I didn’t know there was a sport named after my local international airport. What is lax…is it lacrosse?
Sounds just like my middle school, only about a decade later. We did the same things, plus vollyball, lacross, flag football, soccer, and baseball (it was in the country and had many, many outdoor athletic fields. A seperate one for each of baseball, soccer, football, football practice, lacross, plus 3 general fields.
One thing I hated was wrestling. I got lucky one year like Bimble when I tore cartlidge in my knee during a winter hiking trip and was able to sit out PE during the wrestling section that year. But the next year I had to suffer the annual 8th grade wrestling tournament…
After suffering for weeks in PE learning wrestling they forced all the 8th grade boys to participate in a wrestling tournament. It was held during our ‘elective activities’ period when I was usually in chess club. My request to NOT participate in the tournament was turned down. But I had a plan…
I showed up for my first match. (they had a big board with one of those ’ competition trees’ drawn on it with all the 8th grade boys names on it showing who they would go up against first and then blank spaces where the winners would move on to the next round, etc. until it wound up with one winner.)
I showed up for my first match. It was against a small guy who wasn’t athletic at all. (I was almost 6’ at that point, and although a chubby nerd myself, I did enough hiking and splitting wood at home that I wasn’t the weakest kid in school.) I asked the coach one more time if I could get out of it. He refused. We got in the ring. The coach said to start. My opponent started circling like we had been taught. … I promptly lay down on my back. My opponent blinked in suprise, turned to the coach and asked ‘What do I do?’ … ‘Get on him!’ the coach roared! He lay on me, the coach counted to three. He won. I got up, grinned at the coach, and asked if I could go back to chess club. With a disgusted look on his face he told me to get out of the gym. (Hey, I said I didn’t want to wrestle. My parents knew I was a stubborn kid… )
The epiloge is that a couple years ago, I was visiting my father who still lives there and was talking to the kids of one of my friends. Kids who go to the same school I did. They said that they still talk about me in gym class. The gym teacher tells the story of the kid who didn’t want to wrestle…
Woo Hoo, I’m famous! … or infamous…
For years after my high-school PE experience, I had such a pavlovian aversion to any kind of otherwise unessential physical activity that I didn’t do a lick of exercise that wasn’t forced on me from then until this year, pretty much.
The only reason I’m not a blimp at this point is 1) eating more or less healthfully and 2) I lost 20 pounds because I had to climb up a mountain to go to cegep.
Nowadays I do fairly long-distance bike rides every two days or so and I do enjoy that. But damned if phys.ed., the way it was taught to me, didn’t do exactly the opposite of what it’s supposed to do.
It’s no surprise that if you go out of your way to make phys ed as unpleasant and foul an experience as possible for a subset of the students, that subset will develop an aversion to physical activity.
I have two views of school sports and PE classes.
For the first six years of my schooling I was in a public school, which was very jock-oriented. The teachers as well as the students felt free to ridicule anyone who didn’t meat the standards of accomplishment on the field, and then would, as other posters have said, ridicule the awkward for not wanting to play recess dodgeball.
During this time I hated PE. I have been overweight all my life (except for about a four year period while I was in the Navy.) but usually was in good health. Not a natually fast runner, but one who could, if allowed to go my own pace, run forever. I have the coordination of a pregnant, and drunk, cow, however, so most sports do not let me showcase anything other than klutziness. I also had other problems in school, so for me, PE wasn’t simply the bad part of my experience at school - but just the worst part. And not by all that great a margin.
Then, in 7th grade, I left that school system to go to another school. This new school was, if anything, even more jock-oriented than the public school I’d just left. However, there was something very different about the attitude: teamwork was important, not simply the excuse for the exercises. And so, teammembers would help out the weaker ones.
This new school required that all students go out for a sport every season. And we had pretty good, winning teams. And even though I was still a klutz, I was a valued part of the team - if only because I never gave up, and kept trying. I was never very good at physical efforts, but I actually enjoyed sports. Which is something I’d never have thought possible.
Alas, I had to go back to a different school for 10th-12th grades, and there PE was a bit more like the norm I’d experienced in the first six years. A little less so, but in part because I knew more, now, about how to defend myself rather than any change related to the PE teachers being more sensitive or proper. (Graduated in 1986, for timeframe for all this.)
Anyways, the short point of all this long-windedness is that while I accept that team sports can have a great potential for helping children grow up and learn life skills, my experience is that in most school systems that’s not where the focus is. So, while I’ll agree that if one were to apply the nominal lessons of the PE program through one’s life after school it would be of great benefit - I don’t think that many people actually try to teach those nominal lessons in practice. And until that changes, I don’t see the large amount of hatred for PE and jock-types changing, either.
YMMV
Yep. It’s a great sport - I wish it was better known.
Gym wasn’t all that bad. I hated team sports and was too nearsighted to see the ball well, but I mucked in and did the best I could. The team I was on would usually have been better off without me, but nobody ragged on me too much. We only played dodgeball–which we called “murderball”–on rainy days in the gym.
Everyone hated “stripping”, and few things were better than arriving for gym and seeing a ‘NO STRIP’ notice. I don’t know why that was; nobody actually hated the uniform; I think we just didn’t like being told to wear it.
Later I got placed in what was then called “body building”, where you just ran two or three days a week, and lifted weights on the other days. At least I didn’t have to worry about catching a ball.
After high school I avoided exercise completely. I’d see people jogging or running, and marvel that they voluntarily subjected themselves to a form of P.E. Finally, though, I started working out when I was about 30 and have been very conscientious since.
Not showering after gym is quite common at the junior high level. Our showers were cold, and then at that age many kids think they wouldn’t shower after voluntary physical activity, so why should they have to do it after compulsory games? You don’t exactly work up a sweat standing out in left field, or sitting on the bench waiting for your turn to bat.
Gym class sucked for me in every way imaginable. I was a geek, a nerd, a ripe target for all the jock assholes to pick on. In 7th grade the gym teacher just turned us loose on the football field and assumed we all knew how to play the game. I didn’t know jack shit about playing football (and still don’t). Inevitably being picked last, it didn’t matter to anyone whose team I was on. All I did was run around like a clueless moron for 30 minutes. The teacher didn’t bother to tell me what I should be doing (he probably felt I was a hopeless case anyway). Every Friday we ran 3/4 of a mile, and that was pure torture. I always finished last, gasping for air as it took me at least five to ten minutes to recover. At least once we got to soccer, basketball, the weight room and then baseball in the spring, I redeemed myself a little since I at least knew something about playing these games, but I still sucked at them and was always chosen last.
The locker room antics were just as bad, if not worse. I was flipped with wet towels, I had my clothes hidden, and since I went into puberty before most of the other boys, this tended to attract attention and dirision (they were probably jealous). At least I wasn’t picked on for not wiping, which was the case for another boy who was also picked on mercilessly for his lack of athletic prowess as well as the skidmarks in his underwear. (His response: "So why are you even looking?)
When I was in high school (early 90s) we were graded on participation and had a few tests on rules of different sports, which were pretty easy. Basically, if you showed up and changed into your shorts and sneakers, and didn’t sit on the bleachers all day, you got an A. We did have certain state mandated tests that we had to take for what I assume was statistical purposes, such as how long you could hang from a chin bar (.001 seconds for me, go go lack of upper arm strength) or how fast you could run a mile. But we were not graded on those results.
During the pre-Cambrian era, when I was in high school, you were guaranteed a C if you showed up and your uniform was relatively clean. And it didn’t count in your GPA.
So I didn’t give a rap.
Of course it was 90% bullshit - what part of high school isn’t? But I wasn’t defiant or rebellious or scared or anything else - I didn’t care. We win, we lose - whatever.
Regards,
Shodan
I went to a whole high school of nerds and some of those nerds were extremely good at football, baseball, swimming, etc. The claim that smarts and athletic ability are two mutually exclusive things is absurd.
My high school offered different gym classes, but you were sometimes restricted in what you could choose due to scheduling. The ballroom dancing class was very popular and filled up quickly. One semester I took weight training, taught by the football coach, and actually really enjoyed it. By the end of the semester my 100lb 5’2" ass could bench 55lbs and do like 50 crunches on the top of the incline bench. Another semester we had the choice of playing softball with the group or just going for a jog. Basically we had to keep moving for our hour. It’s not like I looked forward to it all day long but it wasn’t agony.
Kids tend to have short legs. Which matters.
No, I’m saying that in a culture where AOD has spread to twelve-year-olds, that any exercise is good exercise. But you knew that. If your idea of refutation is to extend a statement to a ridiculous extreme in the hope that discrediting the extreme discredits the statement, then you might as well put “debate” right above “dodgeball” on the list of things you don’t do well.
Are you seriously attempting to assert that taking a bump or two in gym class is physical assault? :rolleyes:
I can’t help but point out that you vaildated my statement perfectly by posting this little bit of snark.
<hijack>Marianapolis?</hijack>
The problem I always had wasn’t PE class per se, but the way it was carried out. I think that’s what a lot of people are saying Happy.
Yes, it is be a good thing if people are encouraged and taught about healthy activity levels and general fitness in PE, but in my experience (and it sounds like a lot of other people’s experience as well) that this didn’t happen. If anything, the whole experience was sufficiently hideous for a lot of people that it actually discouraged people from putting the principles into use once no longer required to do so. This is counterproductive.
And, incidentally, when people refer to physical abuse occurring in PE, they mean deliberately induced injury - not random bumps and bruises that happen when you play contact sports. Instances where other students actively attempted to hurt. And, more importantly, that the teachers - rather than seeking to minimize or prevent such occurrences - ignored them and therefore tacitly condoned them.
Brains can be just as nasty and malicious as jocks - but jocks were substantially more likely to express their maliciousness physically, and often PE gave them a golden opportunity to do so without having to worry much about teacher intervention.
Yep. This is back in the 70s in Southern California. I hated PE with a passion, because we were always getting graded on stuff I was lousy at. My one “D” in junior high was in PE the semester the teacher based our entire grade on our “running” scores. Guess what? I can’t run. Period. Never have, never will. Yet the next semester, when the graded was tied to wrestling…well, there I was A+ material. The teacher never saw the injustice of that.
In high school I quickly got myself onto the swimming and water polo teams, so I would never have to take PE again.
At the high school I teach at now, I am actively involved in trying to get PE abolished, or at the very least made strictly an elective class. At the high school level, PE is a joke.
I liked gym class.
As a 300lb teenage girl (yup! really!) I couldn’t fit into the uniform. Had to ask the gym teachers in middle school and high school if I could wear different shorts. They agreed to let me wear school-colored sweatpant cutoffs that my mom sewed for me (I am wearing them right now)
I couldn’t run worth shit, but I tried. I did my required mile, twice a year, to the best of my ability. Which meant I ran for about a minute then walked the rest of the way.
I also grew up with the same mentality of a Great Dane who thinks she’s a lapdog. Even though I was glaringly obese, I ran around like the rest of the kids. Well, probably MORE than the rest of the kids. It’s hard to motivate a bunch of teenage girls to sweat.
We never had to take showers. We had shower facilities but no one ever told us to. I think I would have been fine with it, though. People knew I was fat by looking at me with my clothes on. It was no secret what I looked like under my clothes.
I was never picked on or teased in gym class. People saw I tried my hardest, and usually ended up doing better than them. My teachers noted this and I always got A’s.
I think the attitude in gym is alot different amongst boys and girls. I don’t think we had any female jocks in my classes, which were always segregated by sex. Boys I knew (the scrawny, nerdy or fat ones) had more horror stories about gym than I could ever imagine. You just didn’t run into that sort of thing in my classes.
I wish my high school had done this.
Think about it: in most other required classes, is everyone in the same class regardless of ability? No. There are various classes for people at different levels of ability, which means that there isn’t such a huge range of abilities in the class.
Fortunately for me, my PE classes all graded on whether you showed up, wore your uniform, and passed tests on rules of the various games. Those things I could do. But I hated PE, and when it came time to choose a college, I wouldn’t even have considered one that had a phys ed requirement.
Is this for real? All these opinions about PE from a bunch of people who are likely sitting in front of a computer all day? COME ON! These boards are cool, but anyone who thinks PE isn’t necessary or shouldn’t be graded in this day and age has got to be on crack or something. Granted, most kids don’t really like PE unless they’re into some sport or another, but to hate it, or not look back on it as something that was necessary? It’s the first step toward teaching one to look outside the box and beyond their books, encouraging them to be well-rounded and healthy individuals. We should all be following that example and get out there once in awhile!
I’m not against PE classes, and I suspect most people posting here aren’t either. What I am against is PE classes as they are currently taught.
I think PE classes would be much better if:
There were several different ability levels of PE classes
Teachers had no tolerance for the teasing and abuse of fat or non-athletic kids in class
There were more PE classes that focused on non-team activities like aerobics, that are more relevant to people who are not interested in playing team sports
Kids didn’t have to shower before or after class in communal showers
PE uniforms were less revealing and unflattering
I’m trying to get our PE classes to teach something practical, like martial arts. Not only are they a wonderful workout, but the kids might actually learn something that will help them later in life, as opposed to line-dancing and volleyball.