-Girl Anachronsim

Did you use to bunt the ball in baseball so you didn’t have to run around the bases? I did. Did you once fall in kindergarten while simply running around the gym, and had a big ugly kid run over your hand and break it? I did. (Beginning to get the picture?) I still think the reason I am such an artsy is due to gym…The only way you could avoid taking high school gym was if you wanted to take both music and visual arts. This seemed like a no-brainer to me, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Yes, we pay to work out now…but I think this is more about looking good in Mexico on March Break than anything else. If they’d bribed me with booze and tropical temperatures back in elementary school, I’d likely be an athlete now!

M. Martin
Out of shape teacher-librarian and physical education extraordinaire from Ontario, Canada!

Every one of my gym teachers was certifiably maleficent.

The most choice were the ones at my middle school…

I had one who wore a neck brace (seemingly as a fashion accessory because she was able to turn her head just fine when startled) that made many activity demonstrations look like the dancing from Scooby Doo cartoons. She lectured us DAILY about the “social error of body odor” and found it intolerable when a person would point at another– a rudeness apparently reserved only for mothers. She gave us the rule of thumb about pointing: “If the person didn’t slip out of your vagina, you should indicate with your ENTIRE hand.” I was perennially grossed out that year.

We also had a teacher, Mr. Brush, who made just the girls in the class do jumping jacks for 5 minutes every day while he and the boys sat and watched. Besides being completely humiliating and infuriating for all the girls, it was disastrous for one particular girl who had very large breasts and needed to get special bras made. She would beg to be excused because her special bras would tear, and they were expensive to mend or replace. He never relented. We got partial vengeance, however, because he happened to be especially ignorant about the menstruation. In order to get out of class for the day you just had to START to say that you had your period and he would stagger back in horror and revulsion and allow you to do anything you wanted as long as you went away quickly. I always wondered if he thought it was catching, or if he had a wife or sister or mother who weaved 7th-circle-of-hell stories about what it was like.

I had one last doozy at that school, a man who threatened to hit you if you talked back – no matter the legal consequences. “Oh you just try and sue me… instead they’ll give me a medal for suffering you so long.” I never saw him hit a student, but every single one of us believed he would.

Ugh.

That said, I don’t remember any gym teachers by name or face. Other teachers yes. I do remember being in elementary school and having a gym teacher make fun of me in front of the class. I came home and told my dad, who looked the guy up in the phone book and called him. The next day in class, the teacher threatened me. I don’t think I told my dad about that.

I have observed many fantastic P.E. teachers who emphasize the Physical Education. I see competition being deemphsized. Most games are structured now so that even when you are “out” you are doing something. Strategy, teamwork, and goal setting are being stressed more. Winning and trying to reach arbitrary levels are deemphasized- continual improvement is teh goal. A student is compared against their previous efforts, rather than other students.

-Jeff C.

First off, gym has nothing whatsoever to do with *education* or academics or indeed anything school was supposed to be for. It was just another block of time stolen from my life each and every day, for no purpose I could ever detect, and I deeply resented it. I still do. I think it’s absurd that my taxes pay for it and it’s yet another reason my kid is being homeschooled – not a major one when there are so many, but it *is* on the list.

Second, gym teachers are, in my experience, sadistic by definition as well as being so used to being bombarded with desperate attempts to escape their clutches for one more day that a) they treat all non-jocks like whiny criminals and b) refuse to believe anyone who actually does have a problem.

I once threw up on my gym teacher and then passed out cold. Next time I told her I was getting heat stroke (2-mile run, no walking allowed, 102 in the shade, plus did I mention no functional knee cartilage to speak of, even then?) the bitch damn well believed me.

The really ironic part is that I liked sports and was pretty good at some of them until I hit the age where the females were forced (in those pre-groundbreaking-lawsuit days) to step aside to make way for the boyz, who, after all, might get a scholarship out of it. After I understood that yes, they were serious, I decided the entire concept of sports could pretty much pucker up and kiss my arse. The irony becomes even more ironic when you realize I hit 6 feet before I was out of the ninth grade, and this dippy woman simply could not believe she didn’t have some kind of basketball prodigy on her hands. First, do you know what happens when you grow that much that quickly? Exactly – absolutely no coordination to speak of. Second, the sports I was really good at as a sprout, football and baseball, apparently required that one have a penis, for reasons that have never been fully explained to me. So the reason I was now *supposed* to care is…what, exactly?

Let’s see – verbal abuse passing as “toughening up,” creepy lewd staring/touching in the locker room, regularly reducing the weaker students to tears…

God, it’s amazing how angry I can *still* get at all that, 20+ years later. How absurd. But gym was the very worst of a very bad time and place.

PS There’s a definite pattern here. Field hockey was, in fact, Da Bomb. We did it in gym and I turned out to have a real flair for it. That’s a sport I would have gladly played, except of course we didn’t have teams for it. BTW, the gym teacher I puked on? The one who made my life a living hell? I hit a wild ball right to her kneecap and managed to give her a limp that lasted the rest of the year. And to this day I’m glad, do you hear me, glad, bwahahahah!

I was a small time geek-jock in junior high…running crosscountry and long-distance track. Then I grew boobs.

He’d clearly been watching my efforts for a while, because he chose me to demonstrate, intentionally. He pulled my legs up while I had my head and hands in the correct position and then stood there, explaining to the class how to do this maneuver. He explained it for a long time, while I was there, upside down. Why? Because I had not thought about tucking in my gym shirt, so it was slowly coming down. Once I realized this, I was traumatized. He used my terror, as it got lower and lower, closer to my bra, as an illustration for a lesson and long, drawn out lecture on remembering to tuck in your shirt. Then, just as I was on the edge of tears, and my shirt was at the bottom of my bra, he let my feet go and I tumbled to the floor. Why didn’t I complain? Kids often don’t feel empowered to. It didn’t even occur to me to do so. But the next year, when a high school boy who’d hated him slashed his tires, I was happy.

I have other memories of gym that were also horrible and unhappy. Strangely, in high school, I did get to take one sort of “wheel” of different non-normal sports (what sounds like that Lifetime thing) and one part of it appealed to me a lot — the weight room and Nautilus machines. The idea of focusing on getting stronger, instead of doing lots of aerobic work to lose weight, was really enjoyable. But even on machines, I tucked my shirt in.