I totally didn’t get it. We played softball, kickball, wiffleball, etc on our own time and had fun doing it. As a school activity we were forced to participate and did not enjoy it. I also never understood “Art” as a class.
Hated every second of it with every fibre of my being. I was an awkward, gangly teenager - think baby giraffe on ice. We would do different types of PE in blocks of a few weeks. Cross country running or (field) hockey I could just about cope with. Gymnastics? That was when my mother had to call the school to try to figure out why I was suddenly “ill” on Tuesdays. No, I can’t even do a forward roll. And they tried to make us do a forward roll along the top of the vaulting box. I fell off, and just got shouted at for not trying.
A horrendous way to deal with children.
This was in Scotland in the Seventies.
From thisthread:
Elementary school: Sometimes we played games, like kickball or bombardo (aka dodgeball). Sometimes we did physical “busywork,” like run/walk around the school building. Sometimes we had to wait around and take turns getting tested on things like how fast we could run a sprint or how many pushups we could do. Some of it was kind of fun, much of it was boring and tedious and uncomfortable, but I don’t remember anything especially awful. I absolutely sucked at all of it, and was usually one of the last ones picked when teams were chosen, but I don’t recall any malice in that: I was the “smart kid” in the class, not one of the strong kids or the fast kids or the coordinated kids.
High school: We’d spend a few weeks each on various different activities, which ranged from kind of fun to really tedious and annoying. They didn’t make us shower for gym class, but we did have to change into/out of gym clothes, which was a minor PITA.
In retrospect, I don’t think P.E. did me any harm, and might have done me a little good; but at the time I would have been happy to avoid it.
I didn’t have a PE class till 9th grade (school year 1968-69), having attended a Catholic elementary school that had no gym - our playground was literally the church parking lot. Ergo, I never really learned how to play sports beyond neighborhood versions. Suddenly, at 13, I was in a class full of girls who actually had some experience and skills that were foreign to me. Plus there was the whole showering with strangers thing.
I didn’t so much hate PE class as I felt out of my league. I did OK with individual sports, like tennis or archery or floor exercise, but I’d never really learned how to play on a team, so softball and basketball and volleyball weren’t a lot of fun. And when we had units on the gymnastics equipment, I was mostly terrified of getting hurt - especially on the balance beam. And we won’t even talk about my attempts to climb that stupid rope.
The teachers were OK - I never felt bullied and I expect they recognized that I’d never be a jock, but I was polite and I tried, so I passed. Honestly, the worst thing that ever happened to me in PE was the day we were doing floor exercises on the mats, so we had to leave our shoes along the wall. Someone stole my brand-new sneakers!
Bottom line, it was an OK class. And less of a waste of my time than the stupid Home Ec class I was forced to take.
YES! What was up with that?
I did quite enjoy PE one year. The punishment for not dressing out was to run laps…in the parking lot. We would run as far as my friend’s car, then take the rest of the day off.
I was pretty athletic so I had no problems, but I remember PE seemed like a waste of time. I was on a team so I could usually get out of doing whatever game or activity was scheduled to go run on the track or lift weights.
It was more or less irrelevant. I learned on the first day that, if I showed up, and my uniform was clean, I was guaranteed a C and it didn’t count towards my GPA. That is all the information I needed, and formed my attitude towards the classes from then on, which was “whatever”.
I was already in hard 5-day-a-week training for judo, and I wasn’t about to risk injury that would interfere with that or distract me. So it was mostly stand around and watch the other jocks scrimmaging. Run laps? Sure, fine with me. It is remarkable how slowly I can run a lap. We did a wrestling segment. That was fine - I practiced my guards and sweeps and takedowns and didn’t care very much about the score. Once in a while we did tests on the rules of basketball or something. Well, no offense, coach, but a ten-minute read thru the material is about all the preparation I feel I need.
If you made any of the varsity teams, you were exempt from PE class. I was not, even when I was in training for nationals. Go figure. But then again, whatever.
It has had no effect that I can discern on my subsequent exercise habits. I have bee in training one way or another since I was eleven. The PE teachers themselves were no better nor worse than any other teachers. One was a jerk, none of the rest of them were particularly inspiring, but I wasn’t prepared to be inspired.
Regards,
Shodan
My high school PE wasn’t great but it wasn’t a horror show either. I wasn’t athletically inclined or interested but that led more to me being placed in far left field and ignored than harassed. Some non-team stuff I did fairly well in such as running or gymnastics so those parts of PE were tolerable. It was mostly the baseball/football/basketball parts where I was pointless.
Senior year, PE was broken into a bunch of weird electives you could pick from. I took an “Adventure ed” course that was orienteering and rappelling (up and down the side of the gym) and another course that was archery, golf and bowling (huh?) which was as fun as PE was going to get. No, the school didn’t have a bowling alley; we’d load up into a bus and drive to a local alley 5min away and bowl for 25min then head on back.
None of this had much impression on my current physical state. Like I said, I didn’t mind the stuff like running or push-ups so much; it was the competitive team sports that I disliked and I doubt many people make football the core of their fitness regime.
Hayed it. No PE until HS, but then it was required for everyone for the whole four years. It was divided into 2 hours a week of calisthenics (pushups, horse exercises, rope climbing to the gym ceiling, rings, that sort of thing, none of which I could ever do) and 2 hours a week of sports (softball, basketball, handball) which I actually enjoyed, even though I wasn’t any good–except for hitting a softball. One of the teachers was an ex-army drill sergeant and a sadist. I guess the others were okay. I got 8 straight Ds. I survived.
I always liked PE, but then again, I was a pretty athletic kid.
I think a lot of the dislike for PE for a lot of my classmates was because athletic events tend to be inherently competitive, and they tended not to be good at them. So even though there was not any formal or even informal humiliation or ridicule, they felt that way because they were poor at whatever it was that we were doing that day and (this is the important part), it was* immediately and clearly apparent* that they were poor at it.
Think of it this way- a kid might suck at reading and make poor grades, but for the most part, that stayed between their teachers and themselves. In PE, if you sucked at running, playing volleyball, etc… everyone could see that you sucked because it was right there out in the open. A comparison might have been if a teacher made all the kids read aloud in class- the kid who was poor at reading might feel singled out and embarrassed, even though he actually was not.
PE was, I imagine, like having that happen every single day for some kids who were just nonathletic.
PE would be better if the kids could chose between competitive and solo activities. The competitive kids could do things like team sports and track, while the other kids could do self-directed activities like walking, jogging, or even things like group yoga classes or juggling. The important thing is for the kids to be active rather than winning at sportball.
I always liked PE, even though I was (and am) very big and have zero running ability. I was good at learning the rules for games, was not too timid to play any sport, and the teachers could always tell that I was trying.
The only thing that sucked was that I was way bigger than everyone else and had to have store-bought shorts instead of the school issued uniforms because they didn’t make uniforms in my size. Embarrassing sure but everyone else spent all their time being embarrassed for whatever reason, that nobody noticed my shorts.
This was in the 80s and 90s and while we had to change together, we didn’t have to shower. That would probably make a difference in anyone’s level of discomfort with the class.
It probably did make an impact on my enjoyment of exercise as I got older. I took weight lifting in college because I had been introduced to it in high school gym. I went to the college Rec Center and have been a member of my city Rec Center for 20 years because I don’t mind being active in public.
I think it would have been fun to have two different classes, but with competitive sports for both (with competition stressed less and sportsmanship more in the second one). I would have enjoyed playing things like flag football, softball, etc. with kids around my own ability level, so everybody could play the fun positions instead of being stuck in right field or something. Either that, or play other games that emphasize athletic development. For me, it would suck getting stuck doing calisthenics or running around the track while the jock kids got to play actual games.
Exercise is fine. But if the type of exercise is massively unpleasant, that isn’t going to lead to kids being more active.
I would have happily cantered around the gym for the period, pretending to be a horse, for at least two years after one was supposed to be too old to do that; and am not at all sure that I would have stopped then if I hadn’t been teased for it.
But attempting to force me up into the rings when I was terrified of the dismount only reinforced my fear of falling and put me permanently off doing any such thing.
That wouldn’'t have helped me a bit. For one thing, I really doubt any of the schools I went to could have come up with a whole team’s worth of kids as bad as I was. For another, I would still have ducked whenever the ball came anywhere near me, still have been unable to catch or to throw it effectively, and still hated the whole process.
Calisthenics were boring; and I also, as somebody said upthread, rather think that those deep knee bends damaged my knees. Letting me just run around the track would have been fine, as long as I wasn’t being hassled to run faster, faster! If nobody had bugged me about it, I might well have gotten into running faster, faster on my own; but making it a requirement would have taken all the fun out of it.
It was fine. Mostly we just changed, played basketball for 20 minutes, and changed back. We were supposed to shower but no one did. Sometimes we got to do cool stuff like cross country skiing or water polo (our school had a pool).
I don’t think it had much impact on my interest in sport. Sports were big part of life in the small towns I grew up in and I was active. Later on I became more sedentary, which I am trying to correct, but that’s another story.
Elementary school in the late 50’s and early 60’s. It was a very rural school with classes of about 30 kids and a core of 20-25 that went from grades 1 to 8 together, so we all knew each other pretty well. I was the shortest, plump, and slow.
I don’t actually remember formal PE classes, but I do remember being turned loose for recess and playing just about every game under the sun, including some we invented. Being small, I occasionally got shoved around, but never bullied. In fact, some of my best friends were the closest thing to gangsters that we had in those days.
A friend from those days, who was bookish and smart, so we ended up bonding over that in those days, told me when we were in our twenties that those days were mostly hellish. I told him he should have participated in recess games instead of letting everyone know he thought our games were boring. I told him I remembered recess as a lot of fun.
His response was “But peccavi, you always got picked last for teams!”.
I responded “Yes, but I always got picked.”
When I hit high school in the mid 60’s, it was a new environment and I was no longer just with kids I’d known my entire life. I remember PE in the first part of freshman year was not a lot of fun, and suddenly there were these bullies around, but by Spring, things stabilized and after that PE was just another class, sometimes fun and sometimes boring. Two memorable incidents contributed:
Bullies- In PE, showering was required, and we had this big communal shower. One day, I’m showering next to the captain of the wrestling team. He bumps me as we are showering, so I give him a shove, sort of a “stay in your own lane” shove. He reacts by shoving me hard, so I square up with him. He raises his fists as well and there is no question that if a real fight occurs, I’m going down hard and (probably) quickly. But as we face each other, I see him realizing that we are standing on soapy slick tiles, which are a very hard surface, next to steel handles and pipes. It doesn’t matter that my fists can’t hurt him, if he loses his balance, it could be nasty. So he takes a weak poke at me, which I block, and I take a slow jab at him, which he blocks. Then we both dropped our arms and went back to showering.
I wasn’t picked on after that. Not because I “beat up the bully”, but because I showed I was willing to hit back rather than whining to the coach, and there were plenty of more passive targets out there. I think this works with the majority of bullies, though not the psychopaths, but for those, I had my scary friends who even the psychopaths had to respect (how scary? Within two years of graduation one was dead and the another in prison as the result of their violent crimes)
PE Classes- I’ve always been the slowest and the shortest, but I’m competitive as hell and always loved playing sports, just never very well. When I started PE in high school, the coaches (all our PE teachers were coaches of something, often multiple sports- we had a small school) binned me in the “nerdy, bookish, doesn’t like sports, doesn’t like us” bin. I got barely passing grades.
The last day before Christmas break, we were given “free play time”. Many took that as a time to lounge in the bleachers or play desultory games of horse. Some of my friends (including the above mentioned bully) had a football and grabbed me and said they were going to play football out on the practice field. So about 10-12 of us ended up out on the practice field, which was sodden and muddy (it had been raining on and off all week). We chose up sides (I was picked last) and played 6 on 6 (or thereabouts) for about 45 minutes. When we trudged back in, covered head to toe in mud, nearly unrecognizable, we were met by one of the coaches.
“Peccavi, is that you?” “Yup coach”"
He paused, grinned, and looked at me and said “Wash the mud off of you and your clothes before you go to class, and remember to take your gym clothes home with you. They’ll get moldy over the break if you don’t”
After that, I never got less than a B+ in PE, and usually got A’s. Never got more athletic, but was no longer binned in “Hates PE, hates the coaches”. I think they started to notice I always gave it my all, despite not having an athletic bone in my body.
I never saw the advantage to complaining, being passive-aggressive, and diminishing the things teachers cared about. It never seemed to me to lead to a good outcome.
“We’ve been meaning to talk to you about that…You do realize it was a fly fishing class?”
I remember choosing teams by counting off 1-2-1-2… But I also remember choosing teams by having team captains take turns picking. The advantage of that method is that, if captains choose players strictly based on their athletic ability, the teams end up pretty evenly matched. From a competitive standpoint, it’s fair. And if you already know you’re not very good at whatever-it-is, there’s no extra shame in being picked last.
Anyway, that’s my Devil’s Advocate defense of the practice. But you’re probably right that it shouldn’t be done that way. I say that as someone who was bad enough at sports that I was usually among the last picked, but who was good at enough other things that it didn’t wreck my whole self-esteem.
Enjoyed it, was usually one of the highlights of the day.
It was the only class in which other students were allowed to punch my nose without repercussion, and I was still the quiet kid who’d not yet morphed into a smartass. I remember doing a month on wrestling. We were broken into two groups: 99# and below, and everyone else. So 101# me got to wrassle 198# Alton (who was a great guy, we played offensive line together in high school a couple years later)–I didn’t learn much about wrestling, but I learned how to take a body slam. Oh yeah, and the joys of being a 12-14 y/o boy wearing gym shorts in a coed volleyball block of instruction was a fukkin hoot. Yeah, Gym class can suck a musty jock strap. It only exists to give the coaches something to do during the day.
After Freshman year I got the school to waive my PE requirement in exchange for letting me take advanced academic classes.