The clearest example I can remember was to use [can’t find the English word] a bouncing board to jump on a balance beam from the side. There’s so many things that can go wrong with that I don’t even want to think about it. Especially if - like me - you’ve got no sense of balance and extremely long limbs.
Oh, nobody in any school I ever was in (I was born in 1980) ever showered there. I mean, ugh, what is that, something people did in the 60’s? If absolutely forced by arm twisting to dress out we did it in such a way that nobody saw anything - if called upon I’m sure I could still change shirts in complete modesty. It’s not like I ever sweated in PE at all, ever. 
One day, Coach forced all of us non-dresser-outers to dress out… in January. It was 30something outside and all any of us had was shorts because, you know, we’d brought them in in September. We all had to get our gym locker/basket combinations from him and spent that whole day in frozen misery. I don’t blame him, I blame people who think that people who are qualified to coach football are also qualified by osmosis to teach anything whatsoever.
ETA - you should have seen his "instructional’ sessions at the beginning of each unit (read “sport”, of course.) He’d put up page after page after page of handwritten overheads and expect us to copy it down verbatim and check it. You know, to make sure we’d written down every word about whatever the fuck a buttonhook pass is. And then there would eventually be a test… fill in the blank, with the notes missing some words.
To give him credit, he did pretty much give up on Us and leave us in peace except for the Dressing Out incident. I think he had enough awareness to get that we would never learn to love football under him. Because you know I didn’t write that football shit down verbatim (I probably actually learned a little bit more by paraphrasing, although I have a mental block about learning what they do on a football field) and I passed that one required year of high school gym.
For myself gym class was for reading Dungeons & Dragon modules not dodge ball.
To look “cool”.
I just can’t imagine this weird PE class where dressing out is even required. It just seem like you are just looking for trouble. Either you let them do it unsupervised, or there’s the problem of claimed sexual harassment. It’s not like changing your clothes would help that much, so you’d pretty much be dealing with having to watch people shower. Yuck.
My PE class consisted of either playing a sport, or walking around a track. Anybody who even began to act up was sent to the office (with an escort if necessary). And if you made a habit of that, you’d be kicked out of the class entirely. If violence was involved, the resource officer would take care of it. That’s how it was in all classes.
It seems like most of you guys went to places with pretty shoddy discipline and pretty crappy students. I knew we had pretty well-behaved students in my class, but I had no idea our system would be considered at all strict.
BTW, I’m 25, and I took PE my ninth grade year, which would mean 1999 or 2000, as well as having it be required in middle school (5-6 grade, 1995-1997). I went to a private elementary, where it was not required, and, honestly, we had no more problems with obesity than anywhere else. Of course, we actually had a decent recess.
ETA:I’d think it’d also be useful if everyone else gave at least a vague time period for when they were in PE. I’d bet my experience is more common with the youngsters.
It’s not that I hate exercise, but i am uncoordinated. I’ve always liked swimming and riding my bicycle but i’m just not into group activities.
He repeatedly belittled him. That’s worse than the ass-pat, if you ask me. A shitload worse. For me, I couldn’t give a good fuck about this scumbag gym teacher who couldn’t do his barely pointful bottom-rung-of-the-teaching-profession “job” without belittling the kids he was supposed to be encouraging. Fuck him. The guy sounds like a cunt.
He was doing his job. He made the kid do a pull up and then patted him on the butt for encouragement. What’s wrong with the world when that’s considered grounds to destroy a teacher’s life?
Several posters upthread have said that PE was pointless, stupid, a waste of time being subjected to asinine brute activities that would never serve them in their adult lives, and I agree wholeheartedly. The school model just doesn’t really work for some kids. Like Interested Observer, I was a total non-participant for almost everything in middle and high school, with the exceptions of Art and English. I dropped out, got my GED and (after some stumbles) managed to become a very happy and productive member of society. I have a good job at a University, own my home, happy family etc. Can’t say I have a 4.0 GPA but I’m doing just fine.
Oh, and my exercise of choice has always been dance. Not in the PE curriculum for most of my school career, unfortunately.
For some kids, gym was total hell. My brother, like many young men, was coming to terms with his homosexuality during high school. The locker room was anything but comfortable for him, between having little control over his physical reaction to other boys and the outright brutality and bullying from those in the jock clique. He was lucky to have had understanding parents who supported him and arranged for a medical excuse for the rest of his high school career. He graduated early with a very high GPA, went to college, has a great career and life now. Things could have been quite different for him, and not in a good way. Not everyone fits the PE mold.
He belittled him infront of his classmates, doing “…everything short of calling [him] a faggot or pussy” and “made [his] life hell every other day”. I’d call that fair grounds. Bullies deserve whatever they get. The prick should never have been working in a school in the first place if that was the only way he could do his job.
That’s a pretty subjective and one-sided description, and it’s still not an excuse to fabricate charges of sexual assault.
Try reading my posts, I never “fabricated” anything and I never used the word assault. All I said to the VP was that he touched my ass, and it was a violation of the school’s sexual harrasment policy (which it clearly was).
I did not like him patting my ass. I did not want him to patt my ass. He did not ask to patt my ass. I had no reason to expect he’d patt my ass. I gave him no reason to think I’d be OK with him patting my ass. Why he patted my ass is completely irrelevant. How can you possibly think it’s okay for a teacher (who’s in positon of authority) to just touch a student like that without their permission?
If I just randomly patted the ass of one of my female classmates after a group project and she objected I could get suspended or worse. Ditto if I did that to a female teacher. Why should it be any diffenent because he was a teacher patting a student’s ass or we were of the same sex?
If we were in the workplace and he did that (at least in front of witnesses) I’d be looking at a cash settlement, he’d probally be out of a job.
I was assaulted by every teacher I had my entire life under that definition.
I don’t know about other countries, but in the US there was an actual government program (can’t remember the name of it) that started in, I think, the 1960s, that kept track of the general physical fitness levels of America’s youth, specifically so that the military could have a general idea of how many “able-bodied” young people would be available for military service in any given year, and they could project these numbers a few years into the future.
We called it “suiting up” or just “getting dressed”.
This is exactly why, in junior high school, I developed my lifelong hatred for basketball. There are so many “fouls” in basketball that aren’t plainly obvious to the casual observer. Football fouls are typically easier to recognize and remember “don’t do that”, and baseball doesn’t really have many “fouls”, per se. For basketball in gym class they explained “traveling” and “double-dribbling”, and that was about it. And so I ended up playing basketball, and had one older kid who kept pushing me down and telling me he was going to kick my ass if I didn’t stop “fouling” him, but refused to explain exactly how I was fouling him because “you should know!”
Fortunately, when I was in school our P.E. grade was based on “improvement”. So basically, you were only competing against yourself. You were measured on various things at the beginning of the term, and then measured again at the end of the term, and if your end-of-term results were better than your beginning-of-term results, you had “improved” and were graded accordingly.
I tolerated gym in grade school, but in high school, I positively HATED it.
We rarely did anything fun and more often than not did the same exact thing day after day after day.
Add on that after being verbally abused daily in grade school from 3rd grade on, in high school, they decided to add physical harm to their repertoire.
Gym class was the perfect place to beat me up without getting in trouble for it. I was subjected to all manners of abuse: being kicked, had the ball slammed into my face, and one glorious day, had an entire large bucket of golf balls whipped at me one by one for an entire class. My teachers thought it was funny, and there was no opting out. In my school, you HAD to take gym all four years, every school day, and if you didn’t pass, you didn’t graduate. I ditched ONE day, but only after roll call and since it was a sub, they didn’t want to admit they’d “lost” a student, so I got away with it.
I wish I could have sat on the sidelines and still passed. I know my parents’ would have probably appreciated the lesser amount of doctor bills from having to take me to the doctor from injuries incurred during that torture-fest.
I first encountered an actual gym class in 7th grade, which would have been 1965-1966. It was never explained to me that I was expected to strip naked and wear a pair of school provided shorts (all pulled from a communal bin) and later to have to shower before getting dressed. Having never done anything like this before, the first couple of times was a bit of a shock, but we soon learned that “that was how it was done.”
I don’t recall anyone ever refusing to “dress out” or participate. If you had a temporary medical reason for not doing so, that was okay, but everyone had gym, and for the boys, everyone had to shower.
I wasn’t interested in athletics, but I got by fine. We did a little baseball, basketball, running, etc, and it seemed like everyone was graded on effort as well as ability. No one was really picked on. If you were too fat or uncoordinated to play a certain thing, the others would just let you hang around while they played and not hassle you about it.
Never saw or heard of a coach bullying or calling out a kid. He might call the kid a “bonehead” if he missed an easy catch, but it was not done seriously, so nobody took any real offense.
By 8th grade, if you were taking Band, you didn’t have to take PE anymore, so I was out. It was never explained just why that was, since it was originally beginning band, and we didn’t have a marching band, but I was only in gym that one year.
The only odd thing that happened when I was in gym was the time there was a couple of guys that didn’t get along in the class and were often going at each other. It never came to a real fight, but there was a lot of ongoing pushing and name calling going on. The next day, the locker room floor was covered with heavy gym mats, the coach put boxing gloves on the two guys, and let them go at it with each other. After a few minutes of scrabbling around, the coach broke it up and the hard feelings were over.
You would never see anything like this in public school today. The funny thing was, the coach charged everybody a quarter to sit and watch the fight.
In every grade from 7th to 12th, the gym teachers also taught a regular class and subject, usually science or social studies. They weren’t just coaches.
I didn’t see anyone respond to this bit, so I’ll chip in.
The usual disciplinary measures. Detention, calling parents and whatnot, ultimately leading to expulsion. The same as would be done with any other disciplinary issue.
High school gym class circa 1967 - 1971 was taught by the football coach. He never really failed anyone that I remember, but his grading scale was not based on effort or participation. The athletes of course got the highest grades with a descending scale that ended up with the geekiest kids getting grades barely above passing.
Amusingly enough, he gave out grades in the American History class he taught based on the same scale. The skinny, straight A students with thick glasses and bad skin ended up with a low C or a D in Coach Moore’s history class.
We had one required year in junior high and one required year in high school.
Second day of junior high, I’m on the sidelines talking to the teacher about how to play dodgeball, since I was a brand new student coming from a parochial school and I didn’t know how to play. Someone hollers out and we both turn toward the noise, I catch a ball right in the face. Since I wore glasses, the force of the ball smacked them into my face and split my eyebrow open. Instant blood fountain. The teacher freaked, piled a wad of paper towels on my face and had a student lead me to the office to call my parents. Took a few hours to locate a parent, pre-cell phone days, but finally got one in and away I went to get stitched up.
My Dad went to talk to the teacher while mom was at the hospital with me, and must have scared the jeebers out of the guy. I was transferred out of the class and put into choir instead.
Next year I’m put in the only female-only gym option, since my mother had a conniption about it. The other girls mostly left me alone, when they weren’t being derisive because I didn’t know the basic rules of any actual game. I sucked at the class, but was quiet about it and tried to participate, so I got a pity D from the teacher.
High school I found out about the swimming requirement and knew I didn’t want to deal with showering in the middle of the day and ruining my 80s hair and makeup. So I made an impassioned plea to my mother and convinced her it’d be damaging to be leered at in a swimsuit, she convinced the family doctor to give me a note and I got out of it.
There was no way for us to opt out of gym class and I responded by passive-resistancing my way through it. I feigned a lot of headaches, and my crowning achievement was taking an entire class to do up my hockey pads.
Gym made me more miserable than anything else in my childhood that didn’t involve my dad (which it usually did, once he saw my grades). I remember being belittled, having my body insulted, being physically attacked, and so forth. No allowance was made for the fact that bodies come in different sizes and ability levels, nor for the fact that I was a year or more younger than my classmates.
It took me a long time to get over gym class enough to do any physical activity on my own, which I believe indicates that they may have been barking up the wrong tree with how they chose to teach it.