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

[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.