrid Canada_Fitness_Award_Program? Were any of you bestowed with the venerable…dun, dun-dun-dun Award of Excellence? DON’T LIE.
Fucking badge things.
One of the program’s feats of derring-do was called the Flexed-Arm Hang, where you basically latched like a monkey onto a horizontal bar (with your feet not touching the ground) and see how long you could just basically hang there. One or two of us would start bugging the participants with stupid jokes to get them to laugh so they’d lose their hold, and fall - which also got us tossed.
Whoa the disgusting foul stench of the changeroom after soccer or lacrosse (which was kinda trippy) in the rain, and of course with no one showering, I’m sure we all have horror stories of sitting in class next to such foul vermin. Like myself.

33

I took three years of ROTC in high school specifically because it counted as a PE credit.

34

I’m not opposed to physical activity or the the concept of physical education in school, but I hated gym class as actually practiced in my school. The curriculum was one-size-fits-all and seemingly designed with jocks in mind. There was too much emphasis on competitive sports. You wasted a lot of time changing into and out of uniforms and picking teams. And the less athletic students like me were relegated to unimportant positions where there was nothing for us to do except stand around looking stupid. On the rare occasions when you are in a position to do something, you’re likely to fail and earn the ire of your teammates, or at least the ones who care about winning. That can’t really have much of a positive effect on physical fitness or instill a lifelong love of physical activity among kids who aren’t already athletic.

I always thought they should have had two different gym classes: one for the jocks where competition is stressed and one for everybody else where non-competitive moderate-intensity aerobic and strength-training is stressed. Short lectures, not taking up the entire class period, on subjects like exercise physiology and nutrition, would also have been helpful.

35

It was an exercise in humiliation, from the teachers (e.g. former army sergeants) on down.

And then there was the naked swimming.

36

Hmm, I remember seeing those badges on other people but I don’t think my schools participated in that. Which is just as well.

Physical education in elementary school was not that bad. I didn’t understand much, and wasn’t very good at it, but it didn’t matter much. The school “gym” was a room about the size of 4 or 6 classrooms, with a higher ceiling and lots of markings on the floor.

In the first year of high school, all of a sudden, it sucked. The school’s newly-built gym was a huge, airy space with cold mercury lighting and a gigantic curtain separating the boys from the girls. To make up for the gender separation, our regular class of somewhat-high-performing kids was paired up with one of the classes of… bums. (All right, jocks with discipline problems, who got more gym periods than we did because they didn’t have music class because, well, I guess the school got tired of replacing broken xylophones.)

The PE teacher took things way too seriously. He wasn’t hostile to me, but he certainly gave the impression of not caring for those of us who didn’t perform well. They did have people picking teams, and I was among the last 3 in most cases (years later, it turned out that all 3 of us were gay). And the guy I considered my best friend (who was in the class of bums) was somewhat hostile, as he couldn’t be seen being friendly to me.

We were told from day 1 that showers were mandatory (these were individual shower cabins, not communal). So I tried to at least obey that rule (only 3 or 4 of us did), and was submitted to the unpleasantness of other guys kicking the door open to laugh at me while I was showering. I gave up the showers after a few weeks. The locker room was one of those adult-free zones where anything could happen. It was hell.

Things got a little better in the second high school I went to, but it still wasn’t pleasant.

We had an annual run, either 3 km or 5 km, all through high school. We’d practice running for a few weeks before the event. I sucked at that, too. My schools didn’t have any football, thank goodness. We did have rugby in the last year, that was unpleasant but didn’t last long.

After all that, it wasn’t until I finished my degree that I worked up the nerve to step into a gym. And even then, it was the (well-equipped) gym at my workplace. Now I go to the (commercial) gym every day, it’s way less horrible that I pictured as a youth. People just do their own thing, there’s no competition and very little pressure to perform. But I still wouldn’t participate in group sports if you paid me, and that includes Crossfit.

37

As a 14 year old high school freshman, the only exercise I was interested in was lifting weights. For about a month before I officially started high school, I had been attending pre-season conditioning sessions for the wrestling team - a few hours each day of either running or weightlifting. Hated the running. (Also hated the wrestling, once the actual season started.) But I enjoyed the weightlifting. Once school started, I suddenly found myself in a stupid gym class where we played stupid games with balls and other shit I didn’t care about, and running which I hated. I wish I could have just spent that period lifting weights. I became good at inconspicuously lingering on the edges of the class and not actually participating, but moving around every so often so it sort of looked like I was. And I guess that was good enough for the teacher - but I hated having to play this game of half-ass participating with no enthusiasm whatsoever. Hated the waste of time. On the plus side, the day we were individually tested on various exercises, I did WAY more pushups than anyone else in the class.

38

Phy Ed was an easy grade. Show up and run around for 45 minutes and get an A, no home work. Ours was an easy class to ditch every now and then because if you went to evening open swim for an hour it counted towards making up 1 gym class missed.

It wasn’t required our senior year but I took it as an elective because it was an easy A. Senior gym was a blast. We played golf, tennis, and bowling. By senior year most of us were old enough to drink so we were hoisting beers at the bowling alley while there on official class time. Viva gym class! Of course, it was the 1970’s, YMMV.

The worst thing about Phy Ed class were the pantywaists who were whining about how much they hated gym class.

39

Enjoyed it. We didn’t have dedicated PE teachers, it was just a period one of the other subject teachers took because it was in the curriculum. They generally were just interested in us getting some fresh air and exercise. So we played football or volleyball (not competitively, just kicking/hitting a ball around for an hour), or went on a cross country jog/walk, most PE periods. If it was raining, we skipped it (very few South African schools have indoor gyms)

40

I thought it was OK. I was a nerdy kid with really thick glasses, but nobody gave me much crap during gym. I was athletic enough to not be the last kid chosen for an activity, but I don’t recall the teachers ever asking the kids to choose up teams.

My son is having a good experience with PE, though he’s less athletic than I was. Great teachers through 5th grade. Diligent professionals who really want all the kids to love sports and physical activity.