Alas, gym class!

[heidi]

bethbethbeth posted about gym class Issues, and it prompted me to complain about my junior high (age 11-12) experience, and I wonder if anyone had a more traumatizing or insane one that didn't involve actual violence?

Here's my tale of woe:

Our former-drill-nstructor (who'd been my dad's gym teacher in 1955) had us do 3 laps around the football field goalposts (approx 900 yards), then one around the whole field (1200 yards), and only then did we start calisthetics, then sports. It was a co-ed class mixing 7th & 8th grades, so 11 year old girls were in class with 14 year old boys. And the last 10 in my class of 70 to finish the 1200 yd run had to spend the rest of the period doing laps, and didn't get to do whatever sport it was, and so pulled a 0 forparticipation. And of course, 99% of the time it was all girls in that group. Occasionally a boy with a twisted ankle who forgot to bring a note joined us.

I brought home a failure notice in december because since school'd began, I'd participated twice.

Finally, my dad let me get a doctor's note to get out of the class, and I became a library assistent, where I got to read five archived years of Seventeen and all the Shoes books.

The field is gone now - they tore down the old school and built the new building where the field used to be. But I still glare at that place when I drive nearby.

Comments

[gunderpants.livejournal.com]

Wow, that is really hardcore. They made people with twisted ankles run laps? Oh god!

Now I feel grateful for my own PE teacher, who was often so lazy in our classes that we never had a lesson that didn't involve those awesome bigass gymnastic mats.

[megd.livejournal.com]

Somehow I was placed in the track gym class as a freshman in high school.

Coach D decided that we would have to run the mile for a grade, despite it being against the school's rules. Under 8 minutes was an A, under 9 was a B, under 10 was a C and anything over 10 was an F. She was submitting dummied up test grades to go with it.

Needless to say, I failed every run. I ran the final in 12 minutes, passed out and came to to her leaning over me going "You know that's an F"

I complained to the President of the school (a Catholic married priest, long story) and she told him I was crazy.

He took my side though. I think it had something to do with the fact I was on the swim team as a short distance swimmer and wasn't that out of shape.

I still loathe that woman.

[aim-toothpaste.livejournal.com]

Makes me extremely grateful for the NZ education system where participation seems to be the key and no one has to take PE past year 10, when it starts to count towards their final grade.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

In Britain, we don't get marked for PE, thank god. Well, we do, I suppose, but it doesn't count towards anything. For this reason, I don't think I actually attended more than two classes in a row. I was a very good child who got an urge to take up smoking behind the bike sheds every time I got anywhere near a gym. *g*

[starrysummer.livejournal.com]

Damn, that pisses me off and my gym teachers were never that bad. I mean, I failed the president's fitness test or whatever it's called every single year because my best mile time ever barely cracked twelve, but that never hurt my grade more than a little.

[zorb]

P.E. was the bane of my existence in sixth through tenth grade (we only had to take it through then, thank goodness). By high school, it was the only class where the Honors/AP kids weren't separated out from the people who liked to pick on the Honors/AP kids, and a lot of said H/AP people did band or sports instead of P.E., so I was mostly alone amongst the pack of wolves, which made it all the easier for them.

I don't have a story like yours, other than the very close brush I had with an actual fist fight. My eighth grade P.E. teacher was the advisor for the Student Council, and a large portion of those girls were in my class. At first I was happy to finally have a female P.E. teacher (the sixth grade male teacher gave us all the creeps), but she turned out to favor "her girls" and let them get away with anything. Of course, they were all well into puberty, and I didn't hit it till high school, and, well, they were middle school girls, which just made it that much better.

Mostly we ignored each other, until one three-on-three basketball game, where a dispute ensued about...gah, I don't even remember exactly what it was, but I was being accused of some offense which I did not commit. They were used to dominating, but I'm a stubborn ass, and the debate over what I had or had not done quickly escalated into a close-up shouting match. Picture, if you will, a short, stick-like girl who looks about ten being ganged up on by three teens who had a few inches and considerable muscle mass on her.

It was the stupidest back and forth "You did!" "I didn't" ever, and finally, I took a huge breath and screamed right in their faces, "I DIDN'T!"

It wasn't the most mature move, but it did end the argument. The element of surprise totally worked in my favor. Not only did I not get smacked, but they were so startled that they backed off, laughing incredulously.

And that was my moment of middle school triumph against the in-crowd, short as it was. High school P.E. was back to hell. The last day was one of the happiest of my high school career.

[peacockharpy.livejournal.com]

Mine's not quite as traumatic, but the ending is similar. Mine has to do with my junior high PE coach. In point of fact, it's thanks to her that I have Issues about volleyball to this day.

The sun hurts my eyes, and of course with volleyball you have to look straight up. I would and then, dazzled by the sun and the sight of a volleyball headed straight toward my face (I also have a fear of projectile objects), I'd flinch. But I was always out there and trying, at any rate. When the grades came out, I had a B. I asked why and was told that "girls who duck from volleyballs don't get A's."

Later, when we progressed to the dance part of the PE repertoire ("dance" being various disco step-dances, like the hustle and the New York Bus Stop -- this was the mid-80s), I excelled, so she couldn't mark me down -- but she did yell at me for not moving slowly enough for others to follow my moves. WTF? I'd never been told I was supposed to be a teacher.

Anyway. I was supposed to take a year and a half of PE. I made it through a year, and then was heading into my freshman year, when grades would count. I threw myself on the mercies of the guidance counselor, who (bless her) agreed that it was against my long-term academic interests to take a class where it was a given that my grades would suffer through no fault of my own. I signed up for graphic design instead, and thanked my lucky stars that I'd been able to get out of the third half-year of PE.

I did have to take PE again in high school, but thankfully, the coach was nice, grades were based on a combination of personal effort and actual tests (on rules of games, nutrition, etc.) and I possibly even enjoyed myself a little bit. I signed up to run cross-country, even.

I still suck at volleyball, though. And it's only through the loving help of my husband that I overcame my fear of projectiles enough to learn a bit about tennis, which I do enjoy but rarely play these days.

[casirafics.livejournal.com]

I got a medical exemption from P.E. after the lovely experiences I had with softball, badminton and pickleball one year, the most memorable moment of which was when I struck out for what felt like the umpteenth time and my teacher told me "I thought you could do better than that" in front of the entire class. More mild than your experience, obviously, but it still stung.

Particularly since I followed this up by going to the ophthalmologist, discovering I'd gone from being farsighted to being nearsighted within the course of a few weeks, and that my depth perception had flattened to almost nothing with my old prescription.

Might explain why I was having troubles judging the trajectories of rapidly moving objects, dont'cha think?

[musikologie.livejournal.com]

One of my requirements for choosing a college was "no P.E. requirement" because after being required to take gym classes for my entire life (sometimes at 7:00AM) I was never going to do that again.

My one traumatic experience was my freshman year, when we had the dreaded annual swimming unit. I told my teacher I couldn't swim (totally true). I told my teacher I was allergic to the mold and chlorine in the pool (also totally true). She said I got a personal teacher at the shallow end to teach me the basics, because that's not humiliating to a 14-year-old at all. I get to the first class, and manage to get in the water before I have a full-blown asthma attack. For the rest of that year and the next three, I got to do an extra archery rotation when the rest of my class was doing swimming. You didn't hear me complaining!

[emrinalexander.livejournal.com]

I was a tall, skinny kid who looked like she should be coordinated and a good runner, etc.

In fact, I was shy, uncoordinated and flat-footed - yeh, running is soooo not my thing. I hated gym class with a passion - wearing glasses meant the chance of getting smashed in the face playing some "fun" thing like dodge ball was torture, and don't even get me started on the horrors of field hockey, basketball, swimming (try diving into the deep end of a pool when you have 20/80 vision), freaking track and field. The instructors were quicker to pick on the slow kids, like me, and make fun of them, than the other kids were...I get so angry when I think about the whole experience, I could just smack something. Preferably the twin drill sgts. who served as our teachers for phys ed.

The only thing the whole wretched experience left me with was a hatred of all exercise that I have only been able to overcome in the last couple of years.

[magnolia-mama.livejournal.com]

My high school gym teacher graded us not just on participation, but also on our ability to play whatever sport we were learning that term. In 9th grade I got an "F" on my report card because I couldn't (still can't) hit a damn tennis ball to save my life.

And yes, P.E. grades were applied to our overall GPAs.

[sarcasticpixie.livejournal.com]

Sixth grade gymnastics. Chubby 11-year-old thighs got stuck on the sawhorse and could not get off. Had to be pulled off by female gym teacher while entire class snickered. Refused to move from the bench for the rest of the year, failed sixth-grade gym.

Submitted doctor's note re: rare orthopedic disorder, excused from all of seventh-grade gym.

Tenth grade, square dancing. Psychotic, perpetually drugged-out ex-cheerleader of a gym teacher had one song -- Billy Ray Cyrus' "Achy Breaky Heart." Had to listen to song on constant repeat while do-si-doing around sweaty, hellish gymnasium. Following week -- polka dancing. Still to "Achy Breaky Heart." Was put in detention for asking teacher exactly how much weed she'd smoked before deciding on that particular lesson plan.

Submitted doctor's note re: rare menstrual disorder, never set foot in gym class again.

Physical activity -- great, in theory. I played field hockey and softball for three years of HS and loved it. But gym class itself? Quite possibly the worst execution of a good idea ever to exist.

[longstrider.livejournal.com]

Much like others here, I had a gym teacher (or to the community God, the state champion football coach) that had difficulty with the difference between Participation and Performance. Got graded on how well your team did against the others in class and how many situps/pullups etc you could do while working on the Presidential Fitness Award. I was a rather athletic teen, on the track, basketball and golf teams at various points in my time there, but couldn't do situps to save my life and was painfully unpopular so got stuck on the sucky teams. I ended up with a less than ideal grade that period, my parents and I did some research on the curriculum, found the reference to 'shall be graded solely on performance' and took it up the chain of command. In the last meeting on the the topic he still didn't seem to understand the difference between Performance and Participation and ultimately we called him everything short of moron to his face. I now can't remember if the grade got changed but it seemed to have been fixed (at least for me) in the future and that preserved my GPA (3 grading periods in a semester which is what mattered for the GPA)

[alhewison.livejournal.com]

Yuck! Is it just my imagination or were PE teachers across both sides of the Pond some form of sadists in the 1980s (or were we all just unlucky?)?

Our PE grades counted for nothing, and by the end of my time at school I hated it. But I began secondary school loving it. I thought I was good at gym, ok at swimming and good at some athletics. But I ended up not trying at all. I have memories of the teacher calling me butter fingers when I dropped a ball in netball. It was only hovering around freezing at the time, and I was still nursing a sore thumb, cracked during my first ever hockey game.

But for me, it wasn't just the stupidness of the games. Although, thinking about it, teachers would be hauled over coals for putting kids down for being "failures" at say Maths and English, in the way our PE teachers did over their subject. What I remember most though is the way they seemed to take some sadistic enjoyment about forcing kids into the showers. They were communal showers and at all different stages of development, kids were really reluctant to go in and "be seen". So the PE teachers stod at the entrance of the showers, forced us to leave our towels and then watched as we washed. They had a calendar in which they marked when girls had periods. a big "P" meant you didn't have to. But then they didn't believe it if girls weren't regular.

Ugh, it makes me annoyed just thinking about it.

I really hope our kids never have to go through that.

[daintress.livejournal.com]

I've got a good one, though it was a one-time deal, rather than ongoing torture:

Co-ed flag football, Junior year of HS. Flimsy umbros. Thank heavens I wore pretty panties that day, because everyone got a show. I spent most of the class period standing on the sidelines, scowling at the other players with a hoodie tied around my waist sideways. It still showed a good bit of hip/thigh, but at least the panties were covered......

[midnightbex.livejournal.com]

I never had a teacher that bad, but my school years were plagued with bad gym teachers. I'm not athletic, I'm asthmatic, and I just don't enjoy most sports. All the gym teachers I had maintained the view that there was something wrong with you if you didn't like athletics, which just made PE awful.

My highschool gym teacher was the worst though. She didn't believe any kid actually had asthma or breathing problems, wouldn't accept doctor's notes, and wouldn't allow inhalers outside the locker rooms. It took me actually hyperventilating so badly that I collapsed and passed out during the mile run/mile walk final my junior year for her to believe I had asthma. The next year she was so paranoid that it would happen again and my parents would sue that she wouldn't allow me to run and I had to have my inhaler with me everywhere, but she still wouldn't allow anyone else in my class to bring theirs.

[meshell-mybell.livejournal.com]

My tale of woe...

In 9th grade, we had a 'Gymnastics' lesson. We learned basics in Gymnastics and after a few weeks we were tested on the equipment of our choice. I was rather good at the balance beam, the uneven bars and the parallel bars.

Well, I thought I was good.

I lost my grip on the uneven bars and landed on my wrist. My next test was the parellel bars and I had to hold myself up and swing my legs and do this over and over until I got to the end of the bars. But my bumb wrist wouldn't let me support my body weight. The teacher supervising the test yelled at me to keep trying even though I told him (and so did the teacher testing the uneven bars) that I hurt myself.

He failed me. This man who was as wide as he was tall (and I'm still pondering what made him a gym authority when he couldn't walk across the basketball court without stopping halfway for a breath) failed me because I couldn't support my own weight.

Grrrrr...

Still Bitter,
~Blue