Well, let me ask a question: would you discipline a student who intentionally tried to raise a welt on another with the ball, as the Cynic just bragged about? if not, why not?
Gym just wasn’t my bag. It was required, on the books, but the PE teachers were not that big on enforcing it. If you weren’t causing any particular problem, it wasn’t a big deal if you lingered around for a while on the sidelines and then slipped out, leaving them to concentrate on the kids who were enthusiastic participants.
I’m not even sure why I didn’t like it. I felt like I had better things to do with my time (“better” by the standards of a high school kid, so that really could mean anything), and the kids who LIKED gym tended to be athletes who were all friends with each other and gym class was both social and fun for them. If you weren’t in that group, you were pretty much invisible in gym class, so why not blow it off?
The ONE thing that was enforced was passing Swimming. I almost didn’t graduate on time because I had skipped out on Swimming entirely. It turns out you could be exempted from the Swimming requirement if you had a Red Cross lifesaving card, which I had from my days as a summer camp counselor. When I got it a few summers back, I chucked it somewhere and then had to turn the house upside down to find it to present it to the high school before graduation.
Looking back, the craziest thing was that I WAS one of those enthusiastic participants AT SUMMER CAMP, that was where sports were social and fun because I was with all my friends. When the whole swimming thing came out, and that led to the fact that I rarely showed up for gym, my parents were confused, because at camp, I was big on field hockey and softball and swimming and all sorts of things. I was confused that they were confused, because it was so obvious to me that camp and school were completely different things.
My answer to the question in the thread title is “Who knows why teenagers do anything?”
::Cue theme music::
Oh, I loved summer camp too. Granted I still prefered activities like canoeing, archery, arts & crafts, or hiking to baseball or basketball games. I also had zero-problem with showering with the other boys or other communal nudity like changing in our tents. Honestly I actually anjoyed that part. 
Many of these same boys I went to school with. It’s just that nobody else did after gym and I had no desire to be the first. If other boys showered I would’ve showered. Then again by HS I’d get an erection from just holding my partner’s feet during situps so that might not have been the best idea. :o
Because it’s neither sexual nor a battery. It’s an insult to real victims to say it is.
To me, dodgeball was about being able to get BACK at bullies. I got picked on, slammed into lockers, tripped up in the hallway, etc. all the time. Gym was the only time I could get something back at them without getting the shit beat out of me.
I also liked dodgeball. The balls weren’t that hard and once you were hit you got to go sit on the sideline and talk your friends. We didn’t play it after grade school though. And you still haven’t answered my question about whether your response would’ve been the same if it had been a male teacher patting a female student on the ass and she reacted the same way.
I was one who virtually never dressed out for or participated in gym during Jr. High. Why? It was a stupid waste of time…running around in circles and doing idiotic drills…and I had zero interest in it. Had we been maybe going outside and playing soccer or even allowed to just play a game of basketball instead of doing insipid DRILLS, I would SOOO have been up for it.
FTR, I felt the same about ALL my classes and pretty much “sat them out” as well (failing the 7th grade altogether).
I went on to spend a yr in a religious school (as parental punishment) where I “worked at my own pace” (meaning I did nothing) and to drop out at age 16.
At 18, I went and took the test and got my GED.
A few yrs later, I went to college and graduated with a 4.0 gpa.
I’m currently back in school working on my second degree and carrying a 3.85 last I checked.
In between, had 2 successful careers, owned 2 small businesses, had 2 kids, and generally did OK in life.
So why did I protest gym by refusing to dress out? Because it was stupid, boring, an insult to my intelligence AND the uniform was this polyester, navy blue striped monstrosity I couldn’t STAND! 
The rest of school was everything BUT the bad uniform (oh, except the religious school, which also had one of those).
Yes, my answer would be the same. It’s not a sexual battery.
I wasn’t a refuser, but only because I couldn’t tolerate getting an F in an subject. I really really wanted to refuse because -
- I found every gym activity stupid, pointless, and inapplicable to anything in my life. If it were supervised and structured fitness training, maybe it was justifiable, but it was just shit like how to play basketball, how to play football, how to wrestle, etc. If I wanted to be in a sport, I’d have already joined one of the damned sports teams. High school is too late to be picking that crap up.=
- I was shy about my undeveloped body as a teenager
- As a quasi-nerd, I had to do a lot of bullshit macho posturing to avoid getting bullied in the locker room. I succeeded, but again, WTF is the point of that for someone whose life plan doesn’t involve being naked around threatening men?
- I was just not into showering and re-grooming myself at school. I have oddball hair that takes a bit of wrangling and drying to make it presentable, and I couldn’t manage that in the ~3 allowed minutes without risking being late to my next class.
- Carrying around stinky sweaty clothes in a bag… whatever
- High school is already a hypercompetitive environment where everybody is sizing everybody up. I was fit, but uncoordinated. I wasn’t really interested in being known as the kid who was never going to make a free throw.
In conclusion, gym is stupid and ought to have been optional, as it was presented in my school system.
If you had one of those teachers, then cool. But when you’re an A student that ends up getting their only Cs in gym, you wanna say fuck it.
I enjoyed two gym classes: Kindergarten, where we got to use the big rainbow parachute, and my final high school gym class, where I managed to keep in the 80s for my mark (it was actually an 89 at midterms! I was shocked.). That teacher didn’t care that I couldn’t figure out how to properly throw a football, he cared that I went out every time and threw the damn thing.
I hated gym because of drills - of course the people on teams got them by heart, but it felt like learning multiplication tables by watching people run up to the chalkboard, fill out a space on the table and run back quickly. Once we stopped drills and started playing the sport it wasn’t so bad, even though I sucked.
I didn’t dress out and did the minimum. (Actually, I think I “had my period” for at least a month when we did tennis.) I HATED gym. It’s a damned shame, too - only now as an adult am I realizing that, hey, I like running. I wish the entire concept of team sports hadn’t been entirely ruined for me by gym teachers who were football coaches, because maybe I would have enjoyed playing some sport back when it was possible to start playing one (it’s a bit harder when you’re 30, you know? I assume there are some sort of leagues but I have no idea how to play.) The very thought of playing something like basketball or touch football makes me feel suddenly ill, and I am furious at the educational system for that one.
I had gym first period for all four years of High School. We weren’t even allowed to shower afterward and we were given a short amount of time to change and make it to our next class. I went to a very large technical and vocational HS and the distance between classes could sometimes be pretty far. This was enough reason for me to skip gym as much as possible. What long-haired HS boy in the 80s wants to sweat first thing in the morning and interact with girls the rest of the day? If any of this is written poorly, I started drinking early tonight on an empty stomach. Man, I’m buzzing!
I’m not the one that called in “battery”. I belive my words were “sexual harassment” which groping somebody’s ass certainly qualifies as. I mentioned that our own student handbook said that was prohibited. I believe it’s exacted words were something “sexual harassment includes unwanted or unwelcome touching of any body part including but not limited to gentials, buttocks, chest, etc”.
And it’s really creepy that apparently you’d expect a teenage girl to just let it slide if a man old enought to be her father unexpectedly decides to play grabass with her because his reputation and livelihood at at stake.
I refused to do it because it was boring and pointless, tiring, and- in the “summer”- involved swimming in a freezing cold swimming pool. And with the not-swimming stuff throughout the rest of the year, you’d end up sweaty and (in my case) feeling worse physically than before you started.
I was getting plenty of exercise outside school (walking and cycling), so all mandatory PE did was entrench my dislike of competitive sports, running, and swimming lengths of a pool.
I don’t recall the subject actually having a grade, either- but even if it was graded, no-one cared (unless you were in the First XV). Fortunately we no longer had to do PE after 6th Form so my refusal to participate had no bearing on my grades for anything that actually mattered (University Entrance).
And no, I wasn’t a fat kid, either. I just didn’t (and still don’t) like sports.
Under the common law, any unauthorized touch constitutes battery.
We had girls who were allowed to sit out in gym class due to religious reasons. I am not sure what religion etc, I do remember that a gill in junior high school was allowed to opt out because her church required her to wear dresses and she there fore couldn’t wear the requied outfit.
My school gave letter grades and not based on participation but on ability. being a chubby, uncoordinated geek to begin with I hated PE especially playing girls basketball, stupid rules never really explained to us, all I really remembe is that one girl when she would get the ball would head right towards me and run me down. I tried to get out of the way and a foul would be called on me. Everyone would yell at me but I think it is pretty stupid to stand still while someone runs you over.
Not so much. Olympic athletes also have talent, which not everyone has, and they have all the time in the world to practice. (I certainly don’t.) Grading on skill and talent rather than effort teaches kids that effort is meaningless. I’d rather kids be taught that effort matters most, even if they’re not good at a particular sport.
Until reading this thread I was unaware that P.E. classes . . . or any others . . . had become optional. We had to participate in gym class (and shower afterward) and swim naked. Nobody liked it, but it wouldn’t occur to us to just not do it. We would have been expelled.
It was never optional for us either. Showers were mandatory too.