the older i get the weirder it is that not a single p.e. teacher in my entire school career was able to recognize the difference between “a child who doesn’t get enough exercise” and “a child with serious health problems impeding their ability to exercise in this particular way”
you know what else is weird? we had to do that fitness test every year but like… we never actually… learned how to do the things they tested us on…
like, now that i am an adult i have learned how to build up my strength so i can do pushups, but that seems like something they could have taught us? in school? in the class where they tested our ability to pushups? they never taught us how to work our way up to actually doing a chin-up, or whatever. even if i had just been “out-of-shape” (as a CHILD), nothing they did would have solved that problem. i did not learn how to exercise in a functional way until i was out of school and teaching myself, so i’m not sure what those p.e. classes were even intended to accomplish, really.
people are adding a lot of horror stories to this post that are really similar to mine (exercise-induced asthma, running the mile every friday, coughing nonstop for hours afterward and never actually getting any faster or building up any endurance, fainting at least once and not even getting sent to the nurse) but
to add something to the “really obvious shit any idiot could have told me” list
they taught us that the average walking speed should be 3mph, and i consistently tried on treadmills to walk at 3mph, and that always seemed really fucking fast to me and i never understood why
i’m 5′2″
i was in my twenties before i realized that i cannot go that fast because i have short fucking legs
why did grown-ass adults with eyes try to teach my short ass that i should be able to walk an easy mile in 20 minutes
It’s like they say.
If you can’t do, teach.
If you can’t teach, be a gym teacher.
It never occurred to me until reading this notes the utter ridiculousness that PE teachers held all kids to the same benchmark standards for like number of pushups and sit ups, time of mile, etc. even though everyone is at a different level athletically and has different body types and heights
Can we all agree that PE was a traumatic experience for non-athletic kids? It dented my self confidence for a decade and it probably played an integral role in my developing an eating disorder that nearly killed me two years in a row –too busy comparing myself to the CHILDREN who had been taught to be athletic to consider myself worthy of anything else than starving myself to death.
My mum had a similar experience in 8th grade when her PE teacher asked her to demonstrate how to do hurdles, then asked another athletic girl to demonstrate after her –only to say “see class: do it the way Tammy did it. NOT how Cheryl (my mum) did it.”
It wasn’t until I got a fiercely feminist fitness teacher in grade 10 did I realize I was actually capable of LEARNING this shit. Fuck elementary PE.
I hated P.E. the entire time I was in school, and it didn’t occur to me until well into adulthood that if I’d have been taught properly or not pressured the way kids are pressured, I might have actually enjoyed sports. Cause like, I’d love to build muscles, or play volleyball, or tennis, or what fucking ever, but gym class ruined it for me.
Anyone looking to learn what PE class totally failed to teach, Anatrik’s videos on strength workouts are very good:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dF1DOWzf20&t=3s
He’s also worked with a friend to create this great strength routine:
https://www.reddit.com/r/bodyweightfitness/wiki/kb/recommended_routine
What I love about Anatrik’s stuff is that all of his exercises not only describe proper technique very clearly, but come with suggested progressions – if you’re not strong enough for an exercise, there are several levels of easier exercises designed specifically to build up your strength over time until you can do it.
P.E. is one of the most traumatizing things from my entire history of schooling.
My husband and I have been talking about this. Like, if teachers of any other subject just told kids “Here, write an essay” or “Do multiplication” without going through it step by step and giving them opportunities to practice, etc, they’d be fired.
But run a mile? Just go fuckin’ do it, and if you can’t, fuck you. They could have taught me how to work up my stamina so I could run a mile, but no. They just tell you to do it, and if you can’t (or don’t want to because who wants to do something hard that they haven’t been taught to do), you lose. So I always thought “I can’t run.” It wasn’t until I was 25 and recovering from chemotherapy that it occurred to me that maybe if I did little bits at a time, someday I could work my way up to jogging a whole mile. And I did, with lungs more severely damaged from chemo than they ever were from asthma as a kid. I’ll never be a marathon runner, but I can jog a mile without collapsing.
PE classes could actually be really beneficial??? Like, in high school, due to a scheduling change, my jr year we were allowed to take any gym class as our required credit. Usually you had to take “PE 1″ or whatever first, and then only the athletes or people looking for easy As took anything else, but I got to skip PE 1 and take Aerobics & Weight Training.
And I fucking learned how to use all the machines in the weight room. Because if they just set us loose in there we all would have injured ourselves badly and they’d get sued. Do you know how useful that was? The aerobics part was just putting on exercise videos for us to follow, but tbh most aerobics videos explain shit better than any gym teacher. But I have spent my entire adult life being able to go into a gym and confidently use at least some of the weight machines without worrying I looked stupid or would hurt myself.
We could do that from the start. We could actually teach kids how to exercise and play sports instead of just shaming them if they can’t do it, and that might actually lead to kids being healthier and more athletic in the future. Why don’t we????
a specific moment just comes to mind- when we were playing baseball.
the teacher was hellbent on keeping us at the bat until we hit something. no, we couldn’t leave with some semblance of pride after three strikes, like, you know, professionals do. no, we had to try again, and again, and again, until we hit the ball. all while thirty other kids waited after the batter.
i think i must have tried 20 times until i managed to hit something (and badly). i could finally put an end to this humiliation. this experience stayed with me all my life.
and recently i discovered one of my eyes takes a second more to move. i can’t focus instantly. this is why i have never been able to catch or hit anything in my life. not that my PE teacher could have seen this, but maybe she could have spared me the humiliation. bitch.
We had girls in my 7th grade PE class who would make fun of me on the exercise equipment (yes, we had actual exercise equipment) because of how skinny and “weak” looking I was. They were the same girls who REFUSED to work out because they didn’t “want big muscles, because they look weird”.
It took my big brother (a firefighter/EMT), who had to work out regularly, finally explaining to me how muscles and working out ACTUALLY worked for me to realize that we would never see any actual change working out in PE because we weren’t doing it properly as CHILDREN.
I had just thought that I was out of shape and would be weak forever.
I have a chronic illness.
Arthritis, lupus, Reynolds and the like are part of it.
I started showing symptoms when I was 11. I was diagnosed at 13. Until then no one believed me. I had to do PE.
It's still one of the single most traumatic things I went through. I used to be in so much pain from exercises (that I told everyone were agony) that I would start crying involuntary. I was still forced to do these things. PE teachers are evil.
