Funny gym class stories/or vent on PE here

Parent Cafe
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<p>Hi I am interested in finding out what you or you kids hate/love about PE class. Tell your funny story or simply vent here!</p>

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<p>At my kids’ HS, students who do any sport, band, cheer or drill team are exempt from PE. This leaves only the most unathletic students in PE class. My favorite is the class they take first semester freshman year, “Foundations of Physical Education.” They dress out in their gym clothes and sit in a classroom and listen to a teacher talk about fitness. That’s *my *kind of PE class.</p>

<p>Sophomore year, Son’s PE class was first period. Every varsity sport, plus drill team, meets first period, so there was not a single field, gym or court available for the use of the PE class. Son’s class spent the entire semster playing dodgeball in the hallway. </p>

<p>He is now taking his final semester of PE. He is very unathletic but yet is one of the most athletic and motivated kids in the class. I’d pay money to watch his class. They’ve been playing kickball for a while now. Son says that the ball will land two feet away from some girls “in the field” and they won’t move to get it.</p>

<p>I think all these stories are very funny, yet none of this accomplishes the goal of helping the kids get more fit.</p>

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<p>My kids’s h.s. offers bowling as a P.E. elective. D, who will graduate with 11 varsity letters, almost flunked P.E. that marking period because she couldn’t bowl 100 (try more like 35).</p>

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<p>and of course PE brings down your GPA!</p>

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<p>in CA now you are not allowed to be exempt from PE if you are in marching band,etc. it has to be taught by a PE teacher to count.</p>

<p>ridiculous.</p>

<p>^btw i do enjoy PE, but when you’re doing band and AP’s I’d rather go to the gym on my own time</p>

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<p>My D is going to have to take PE next fall. I tried to push her to at least do the dance or badmitten option but she would not budge. I am afraid it is going to be like the class Missypie described. My D is a good athlete but participates in an afternoon EC that makes being on a sports team impossible. I am hoping the class is at least somewhat physical. The class is only 50 minutes and with changing I can’t imagine the actual aerobic portion will be long.</p>

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<p>Ha, that was me in high school.</p>

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<p>When my kids were in elementary school they had a fabulous PE teacher. An older man, an ex-marine who really understood that the key to life long fitness was to make it something that every kid wanted to do. So he made up all kinds of games - a lot of them involved little square platforms on wheels that the kids could lie down on, stand on, sit on and propel themselves around the gym. Also a lot team games like everyone in the class get from one end of the gym to the other without using their feet, it didn’t count until everybody made to the end of the gym and the reward was he would do one armed push-ups for them. </p>

<p>When S1 got to high school PE was a drag – weight lifting, cross-training, etc. All clearly aimed at keeping athletes in shape (in our district no one is exempt). Then after his freshman year the elementary PE teacher was made head of PE for the whole district. All of sudden instead of weight lifting there were skate board obstacle courses, cup stacking competitions, disc golf, broom ball, a freeze tag marathon that lasted 24 hours. Gym was fun again. His idea was if you wanted to play a team sport and develop those particular skills you joined a team. If you wanted life time fitness you learned to love moving. </p>

<p>The upshot is that both of my very unathletic kids really enjoyed PE, did well in it and still enjoy just playing.</p>

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<p>Anyone but me (I’m dating myself here) wear one piece “gym suits” with bloomer legs? Ours were light blue and H I D E O U S! They were supposed to have our names embroidered on them (as if my mother could embroider) and were supposed to be ironed. I think we got points taken off of our grade if they weren’t ironed- which, of course, they weren’t since we never remembered to take the disgusting things home!
Also- even though I was quite athletic, I was “difficult” and resisted some of the pointless activities and didn’t like to run laps. I really wish I could find my old gym teachers and tell them I became a very successful marathoner (and ultra-runner). They would not believe it!
Oh- how could I forget the swimsuits that were color-coded by BUST SIZE!!! We had to wear the school suits and the elastic was droopy and the largest sizes were bright orange!</p>

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<p>We wore light blue non-stretchy bloomer gym suits that, if I remember correctly, snapped up the front and had little collars. They were GREAT, especially compared to what came next… the following year we had one piece, pull-on, stretchy MUSTARD-colored, gymsuits - blousy mustard and white stripes on the top, solid mustard stretchy shorts on the bottom. Can you say uuuuuuuugggggggggggggglllllleeeeeeee???</p>

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<p>Oh, God. The mustard wins!</p>

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<p>I loved gym class. I’m a senior in high school now, and while I’ve finished my gym requirement for high school (about 1.5 years), and most kids in my grade have, there are many kids who take gym instead of a free period because it is excellent. We’re lucky to have four gym teachers in our school (about 970 kids), so there’s a good variety. In the beginning of freshmen year when everyone is required to take gym, you go through a rotation of the teachers and experience the types of classes they offer-one does mainly fitnessy stuff (running, biking, weight lifting), one does more relaxing and random stuff (yoga, pilates, juggling), one does typical gym games (dodgeball, kickball, flag football), and the last does more adventurous stuff (rock climbing, high ropes course, mountain biking, canoeing, hiking). After you go through one rotation with each teacher for the rest of freshmen year you pick what teacher you want about every six weeks-so you might do a rotation of kickball, then rock climbing, then yoga, or you might stick with one teacher and do kickball, flag football, wiffle ball, etc. After freshmen year you pick a class with one teacher for a trimester. Very good variety offered, it’s awesome.</p>

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<p>mowc-
Mine looked kind of like this one-- in the same color. Oh so attractive <a href=“http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_YRZwNH4YytE/Rl3HStTYtFI/AAAAAAAAAF8/k2SxZMYeFco/s320/jumper.jpg[/url]”>http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_YRZwNH4YytE/Rl3HStTYtFI/AAAAAAAAAF8/k2SxZMYeFco/s320/jumper.jpg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>Ours were more like the bottom one here:</p>

<p>[Gym</a> Uniforms of the 50s and 60s - Wearing Bloomers in School](<a href=“http://www.loti.com/then_now/Gym_Uniforms_of_the_50s_and_60s.htm]Gym”>http://www.loti.com/then_now/Gym_Uniforms_of_the_50s_and_60s.htm)</p>

<p>And, yes, we had to have our names emboidered on the left breast. (What do you mean asking what if your mom didn’t embroider - by 7th grade it was assumed that a girl could manage at least initials…)<br>
As for the ironing thing…perhaps the only way the teachers could tell if someone had actually taken their home on Friday and washed it was to look for creases on Monday. (you may not have noticed it in high school but kids smell… dirty gym clothes times 60 kids per class… the teacher should get paid extra…)
Sounds like some of you had great teachers. I had the gymnastics coach. I was 5’7", skinny, <em>no</em> upper body strength. We spent the majority of the long Seattle winter on gymnastics. I still remember her telling me over and over to hold my shoulders tight to the uneven bar as I was supposed to kip my body over. Easy for her muscular 5’ 0" Nordic powerhouse to tell the kids, not so easy for them to suddenly develop the body type or the muscles and skills to do it. Fortunately I excelled on the balance beam and trampoline.<br>
Think about that. Kids got to use an above floor level trampoline (with no safety equipment or spotters) during school. Lawsuit city.</p>

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<p>^^^ ooh good find, dragonmom!! Ours looked like the ones in the top blue drawing! Embroidered the name on the pocket (which was a real pain as my last name had a LOT of letters in it!!)</p>

<p>We also had the trampoline without protection, climbed ropes (dont recall spotters) ditto on the uneven parallel bars. I didnt get hurt on those things. Nope. I got my knee smashed running back to first base during an indoor kickball game. I’ll never forget the name of the girl who took out my knee trying to tag me out. She was a real bruiser. Her first name was Ferris. She was scary.</p>

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<p>Well, I guess my favorite story from my boys–who’ve all loved gym–is about a new game invented by the most dour, miserable looking woman to ever teach gym–and she was a second year teacher! The game is called “Silent Ball”. Boys line up on one side and girls line up facing them. They pass a ball back and forth while being completely silent, if you miss a catch, or talk at all, you stand in the opposite line. Silent Ball!</p>

<p>Remember crab walking? What the hell is that about?</p>

<p>I remember the giant medicine ball being something of a terror in elementary. I wasn’t too bothered by it, but I remember one girl in particular was petrified of it. For some reason, we were playing something like soccer, but we were all on those little wooden dollies. Well the girl who was afraid of the ball got trapped underneath it and people were kind of around her and kicking the ball which was just bouncing and vibrating on top of her. I think her mom had to come and get her because it was her worst nightmare about that ball come to life.</p>

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<p>PE is such a joke at my school. We have to take it all 4 years (although varsity upperclassmen athletes can opt out during the season of their sport(s)). The lame thing is, they keep trying to turn gym into an academic class. As in, we take quizzes/tests over the sports we learn. (The pointlessness is compounded by the fact that we usually don’t play by the official rules in class, but then are tested on the official rules, and over sports that we will never play again outside of class, like speedball.) Also, if we miss a day, excused or unexcused, we have to make it up either by coming in before school to run on a treadmill or by researching a fitness-related article and writing a mini-paper on it. We also have to take final exams, which sometimes include material that we were not even formally taught.</p>

<p>The teachers and administrators keep trying to force PE to be an academic class, but it just isn’t. None of the students take it seriously, and, in my opinion, it is ineffective the way it is currently structured. I would much rather take an elective that I will use later on in life than the PE class we are all being subjected to now.</p>

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<p>Oh yeah, we wore the “bloomer gymsuits” in royal blue. I tried to find a picture of them in my old yearbooks as I was attempting to describe them to my kids, but no luck. I think they were so hideous they couldn’t be photographed.</p>

<p>Sophomore year we changed over to the knit style described by anxious mom only ours were (thankfully) green, not mustard.</p>

<p>I would post my funniest PE story here, but it might get censored. Suffice to say, it involved some of the guys losing bowling balls and a friend yelling that fact to the PE teacher but using an unfortunate choice of words. </p>

<p>Same friend and I “failed” Archery in Senior year PE. Six weeks and we couldn’t hit the target. We claimed we “couldn’t see the target”.</p>

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<p>MOWC - yep, ugly blue gym suits with bloomer bottoms…and we had to put our last name across the back in capital letters and large with a black laundry marker. Prison uniforms!! There was only one girl that actually looked “cute” but she would have looked good in a garbage bag. I loved the drawing and pics posted. I showed the kids a picture (of the cute girl of course) that was in one of my yearbooks. We had one class where you “had” to execute one “trick” on all the gymnastic equipment to pass, can you imagine them requiring that from kids today…there would be all kinds of wailing and chest pounding from certain parents. We also had to be able to run a mile in a certain amount of time…I think 8 minutes sticks in my head but maybe not. I still have nightmares about having to climb the rope up to the gym ceiling. I could not even get half way up…ever…and the gym teacher kept making me try and try and try. Fortunately my boys love gym classes and take them as often as they can fit them into their schedules, but even with the lax gym classes these days I do hear the funniest gym stories from them. I think hatred of gym in high school is universal but the kids have it easy now. They don’t even make them take gang showers anymore, though my boys do 'cause they don’t want to be stinky around the “girls.”</p>

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<p>momofthreeboys,</p>

<p>Where did you grow up, if I may ask? With the exception of the fact that our gym uniforms were green, you just described my HS gym experience (minus the blown out knee in kickball).</p>