In this thread, many posters said that they didn’t graduate (or nearly didn’t graduate) because of PE (physical education, aka gym) classes.
I for one had a terrible time in PE. We were graded on performance as well as attendance, and as well as our willingness to shower after class. I failed on two out of those three parameters, and was graded accordingly, with low grades and stacks of demerits. Sometime around my junior year the teacher decided I wasn’t going to change and just passed me with a B for showing up, but the PE experience still impacted my GPA. Gym class also impacted other areas of high school–I spent all day dreading it, which probably means that I absorbed just a little less information, and I had to put up with insults from other students (who yelled at me for making them lose like the game like I’d made them lose the World Series… it’s dodgeball assholes) and talking-tos by the PE teachers, lectures which sometimes made me late for my real classes. I don’t even want to think about what the poor fat kids at school had to put up with.
I think grading for anything more than just showing up (in which case, I would have gotten an A, since I always showed up) at PE class is unfair. Unlike other subjects, people can’t really improve in gym–it’s so tied to genetics. If someone truly can’t run faster than a mile in ten minutes, there’s nothing that’s going to make them go faster (except rocket boots, which don’t exist… yet). Is there any reason why we need PE classes in this day and age? Why is it fair that someone gets a lower grade for not showering or running fast, even if they might be a genius at trigonometry or can quote Shakespeare like an Elizabethan? What does gym have to do with education? I realize that kids and teens don’t get enough exercise these days, so I’m not saying we should get rid of PE entirely (I wouldn’t have minded a free period in which I was allowed to run around the track a few times and work out stress), but why is it still a graded class?
Please also chime in with your own stories of terrible PE teachers. Or, if there is a PE teacher in the house, explain why you are such a hardass (or why you’re not).
Well, I was just estimating on the time. I can run about that fast. Actually, track was the only “subject” I ever did well in, maybe because there are no rules, and no teamwork.
I wasn’t the most athletic person in school, but I do remember having PE teachers that, for the most part, were pretty cool. Participation was what we were graded on, as well as the rules of the games we played (Flag football, floor hockey, basketball, tenis and baseball were the ones I remember taking rules exams on in High School).
I personally think that the worst part of PE isn’t the instructors, but the kids you are with in class with. Jr. High was hell on earth for me. I was picked on constantly by the “Jocks” of the class for absolutely no reason other than they were assholes.
The deal with PE teachers is that nobody has seriously looked at the purpose of phys ed in public schools in at least a generation and probably longer. When I last had it in 1982 or so, PE was still about teaching traditional post-WW2 gender roles and preparing kids for living up to those roles. Even though the programs had been somewhat modernized, a lot was left undone and left up to peer pressure.
That’s a load of BS. Of course you can improve in gym if you actually make an effort. That’s what conditioning and training is all about. Now, you may not be able to reach an elite level, but the idea that someone is unable to improve (especially a healthy individual in their teens who can’t do a mile under ten minutes) is just silly.
When I took PE in elementary school (1984-1990), we still did square dancing, and also had to do organized dancing to crackly-sounding, archaic records like “The Bunny Hop.” Once a year we also had to take turns running underneath a parachute which everyone stood in a circle and held. This was in addition to kickball, softball, dodgeball, basketball, running laps, the President’s Council of Physical Fitness tests like timed sit-ups and push-ups, and that greatest of indignities, climbing the rope.
You can easily turn the tables and say that it is perfectly fair to those students that aren’t that bright but are naturally good at athletics. Superior performance in trigonometry for example has a huge genetic component as well. Superior performance in most academic sujects require some innate ability that not all students have.
This country has a huge crisis in adolescent and adult fitness. Good high school PE programs should help to combat that. I am not saying that most do it effectively but the requirements should not be set as just “showing up” anymore than it should be for any other subject.
You’re just exhibiting the same bias towards gym that any other person could exhibit towards chemistry or algebra or even English (unless you think discussing sub-texts of Moby Dick somehow apply to being able to ably converse in life, which it doesn’t).
Fir life-time health and happiness, if you applied the ideals of your physical education it would probably benefit you more than any other subject you took in high school.
Actually that’s complete bullshit. First of all a ten minute mile sucks. That’s the pace I ran the Corporate Challange (3.5 miles) and I’m a lazy 32 years old and run like almost never. A healthy kid should be able to run one mile in ten minutes no problem.
Secondly, most athletic skills - speed, strength, stamina, coordination can be improved with exercise and practice.
Please tell me it was the first two.
Because there is more to life than being a genius at trigonometry or quoteing Shakespeare (which by the way has absolutely no practical value in the real world). How about important life lessons like when other people are counting on you (like in a team sport) they will get pissed off at you if you don’t even make an attempt at an effort. And it doesn’t matter that you don’t want to be there. Half the time, I don’t want to be at my job, but people are still counting on me to do it (which ironically, I’m not right now).
I enjoyed PE and never had a problem with any of the instructors (who also tended to be math teachers - a subject in which I’m not very good). There were a number of kids in my PE classes that were not very coordinated or sports-minded, but they put forth an effort and that made all the difference to the instructors.
I hated PE… In fact, “hated” is an understatement in the extreme. Words cannot describe how much I LOATHED PE, the PE teachers and sports in general…
I was by far the fattest girl in the whole school, so PE for me was TORTURE!! Firstly, wearing a vest-and-shorts combo when grossly over-weight did NOTHING to stop me looking like the product of bizarre breeding experiment between a beachball and a human-sized bag of jelly.
Secondly, I had NO interest in sports whatsoever.
Thirdly, the PE teachers were bitches in the extreme - and made no effort to even remotely hide their disgust at The Fat Girl Who Can’t Run. If they were any good as teachers, they would have tried to tailor something that might have actually encouraged me to excercise a bit more and even ENJOY it!
Fourthly… Communal showers? When a kid is so fat? Oh, that was NOT fun at ALL!!!
THANKFULLY - but painfully! - just before I went to High School, I fell over a German Shepherd Dog (don’t ask!!) and tore the ligaments on both my kneecaps in the most horrible way imaginable, so I was excused PE “indefinitely”!! YAY!!!
So… a word to any PE teachers out there, if you have A Fat Kid in your class, TRY (please!) to be nice to them and encourage them!! For The Fat Kid, PE is beyond humiliating and absolutely no fun at all.
…
And for the record, I got to my mid-twenties and then lost 100lbs in weight. I now excercise regularly doing stuff I ENJOY (cycling and mild weight training)
That Fat Girl has now been replaced by a nice Slim Girl who’s a million times happier!!
I have to say that my experiences in gym class were a lot different. I graduated in 1988 from a high school in Alberta, Canada, so that gives you the time frame and place.
I dreaded gym for the uniform (“Gym strip” of adidas bum-hugger shorts which were Not Flattering) and because I wasn’t a particularly active kid. However, the gym teachers didn’t make us square dance, or grade us on our ability. They graded us on our attendance, our willingness to participate, our relative level of improvement, that sort of thing.
I was a fat kid and was always chosen last, but I always tried my best.
I certainly do see the point in developing teamwork skills. I also see the point in developing physical skills. I do not see the point in gym classes as they are generally conducted.
You want kids to exercise? Let them exercise. I only wish I’d been allowed to do aerobics and weightlifting and nothing else, in gym. I wish I hadn’t had to play team sports (and no, my best effort was quite definitely not good enough to placate the jocks). I wish I hadn’t had to do the fitness testing (and no, no amount of stretching will ever make me touch my toes without bending my knees, not when I was eight, not now).
Teamwork and problem solving can be taught outside of the vicious, tribal context of team sports. So can fitness. Lots more people would tolerate gym class if there was, at the very least, always a choice between a team sport and some real exercise.
Among the problems I encountered, besides being skinny and not athletically inclined, was that the teachers never really taught anything. No instruction or coaching on how to improve one’s performance, no actual sports skills, nothing. Also, way back then (when dinosaurs ruled the earth) no one realized that exercising to the point of pain was not really good for you. Plus they used the “team captains pick their team” method. Excruciatingly embarrassing for the over- or underweight ones who were always picked last. Confirmation in front of your peers that nobody wanted you. Great motivation. :rolleyes:
Physical fitness would have been a nice goal. Grading on improvements or effort expended would have been nice.
The showering thing was even more stressful for a shy and underdeveloped girl. There were no individual showers, just a large “gang” shower. Plus a weirdo gym teacher who watched, allegedly to assure that everyone actually washed, and who kept track of when a girl claimed to be menstruating. I don’t know for sure what the purpose of that last was; maybe to assure that no one claimed to be menstruating all the time to avoid having to shower with the rest, or to check for who might be knocked up.
Did anyone else’s junior high and high school basically segregate the jocks who played sports and everyone else?
The junior high I attended had two different types of PE. “Athletics” were for people who played at least one sport in the school year, and “PE” was for people who didn’t. In high school, people who played sports had a period devoted to it, while people who didn’t could take plain old PE. This kept the gung-ho people from having to play with the unmotivated.
And please don’t assume that everyone who isn’t a natural athlete is “unmotivated” or cannot become motivated. If an activity is set up to be unpleasant, painful and embarrassing, how could that possibly be motivating? Jeez. Subject matter teachers – the good ones, anyway – are constantly working on ways to make their classes interesting, relevant and rewarding. IMH experience, the PE teachers did none of the above.
