For me, it’s square dancing. And I’m not talking about just a week or so sometime during my school years. We did it for MONTHS every year from 3rd or 4th -12th grade. There is a hilarious comment thread involving multiple classmates on this subject on one of my FB posts that goes on for over 100 comments.
The funniest part of this is I’m not from Texas, or Oklahoma, or Appalachia. I grew up in New Jersey. We did have 2 gym teachers who were professional square dance callers, so maybe that was part of it. And for a kid that didn’t know left from right until middle school, it was pure torture.
“You always had your crush and your square dancing crush. They somehow never ended up being the same person”. - Confirmed by FB discussion.
Swim lessons during the school day. We had two pools in our school. Every year, 1/4 of the PE time was swimming…and we had to pass a swimming test to graduate from our high school.
My kids also didnt believe we never had snow days…but we didn’t.
We had a drill during which all students hid under their desk in case of an attack (air raid drill) by the Soviet Union (USSR)/Russian missles from Cuba.
If you got in trouble, you’d get sent to the principal’s office to get paddled. The wooden paddle hung in her office. (Never me!)
When H was in HS (in the 80s!) he has a PE teacher, who if two kids were fighting, he’d give them boxing gloves and have them go at it as long as they wanted. Don’t see that lasting long today!
And also in the 80s in the same area as H… the high school drum major - still a teenager - would be tasked with DRIVING THE SCHOOL BUS for their marching competitions. Sometimes this involved getting up at 5am and driving 3 hours, marching all day, then driving everyone home at 1am. Can you even imagine? But apparently this was normal around here.
And don’t forget kids bringing rifles to school to go hunting afterwards.
Crocheting!
Had an awful teacher who taught crocheting INSTEAD of 6th grade math! She couldn’t teach math. I lost a year of math going into junior high school!
Oh, and not something we did, but something none of our schools had — parents. There were no parents in the schools for any reason other than someone was in BIG trouble. And the paddling you got in school was nothing compared to the paddling you were going to get at home…
When I was in high school, we still had a show and tell type activity. You brought an object in to the school and talked to the class about the object. During one of these show and tells, a kid brought in his gun. Bringing a gun to school, showing how to load the gun, talking about shooting, and letting other kids in the class handle the gun was well accepted by both the students and the teacher.
I went to public school and my kids were surprised to learn that we had holiday concerts where we sang Christmas carols AND Hanukkah songs, and no one got upset about it!
In addition to square dancing, we had home ec and shop. Both the guys and girls took shop, but I don’t recall guys in home ec. We also had those awful one piece bloomer gym outfits. Ugh!
How about ballroom dancing. We all learned the box step and the waltz in PE class. There were more girls,than boys so some of the girls wore Pennie’s (remember those?) and did the boys part in the dancing.
Late '60s public grade school – girls were not allowed to wear pants or shorts to school and there was a “boys” side and a “girls” side to the blacktop playground for recess. Girls had to wear a one piece dress for gym class which looked like the baseball dresses in “A League of their Own,” complete with bloomers.
But oh, the intoxicating scent of freshly mimeographed worksheets . . . .
Oh, what about having to clap erasers to rid them of all that chalk dust? And all the multi-colored dust in the blackboard trays and all over everything else?
Not sure there’s anything our son doesn’t believe we had to do because he knows exactly what it was like in “our day.” How not? I’m constantly telling him.
