Gym class...time of your life or necessary evil?

[Teh Don Ditty]

#1 word, hyphenated

rope-climbing


Ill point those who dont understand to Wayne's World.

LMAO.

When I was in 7-10th grade I hated it because I was a fat tub of lard. 11-12 I didn't think it was so bad, except when I had it second period.

When I look back on it, it was necessary because it keeps you in some sort of shape.

 

[c-Row]

When I look back on it, it was necessary because it keeps you in some sort of shape.

A circle is a shape, too.

 

[tobefirst ⚽️]

Loved gym class in high school. Mostly team-sports oriented, but did a couple individual things as well. I'm a huge sports/competition nut, so it was a lot of fun, and a great stress reliever, for me.

 

[Les Kern]

i love gym class. heck i take it even in college (multiple times)

gotta stay in shape and active

The "war" on obesity and student health has looked to PE in schools to help. It has not. For the last 30 years we have gotten fatter and less healthy, and yet we continue to pour billions of taxpayer money into it. Now does that make ANY sense at all? How long will it take us to realize it IS a failure, to discontinue it, and put the money in other programs that DO work?

 

[Stampyhead]

Where is the option for 'unnecessary evil'? I agree that kids need to be physically fit, but schools forcing you to take gym class is the wrong way to go about it. I've always hated sports of any kind so it was just plain unpleasant for me. I went as far as getting my flute teacher to write me a note excusing me from playing volleyball because it would hurt my hands (it probably wouldn't have, but I hated volleyball with such a passion that I was willing to try anything to get out of it). I stayed physically fit in my own way, running 5 miles a day while I was in high school. Gym class is fine for those who want it but I don't ever think it should be mandatory, and when I have kids I'm going to make sure they are not forced to participate in something they don't want to do.

 

[wordmunger]

My high school had a pool, so I took swimming. It was kind of fun. The teacher was also football coach. He sat in his office all day diagramming football plays while one of the swim-team kids taught his class.

I took regular gym class too. It was fine -- a little boring, except for roller skating, which I thought was a blast.

 

[Roger1]

High School gym sucked. I had to take a swimming class, wearing school issued swim suits. Why the %^*& would they issue SPEEDOS? I was already picked on for being fat, why make it worse??
Team sports? Boring. They should have offered a bicycling class where we could ride around the neighborhood, or something. I LOVED riding my bike in my youth. In fact, I've been getting back into it the last couple of years.

 

[c-Row]

Team sports? Boring. They should have offered a bicycling class where we could ride around the neighborhood, or something. I LOVED riding my bike in my youth. In fact, I've been getting back into it the last couple of years.

I totally agree. Gym teachers should try to find sports their students want to pursue, even if this means that there will be a three man bicycling team, rather than forcing everybody to participate in the same activity. But I guess that's not part of the curriculum...

One of our teachers had the great (yes, really) idea to divide students into two groups - the normal group and the "Happy Losers". Each group formed two teams on their own, so it was the athletes against each other, and the rest of us - the HLs - against each other. We were all so hillariously bad that in the end it was more fun than ever before.

 

[question fear]

I am much more fit than I was in high school. I had no muscle really, and actually had difficulty completing a push-up. The worst was the day my arms gave out and I smacked my head on the ground in my push up attempt...and then two days later my gym teacher told me he and his friends had a good laugh about it!

Now when I do push ups I think of every one of them being for my 15 year old self.

 

[Berlepsch]

Since I was a pudgy, glasses-wearing weirdo who usually got elected for teams as one of the last guys in your class, gym classes were not only a necessary evil but regular proof of sucking hard at something.

I am older now, still wearing glasses, but I'm in a better shape than I was around that time, but those six humiliating years at school killed most (if not all) joy of sports for me. However, life also evolved and now regularly shows me I suck at almost everything.

That sums up my experience as well. Only that I deliberately sucked at playing soccer, so that finally both my classmates and I convinced our PE teacher that everyone was better off if I didn't play at all.

 

[Chaszmyr]

Depends on who the teacher was. Some years, gym was the best part of my day, other years it was the worst.

 

[savanahrose]

I didn't care too much for it. I could never play sports and I was always embarrassed. The only time I liked it was when we had soccer and dance. It was a total of 18 weeks out of 5 years that was good for me.

 

[SpaceMagic]

For those 7 years in primary school and the 7 years of high school... Gym days, which usually fell on a Monday or Thursday, were the worst of my life. I couldn't do any of the things wanted´of me and the then seemingly unsympathetic, perhaps Neo-Nazi, Gym teacher sent shivers down my spine and made those invisible butterflies drunkily and lazily fly into my sides never to rebound again. I don't think I ever managed a push-up, the climbing bars were lucky to see me past the third step and blue floor matts were probably happy they never got me doing a forwards role on them. Without even trying, my body did everything it possibly could to come last in the 200m and 400m sprints. It never even made it round the 800m course.

Now, three years later at 21, I wish He was harder on me. I should have been forced to keep running. I should have been made to attend after school classes. They should have found a sport suited to me. But most of all, I should have realised then what I realise now. Everything those apparent fascists try and make you do is for a reason. Your health is the most important thing in the world and if you don't have it at 18, then you're missing out. Big time.

 

[gadgetgirl85]

I had every excuse in the book to get out of gym. If I was to revisit high school, I'd be loving gym. I've turned myself into a gym junkie

 

[Legolamb]

High school and college gym did nothing for me. Hated changing in front of others, hated sweating, was overweight and uncoordinated. Except for fencing in college, detested swimming and ended up with a D in bowling.
Present day, I work out 3-4X week, especially love weights and running 'til I drop.

 

[Virgil-TB2]

For high school students, what's your gym class like? For you old folk, what were your gym classes like?...

Didn't vote because you did not put up a plain "evil" selection.

I would argue that forcing children to exercise is a project doomed from the start and that the instillation of a "culture of competitiveness" is actually counter productive to the advancement of civilisation. Sport (especially watching it instead of doing it), never did anyone any good short of the role it plays in training kids to be fighters/soldiers and the destruction of personality individuality and creativity involved in it's worship.

I'm an "old folk," but my experience of Gym class is almost identical to how you describe it today, so things haven't changed much I guess.

I only ever went to the first class in Grade 8 though. Once I found out it was mostly about playing rugby in the rain and showering with a bunch of homophobes that I wouldn't normally even talk to (let alone socialise naked with) ... I skipped out of every class.

Once I realised that I could (easily) skip out every single Gym class, use the time for more useful pursuits, and never get caught, I couldn't think of a good reason to ever go back.

.

 

[c073186]

If I had to do high school again, I'd look forward to gym class every day.

Exception: swim. (just because the water was always cold and the pool was gross.)

 

[spencers]

no gym for me

played on the soccer team.

i'm glad they make people take a gym class. fat is not the way to be!

 

[iMacZealot]

I agree with many of you that gym classes don't typically get you anywhere, but I think high schools should maybe require that everyone does one extracurricular sport for at least one season with the intention of hooking you on. That definitely wouldn't work at my school, however, since we kill any of our athletes if they aren't state champions and don't focus much on academics.

I had every excuse in the book to get out of gym.

Do tell!

 

[ErikCLDR]

At my school "physical education" is a requirement. 1 Quarter long class each year, regardless if you have a sport.

Personally I hate it. I am a very athletic person but I don't like playing with very unathletic people. Most people stand around and do very little. Volleyball was a joke, we had to play nucomb instead because people refused to go for the ball.

I also don't think 30 min of minimal exercise, 4 days a week will really you much more healthy and it definitely will not get you in shape.

If they want to make kids be more healthy have them be required to play at least 1 sport a year, or maybe even 2.

 

[notjustjay]

When I was that age I always thought I hated gym and sports. Now as I'm older and I look back I realize it was not the sports that I hated, but the attitude of my classmates and the teachers.

It seems that in gym class we make the assumption that everyone already mostly knows what they're doing. And why not? Your stereotypical North American child is surrounded by sports starting from a very young age. You play on a soccer team, Little League, minor hockey, etc. And even if you don't play, your parents watch football, hockey, baseball, take you to games, play catch with you in the backyard.

So here comes me, and because my parents were immigrants who did not particularly care for "American" sports (they were much bigger on ping pong and badminton -- care to guess my ethnicity? ), I received none of that "training". I'm pretty sure the first time I ever saw a baseball bat, or a basketball, or a hockey stick, would have been when they pulled it out in gym class. And obviously I knew none of the rules.

So does your teacher empathize? No, their idea of a unit on basketball in gym class is to hand out balls and tell you to go practice, or set up teams and tell you to play. Well, this is my first time doing any of this stuff. Do I get individual coaching, or have anyone sit down and explain the rules to me? No. (And fair enough, I'd be dragging down the rest of the class who DID know how to play...) Some teachers made the attempt, but coaching a kid who has ZERO muscle memory and coordination for that particular spot must have been trying, as they'd fairly quickly give up.

And do your classmates empathize? Of course not. At that age (any school age, really) you put them into teams and give them sports equipment, and they want to WIN WIN WIN! So everyone quickly discovered I was a huge liability, I always got picked last, and by extension became the one everyone hated, the one who always dropped balls, fumbled passes, and screwed up plays. In high school I got picked on in the locker room, more than once, for my crime of not having the same level of experience as the others.

Over the years this became a vicious cycle. I started off less skilled, which meant kids wouldn't include me, which meant I never had a chance to get better. Whenever they did let me try (or a teacher forced me to participate), I'd screw it up, and "get it" afterward. So I always felt like a loser, which didn't give me any incentive to try any harder. And I started to hate gym class.

I broke my wrist in grade 9 gym class and had to miss out on the unit on wrestling. Best thing that ever happened to me! At 6'3" and 185 pounds, I would have been matched up with the other big guys in the class, the very ones that held grudges against me for always costing me their plays. I would have been snapped in half!

 

[iToaster]

Gym class is pretty good for me [COUGH]cheerleaders[/COUGH]. As well, it keeps me within the acceptable limits of physical fitness.


PS... wow, looks like we're evenly divided about this. Right now it's 50%-50%.

 

[iJohnHenry]

Cheerleaders. Now there's an opening for asking the view of our gay members.

Any funny, upstanding, stories??

 

[dukebound85]

Gym class is pretty good for me [COUGH]cheerleaders[/COUGH]. As well, it keeps me within the acceptable limits of physical fitness.


PS... wow, looks like we're evenly divided about this. Right now it's 50%-50%.

lol i dont think there's cheerleaders for gym class.

by hot girls in gym class yea...thats always nice

 

[RedTomato]

UK view here.

Gym or PE as we call it here, is compulsory up to 16. I enjoyed it (sometimes) but then I'm a country boy. Hated the changing rooms as I was quite shy. (not any more as an adult)

Sometimes the teachers would let us do what we liked - football, rugby, cricket, other times they would test out some weird notion of the day e.g. non-competitive circuit training. (hey, I understand it now, but back then, it was weird). Didn't like the running stuff.

Every now and then, they would try to enforce showers, but everyone complained. I hated them too. They got less keen on enforcing showers as we got older, so in my last few years, it was always optional.

Countryside small town school - everyone walked or cycled to school, from age 11 onwards. We had maybe 1 or 2 fat guys in the whole school.

Usually boys and girls had separate gym classes. We had combined classes once in a blue moon, maybe when staff were off. Looking back, some more combined classes would have been nice, e.g. playing rounders together.

Our PE staff were weird.

The senior PE teacher communicated in grunts, and never spoke to me once in 5 years. Once, he took us to a weightlifting club in town, and us gangly kids worked out on the machines, and he spent the whole time staring at a well built (adult) female bodybuilder in the mirror, who was on some sort of chest expansion machine, trying to hide the turmoil in his trousers while telling us not to stare at her

The other younger PE teacher had a flash 'tache, and drove a sports car and fancied himself a ladies man. 15 years after leaving the school, (and moving to London) I came back to visit family, and saw in the local rag he was serving time for shagging a student. (it seemed to be a consensual relationship, but she was underage and he was married with kids - oops.)

The female PE teacher was also weird, she was about 40, tough as old boots, very sporty, and had this habit of wearing her tight gym trousers hoisted up VERY high so that you could see every detail of her front bottom. This was much commented on by all us kids, both girls and boys.

Another popular topic post-changing rooms, for both boys and girls, was who was the most hairy, with some people proudly sporting small forests down there, and others with just bum fluff.

I'll leave USA MR people with the thought that while in the UK, we had segregated changing rooms, in France, and I think some other EU countries, school changing rooms are communal - much to the shock of some of my friends who went on exchange visits. Toilets too, often with no doors