Non-existent for me. I signed on to be one of the equipment managers for the varsity football team; for some reason, the school administration counted that as fulfilling my PE requirements for my entire freshman year.
Also for some reason (albeit perhaps a different one), PE was mandatory only for freshmen at my school.
Non-existent for me. I signed on to be one of the equipment managers for the varsity football team; for some reason, the school administration counted that as fulfilling my PE requirements for my entire freshman year.
Also for some reason (albeit perhaps a different one), PE was mandatory only for freshmen at my school.
nm. Double post.
ETA: Aw, crap. TRIPLE post?
I can’t say much about grade or middle school PE. I seem to recall a lot of unstructured gym play. No issues with that. I liked sports, and playing sports at school was all good. My freshman year was at a private Christian academy and PE was more structured. 10 minutes of Bible verses or applying “your body is a temple of God” type instruction and then some aerobics and mandatory running/track and then sort of structured instruction/play. We didn’t just “play basketball,” but had written tests over the basketball rules, etc. Showering was mandatory, but really, what sweaty 14 year old boy shouldn’t take a shower after gym? I can’t imagine the afternoon funk if we didn’t shower.
After freshman year, PE was only required for students that didn’t play at least two extracurricular sports. I always did, so 9th grade was the end of my PE career.
That reminded me of something… I think it’s worth noting that at least when I was in high school, most schools allowed athletes to count their sport as their PE credits. So for the most part, we didn’t have to take PE in high school- technically we took Athletic PE, but for me that meant football in the Fall, weightlifting in the winter/spring, and Track & Field in the spring, all of which took place after school hours.
So to some degree, I think asking about PE is getting a somewhat self-selected set of non-athletic people’s opinions about it, if we’re mostly talking about high school.
It was a required course in grades 7-10 (US) when I attended school. Tuesday and Thursday were “Health Class,” while the other days were in the gym. Health Class was mostly watching old films of old sports events (golf, football, etc.) and was a big bore. The gym sessions weren’t too bad, though I was not a very good athlete in most sports and games. Every few weeks, we would get on a bus and go bowling.
Then I joined the football team. The high school had a special Advanced PE class and it was the last period of the day. I enjoyed the heck out of that. During the season, the football players would lounge around resting before their after-school practice at the field. And I do mean “lounge”…we would lie around on the wrestling mats, often sleeping. In the off-season, we would run on Tuesdays and Thursdays and lift weights on the other days as part of a conditioning program, but it was basically self-directed. Most of the time, we wouldn’t even shower after the class, since we would either be going to practice or heading straight home.
Junior high was horrible, mostly because of the forced showers (communal) and naked inspections from the PE teacher. Not a close inspection, but you had to walk past him naked to ensure that you were head-to-toe wet. Activities were all military/presidential-fitness style drills. Pushups, bar hangs, running, almost no fun or instructional activities.
High school was better, showers were optional and more private stalls, and there was usually a choice of 2 or 3 breakout activity series such as being able to choose dance vs basketball vs archery.
I don’t have any good memories of PE or gym class in school. I do remember early elementary school they’d have us play softball sometimes and because I had never played before, they put me in the outfield. When my team was at bat, I couldn’t hit the ball because - again - I’d never played before. When I was in the outfield I’d get bored and start daydreaming or looking for 4-leaf clovers and miss the very rare ball that came my way, thus annoying my teammates. Eventually they didn’t make me play anymore but just had me “keep score”. Which was also tough as nobody bothered to tell me how to keep score for softball. I spent a fair amount of time back then wondering how all these other 7 and 8 year olds learned to play softball before I eventually just concluded that their dads must have taught them. We got zero instruction from the teachers.
I also remember one time around the same age level when they decided to mix things up and have us do some archery. They had all 30-some kids get in line and take turns shooting at the target. You got one shot and then had to go to the back of the line again. When I was up, nobody told me to pull the bow as hard as I could, so I just pulled it taut and let go… and the arrow fell at my feet. Teacher was like “next!” and I didn’t get a second shot at it because there were so many kids in the line. So I didn’t learn anything about archery either, except maybe that I was too weak to do it.
In high school, I would get a doctor’s note to excuse me from gym class because of my arthrits. But in my Junior year they offered this thing called “adaptive PE” so they put me in that class. It was gym class for any kid that had physical limitations, so it was me, a guy with epilepsy, a guy with Down’s Syndrome, a skinny girl who said she had a metabolic problem and wasn’t supposed to do any physical exertion and a few others. The problem here was that the teacher was a sports coach and he didn’t understand or relate to people with physical limitations. He had us rotate through a variety of sports like bowling, tennis, golf, basketball, etc. I actually liked being able to try different sports but he drove us batty trying to drill all of the official rules for the games into us and telling us about his tennis pro daughter. He would scream at us for just having fun smacking a tennis ball around instead of playing by the rules, for example. There were a few times he actually got up in my face and screamed at me like a drill sargeant.
That reminded me of something… I think it’s worth noting that at least when I was in high school, most schools allowed athletes to count their sport as their PE credits. So for the most part, we didn’t have to take PE in high school- technically we took Athletic PE, but for me that meant football in the Fall, weightlifting in the winter/spring, and Track & Field in the spring, all of which took place after school hours.
So to some degree, I think asking about PE is getting a somewhat self-selected set of non-athletic people’s opinions about it, if we’re mostly talking about high school.
I enjoyed it in primary school and don’t remember anyone complaining about having to do it. We didn’t even have a special PE kit so there wasn’t the hassle of getting changed.
In secondary school, we were lucky to have really good teachers. The female PE teacher was a particularly lovely person who was often the one girls would choose to go to if they needed to talk about something - the opposite of the stereotype. Now, I couldn’t take part in a lot of PE activities because my asthma was truly awful at that age, and the teachers knew that wasn’t an excuse because I’d spent several months in hospital, but they were pretty good about still involving me in stuff I could do, like javelin, long jump or short sprints, and I was quite good at them and enjoyed doing what I could do.
The things I did hate, every other girl also hated. Naked communal showering as a teenager is cruel and everyone would just run through getting their towel wet so they could pretend they’d showered rather than actually get naked in front of everyone.
Plus, girls’ PE kits in England in the 80s and 90s were really weird. It was an aertex shirt (fine, but cold in the winter), plus a skirt that barely covered your arse, and special “PE knickers” underneath. They are basically just large, thick panties, usually in puke green or navy blue. You can see them very easily under the very short skirt, so chubby girls felt self-conscious, most girls felt like they had to shave their legs, most boys liked to hang around and leer, and also they really didn’t work very well with sanitary pads. Pretty sure they turned lots of girls off PE all by themselves.
I would link to a picture, but honestly, they’re so short that posting a link to a picture of a young girl wearing them would probably need a NSFW link.
They also meant that for outdoor sports in winter in England you were freezing almost all the time because you do a lot of standing around waiting to start, or standing waiting for the ball in netball, etc. At the same time, the teacher would be wearing a tracksuit with a jacket and saying “it’s not cold!” It is if you’re out here in short sleeves and a pair of knickers.
That’s another reason I didn’t hate PE - no pool and no showers and no nudity.
Elementary school fitness was good. Scooting around, square-dancing, parachute - all fun ways to get kids to move.
7th grade started with weight training. I already had most of my growth spurt and had started to fill out, but was still mostly arms and legs. The teacher thought it was a good idea to weigh all the students and call out their weights. The classmates laughed and I was humiliated. I had her for both 7th and 8th grade and I still remember her name. She stole the fun from exercise.
For high school, students could waive the PE requirement if they were taking college-prep courses. So my last gym class was in 8th grade.
And I agree. No one should have to be picked last. We don’t do that at work for groups, why subject children to more humilation?
Forced shower? If you need to be forced to take a shower, the problem isn’t with the class.
Lots of people don’t like being forced to strip naked in front of bullies.
What’s not to understand?
A decent art teacher will expose one to media and techniques you were perhaps unaware of, or enable tasks that one might not have had opportunity for, like life drawing or using a projector for a mural. Plus a good art curriculum should give you a solid grounding in colour theory, form, shade, line, design and art history. I think art classes are as invaluable as English literature or geography or even mathematics. Even if it’s just messing about with poster paints on newsprint for 45 minutes a week…
Many people have said what I thought: good in lower elementary, loved the parachute. Got more competitive as we got older, and it you weren’t either an athlete or part of the in-crowd (but I repeat myself) you were miserable.
God help you if you wore glasses, because it made you a target, and the teachers didn’t care. “Just don’t wear them!” they would say. I started wearing them full-time at age 6, what makes you think I can function without them at age 10?
And nothing makes middle school girls more vicious than getting naked and showering together. I wish I had the deviousness to claim my period all year long as some did.
I moved from that district to a school with no locker room facilities, so no more showering. Hooray, right? Nope. The PE was just murderball: Dodgeball turned into assault. Who could hit the glasses-wearing first? And the classroom teacher (who wasn’t really a teacher) just whistled when it was time to go back to class.
PE is like so many other aspects of education: a good idea that is so badly implemented that is utterly ruins it for most, and the beneficiaries don’t understand why everyone else doesn’t like it.
I remember enjoying high school gym class. We played basketball, tennis, flag football, water polo, and did swimming, diving, and track. I was quite awful at tennis, but unexpectedly pretty good at flag football when it came to recovering fumbles. One time I actually came pretty close to sacking the varsity quarterback. He was a slippery devil, though.
But I had zero interest in any of that, nor any natural abilities. My POV at the time was that school should be about science, math, history, etc. If you covered all of that and wanted to sit with crayons during your free time, go for it. Poster paint on newsprint? I’d rather not.
I’m not trying to belittle anyone else’s idea of PE here, but when I was in middle/high school there was a pretty sizeable proportion of the student population that would have been averse to ANY sort of forced physical activity, be it because they were too cool for it, because they thought it was the sort of thing for dumb jocks, or because they just really didn’t like physical activity.
And NOTHING that the school could have done would have changed any of that- there’s only so much you can do to motivate sullen and condescending teenagers to go out and run, play tennis, lift weights, do push-ups, golf, yoga, or whatever.
I always felt like that was the biggest hurdle- most of us who didn’t have that attitude were already in some sport or other.
That’s a failure of the school to not handle bullies. Ignoring hygiene isn’t the answer.