Was PE class in school good or bad?

In My Humble Opinion
81

Haa! That effin’ thing!

Let me set this up so I can get to the end of it: I was a shortish, scrappy, highly competitive individual. I played soccer in a competitive county league. I could do a pretty good cross-country run, but I really, really liked racing bicylces (criterium a specialty).

So the Canada Fitness Award Program? Sure. You want situps? How many hundreds? Bam, Excellent. The long-distance run? Sure, you want me to do it twice? Bam, Excellent. The hanging bar doodad? Put the stopwatch away and go get a calendar to measure my time. I’ll come down when I’m good and ready.

But then you want me to what? Sprint? I’m trying! NIL. That one where you dash back and forth? I’m trying! NIL. Standing longjump? Dude, I have leg muscles like whoah but they don’t work like that. ALSO NIL.

Every year, I’d finish with three excellents and three nils, and get a nil for my efforts. Not even a patch or anything, just a little “you tried!” pin. It wasn’t for a lack of athleticism, it was for a lack of fast-twitch muscles required for half the tests. There was nothing wrong with me at all, but something wrong with the test. Eventually, they tweaked the standards so that performance would get me a bronze. So I went from the “crippled” category to “wildly unhealthy” despite smashingly great stamina.

Aaaanyway, as far as PE went, I enjoyed it. When highschool came around, I took the “advanced” PE courses in highschool, which were run by a moderately young teacher who took the whole thing scientifically and seriously, with a vast breadth of topics from various sports to resistance training.

Late highschool and early university, I did competitive orienteering and started a wildly unsuccessful “career” of bicycle racing that ended with more crashes than finishes. If you like roadburn, I gotcha covered.

I don’t like “working out”, but I played a lot of friendly soccer in a local beer league and I still like doing a 50 km jaunt into the local hills as weather permits, if only because blasting back down those hills on the way home is still screamingly good fun.

82

I didn’t care much either way. But I was fairly athletic and tall. No one bothered me. I hated cross country running though. Have never had the endurance.

Crazy thing happened to my cousin. She did excellent in High School and graduated about 6 months early. She then moved to Manhattan to be with her sister for a while.

Well, the High School decided that she didn’t have enough credits to graduate after all. Not enough PE credits that is. Yep, they wanted her to enroll in High School at a school in Brooklyn to get her remaining PE credits. This was a girl that graduated early with honors. She basically said ‘fFuck you, I have my diploma. Come and get it.’ The whole thing was dropped. Bunch of morons.

83

I didn’t care much either way. But I was fairly athletic and tall. No one bothered me. I hated cross country running though. Have never had the endurance.

Crazy thing happened to my cousin. She did excellent in High School and graduated about 6 months early. She then moved across the country to Manhattan to be with her sister for a while.

Well, the High School decided that she didn’t have enough credits to graduate after all. Not enough PE credits that is. Yep, they wanted her to enroll in High School at a school in Brooklyn to get her remaining PE credits. This was a girl that graduated early with honors. She basically said ‘fFuck you, I have my diploma. Come and get it.’ The whole thing was dropped. Bunch of morons.

84

Coming back to this: they did exactly that, in my elementary school. 1950’s. Everybody read aloud, in turn.

At the time, I mostly felt sorry for myself, having to sit there and be bored while several students very slowly stumbled, one word at a time and half of them wrong, through their paragraph. Some years later it occurred to me that they must have felt a lot worse about it than I did.

The first grade teacher broke us up into groups by ability, for reading. I don’t know whether it was less embarrassing to be in the poorest-readers group than to be trying to read aloud for the whole class to hear.

85

It didn’t particularly bother me but I always wondered what gym had to do with being educated. I liked archery and rope climbing and a few other things. The thing we all thought was weird was how many of our PE teachers were fat.

86

I really didn’t mind phys-ed although I wasn’t particularly good at it. There usually was one or more a$$hole(s) that towel snapped you in the nuts in the shower room though. That led to some entertaining squabbles when the gym teacher wasn’t around. :eek:

87

Then your school failed you, and you were lied to about needing “natural abilities”, and I’m truly sorry.

IMO, art is more important than just about any of those except maths. Art is a big part of what makes us human.

88

No, I don’t think the school failed me. I had no interest in “learning” to do art, yet they tried to force me to try.

I agree here, art is cool. I appreciate looking at art. I took my kids to art museums when they were young. I just don’t see why we give the job to teachers.

89

As a short slim male I liked PE fairly well most of the time, but I never got to climb the big rope in the gym. We played some stuff like gym hockey and warball that would not go over well these days.

90

I think the value of a well-run PE program (as well as other non-academic subjects) is that it gives kids another opportunity to find something they are good at. Everyone should have something they can hang their hat on.

Education isn’t just about job preparation or college preparation. It should also be about helping kids reach their full human potential–both mental and physical wellness. And exercise is key to both of those things.

I just don’t know how a good PE program–one that doesn’t leave some segment feeling some kind of negative way–would look like. Maybe it is inevitable that there will always be some segment that hates a particular subject no matter how good it is.
Sent from my moto x4 using Tapatalk

91

Schools are either indifferent to bullying or outright in favor of it. Just handwaving the bullying issue as something that *shouldn’t *happen won’t make it go away. Forcing kids to be ritually humiliated isn’t the answer either, and that’s assuming there’s no physical assault or rape involved.

92

Maybe in previous years schools were indifferent to bullying. But that is certainly not the case now.

93

I always hated PE, even though I support it in principle. Kids need exercise, and many need to be taught how to play outside because their childhoods were spent in front of a television screen. And learning about sports is important for cultural reasons. Unfortunately a lot of people in recent generations need to be taught how to have fun outside. And that’s what this class should be about: fun.

But in my experience gym wasn’t about any of that. It was about making you dress in a stupid uniform and discipline. Sometimes we didn’t do anything but sit on the floor and listen to the teacher explain how to score a bowling game. And that’s just a complete waste of time.

Honestly I wouldn’t be opposed to replacing PE with a long recess. But also, PE is the least of our problems when it comes to faults in primary education. The whole damn system is corrupt and incompetent.

94

It was the special hour of humiliation and kindly contempt.

It did demonstrate to me at an early age the enormous power of being athletic and good-looking. As long as you were those things, you were idolized even if you had no other virtues and were as stupid as a box of dirt.

95

I went to two different elementary schools and nine different middle and high schools total.

The PE teacher at my first elementary school was mostly interested in keeping kids safe and making sure they had fun. I had fun.

In middle and high school, PE was hell. I didn’t wear glasses then and was reasonably in shape. But, my dexterity and coordination have always been terrible. I’ve also never been interested in most sports.

When it came time to buy a gym uniform, I refused. I had long talks with the teacher in which he couldn’t explain or justify why I should spend the money to do so.

“We need to know you’re using a special set of clothes for gym!”
“Why can’t I just use the uniform from my last school?”
“Just buy a uniform!”

Eventually, the school just gave me a uniform.

Considering the amount of bullying I was subjected to (though not physical abuse. The other kids quickly learned that if it came to a fight, I hit hard and fought dirty) I refused to shower after gym.

Eventually, they moved me to a special PE class. You didn’t have to wear a uniform or shower.

I agree very strongly that PE is important. I also feel just as strongly that the overwhelming majority of PE teachers I had, have no idea what their doing.

I enjoyed archery. I was not great. But, I was better than average.

I do associate playing most sports or working out in a gym with incompetent teachers and bullying from other students.

For a few years, I was in a LARP using padded weapons. It was a great workout. It was a lot of fun.

Re Complaining

The squeaky wheel gets the grease.

RE Being Passive Aggressive

Not me. I disagreed plainly and openly

RE Diminishing The Things The Teachers Cared About

Out of all the PE teachers I had, I can only say for sure that one cared about us. If the rest cared about anything at all, they never showed it.

PKBites

Who are these “pantywaists” you speak of?

96

I have memories of gym (never called it “PE”) in elementary school involving simple things like jumping rope or duck-duck-goose in earlier grades, and eventually kickball or dodgeball by grades 4-6.

I don’t remember the atmosphere being one of bullying or whatever; maybe a bit in dodgeball where a couple of the more athletic kids would aim to dominate, but I still enjoyed the IDEA of dodgeball even if I was never the last one standing. I don’t have to be the winner to enjoy it.

I was in a group who liked dodgeball enough to try playing it on our own in the schoolyard during recess, among other games. Except we didn’t have a dodgeball. And it rapidly proved unreasonbly painful to play dodgeball with a soccer ball or (urk) a basketball.

From grade 7-12 I was in a “specialized nerd school” where none of us were athletically oriented, as a primary goal at any rate (obviously some would be more athletic than others, including those who actually did athletic things already outside of school).

There I remember grades 7-9 being “basic PE” type stuff like stretching and running; we learned to swim; and a few months of learning and playing common team sports, like basketball, soccer, and (indoor) volleyball. Kids who were on the school teams in those sports obviously dominated, and were sprinkled among different groups playing against each other or simply set to playing only against each other while the true novices were left to feel things out on their own.

That I also remember as fun, because when else would I ever play volleyball? I wasn’t good at it, but now I know the feel of playing volleyball, at least.

Grades 10-12, gym was elective, as in we got to choose how we did it per semester (half year). I did weight training, self defense (karate, where I also learned to count to 10 in Japanese while learning the basic form drills), racquetball twice (which was fun), and foil fencing twice (which was LOTS of fun, enough so that I bought my own equipment and continued in college for a year or two).

97

At its best, with a good teacher in a good school with friendly classmates, it was still my least-favorite class of the day. At its worst, it was a bunch of bullies encouraged by a teacher who was an even bigger bully, and who divided the entire world into athletes on the school’s teams, and people who should be treated like shit, and who was an idiot to boot. Example 1: He refused to call fouls when we were playing basketball, on the grounds that if he did, it’d be nothing but a free-throw contest. Example 2: He thought that the average of 4 C grades was an F.

98

Terrible.
The locker room was a place where you got the crap beat out of you, & coach never even tried to stop it.

99

I was very sad to hear last year that my junior high gym teacher passed away in a nursing home.

I would have enjoyed visiting him. It would have been like the times Gus Fring visited Hector Salamanca (except for the last time).Reminding him of the paddlings he gave me and the other “stupid” kids who didn’t know how to play basketball.

Suggesting we play some ‘Dodgeball’, right there in his room. With a bowling ball. I would have let “Coach” throw first :slight_smile:

I wouldn’t actually have done any of that of course, because I’m not the truly sadistic SOB he was.

I’m sorry–what was the question?

100

It was okay at times, and other times it was horrid. Fortunately, I was in the “dumb gym class” for kids who weren’t so athletic, and we always joked about it. (For some reason, we referred to it as “jerry gym”, I can’t remember why) So there wasn’t any bullying.

One of the male gym teachers was an old perv who would walk into the girls’ locker room, using the excuse that he had to talk to one of the other gym teachers. He’d also wear white swimming trunks. puke He was a total fucking creep and everybody hated him.
One of the female gym teachers, though, was really nice and as long as you gave it your best shot, she was cool.

The other female gym teacher, unfortunately, was a super-jock who just could not understand that not everyone was as athletic and into sports as she was. I remember her once wanting me to stay after school to practice playing handball. Um, no, I had an after-school job, and other homework that I wasn’t going to neglect. She called my mother, who asked her if I gave any problems in class, if I slacked off, or whatever. When the teacher admitted no, my mother told her then I would NOT be staying after school just to throw a ball against a target.
That was the ONE time in all of my academic career that my parents contradicted anything a teacher assigned.

She’s also the reason I hate golf, due to the fact that she called me retarded for not knowing which golf club to use. :rolleyes:
However, we did a lot of stuff that wasn’t actually typical. I was actually pretty good at ping-pong. No, I have no idea WHY we played ping-pong. I wasn’t too bad at badminton either.