Tuesday, May 8, 2012

High School PE

Oh how I hated it. And the teacher. And most of the other students. But that outfit was the worst of all.

source
Holy Crap. I've never seen anything so hideous in my life. It was like a prison jumpsuit but, instead of long pants, they were shorts. And they snapped up the front. The color? A medium shade of blue that would make you seriously consider hurling. They were similar to the one in the picture on the left. Only much, much worse in shape and color.

I'm not sure anyone enjoyed PE. Though it might have been different if we'd had a decent teacher.

This woman was the girls' basketball coach and basketball seemed to be her one and only interest. Except for her basketball players, that is.

We played basketball every day. EVERY day. Her basketball players loved this. The rest of us- not so much. On the rarest of the rare occasion that we did not play basketball, students on the basketball team did not have to participate. Nor did they have to dress out. Really? Regardless of whether or not a student had an excuse to sit-out of PE, she had to dress out. Unless she was on the basketball team. I am still amazed that our stupid teacher did not realize that this was not going to be just fine and dandy with the rest of us. Especially when they team students sat in the bleachers and had social time while we had to run drills. During basketball season, the players did not participate nor did they dress out.

One day a most brilliant non-basketball player student (I promise you, as much as I wish it had been, it was not me) decided that perhaps a sit-out (sit-in?) of sorts might drive the point home that idiot woman's the teacher's methods sucked were not fair to all students. We felt that:
  • The fact that teacher didn't require her players to take PE but the state did was wrong.
  •  Having one rule for students who made the team and a separate set for those who didn't was quite unfair: everyone should have to dress out or no one should; everyone should have to participate or no one should; etc...
  • Basketball was not the only activity in the state PE curriculum.
We walked into the gym and sat on the bleachers. And refused to move. The moron coach/teacher became quite upset. She finally ran into her office crying and had her star player (I remember her name but decided not to post it) come out and try to guilt us into dressing out and having class. Really? Yep. She was that kind of stupid.

Someone might have suggested, after star player's tirade, that going to the principal or our parents or the school board might be the best solution to this problem. 

That's when star player (and this was hilarious) shouted something like, "FINE! We'll dress out and take class." How freaking generous of her, don't you think?

I rarely think about that day in PE but, when I do, I am disgusted with the behavior of the coach/teacher to this very day. And, to this day, I am not a fan of women's basketball.

Oh and that star player? She's the one on the Latin Club trip to the state capital that got so drunk and caused such problems that we never got to go to the Latin Club Convention again. Thanks for that too.


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This post is part of the NaBloPoMo for May. The theme is PLAY and this post was inspired by the prompt: "What sports did you play as a child."  




22 comments:

  1. Wow every single day? Did you do any thing fun, like archery, or field hockey or golf? We swam and played softball. Tennis? I really don't think we ever played basketball. Oh how about tap dancing and badminton?
    I loved P.E. But I don't think I would have liked it the way you had to play it. I might have sat out too.
    I did the same thing in Math class though, the baseball team, didn't have to do math homework during the spring. It used to make me furious too.
    You know there is justice in the world. :)

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  2. Kim- I wish we had those options during PE but we did not. I'm sure it would have been fun if we had. That math thing would have made me angry too. I still get ticked off that the NCAA scholarships only require a 70 average in high school. That's only one point from failing. Really? Is the message that you can't be both smart and an athlete?

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  3. OMG...my uniform was exactly the same style except it was the color of creamed corn. So ugly. PE class was not my thing. I hated it. All the teachers favored the athletic girls and had little use for us uncoordinated, tall and lanky girls! It really gave me stress. What would have been wrong with shorts, sweatshirts and exercising? Stupid rules! Great Post!

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  4. In elementary school, our gym uniform was a t-shirt and shorts BUT we had to wear them UNDER our school uniform on gym day. Yeah, that was fun in May and June. Sweat city. Ugh.

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  5. Barb- I don't think they came in colors other than make-you-hurl. LOL Same here! The lovelies got to wear cute shorts and t-shirts and had a great teacher.

    MMS- UNDER your uniform? Why bother having a gym uniform? Silly school officials. :)

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  6. Basketball would definitely get boring if you had to do it every days, but isn't it better than the vaulting horse?

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  7. GB- Ha! No vaulting horse in our high school gym. Though we would have never known if it was better or worse since all we played was basketball.

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  8. i once had a friend forge me a doctor's note to get me out of gym--that's how much i hated it--i got caught, though--not only was the note not on a doctor's pad, but my friend spelled his name wrong

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  9. LP- Hahahahaha! That's hilarious! I don't know what we were thinking back then- just getting out of gym I guess!

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  10. Please, you think you had it bad? Ours were white with elastic in the legs so we all looked like we were giant toddlers.

    It was heinous. And to top it off our coach, Miss Bixby would come by and flick your collar to make sure it had enough starch. Thanks for the memories.

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  11. Our "gym suits" were royal blue but our gym teacher was OVERWEIGHT!!!! At least the color was brighter!...:)JP

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  12. Oh that's awful!! I hated those gym uniforms too - ours were one piece navy blue/gold hideous things. And we were forced to take showers in this huge communal shower after class. Most of us wet our hair in the sink to make it looked like we showered, because we were so embarrassed.

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  13. Michele- NO! Say it ain't so! I would have died! Sorry. :)

    JP- Bah hahahahaha!

    Jessica- At least they didn't force us to shower. I would have DIED for sure! I was, and still am, very private when it comes the bathroom stuff. That was a good idea about the sinks though!

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  14. We just wore old clothes and were lucky when we got lockers.

    Basketball was the game. All players made an A, the others a B. Nothing was required of the non-players. Sometimes they would go do something else but mostly just sat. I don't think that was fair to either side.

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  15. Gail- Sounds like y'all had the opposite problem. The lovelies said it wasn't like that when they were in high school at all. Luckily. At least you didn't have to wear hideous uniforms.

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  16. Our uniforms were upchuck green and mustard yellow and we had assigned days to bring them home to launder them for a grade....Yeh right.

    I almost didn't graduate, Jen was cleaning lockers for two weeks since laundry wasn't my thang ;0 my!

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  17. Thanks for dredging up horrible repressed memories of gym class, or as we called it, 'phy ed.' I hated it! The only fun part was when we had a unit on ethnic dances. Other than that, I have about the same kind of fond memories that you do.

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  18. P.S. But our sweaty gym suits were burgandy color. No matter how often they were washed, they always smelled like the locker room. I'm sure my mother would have loved Gain detergent.

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  19. jen-Oh no! You are so funny! I think we had to take ours home too but I don't recall ever doing it--those things must have stunk to high heaven! LOL

    Judy- Sorry! I probably shouldn't have joined in NaBloPoMo. It's all their fault. Yeh, that's right. LOL

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  20. "Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach, teach gym" - Woody Allen. I hated gym too.

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  21. I had a mixed bag experience with PE. For the most part I loved it. It's not that I'm a particularly PEish person. But we had a varied and broad range of things to try. Where I got into trouble was my own big and sassy mouth. My senior year of PE our teacher was one of those huge big teased hair women (a former Rockette...something she was sure to mention every day), that ran her own dance studio. I was just obnoxious enough and full of myself to sit and giggle on the sidelines with my girlfriends about the aging dancer. She ended up realizing what was going on and almost had the last laugh. She failed us....10 of us for the year. Thank goodness it was such a large number as our parents went to the Principal and complained. The result was we had to take a comprehensive written and physical exam of all the content of the year. I ended up having to go every afternoon for a week to learn a dance routine of her choice in her studio. I was one of three girls that opted to take the exam and be allowed to graduate. I was NOT going to not graduate from high school because I hadn't obtained the required number of years of PE. Thankfully I passed and lived to tell the story. I also told all my kids don't be dumb enough to make fun of any of your teachers...they always get the last laugh.

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  22. OMG, Kim! This terrific post brought back so many nasty PE memories for me! I went to an all-girls Catholic school in the early 60's and our gym suits were even worse than yours if you can imagine: we wore canvas dresses to our knees with cotton bloomers underneath (these all reached our knees) and the dresses were cinched in by an attractive (not) cotton belt with metal buckles. We were allowed to miss gym class if we had our periods -- and I claimed to be having my period throughout most of high school just to get out of wearing that hideous costume.

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