P.E./Gym class activities - c/d

destroy: other silly sports.

dud: swimming, volleyball, THE FUCKING MILE RUN

classic or dud?: lazy girls who barely pretended to participate in class, scowled at everyone but their friends, and did the "jelly roll" dance in the outfield during baseball games while ground balls whizzed past them.

i'm still not sure if dancing in high school p.e. was classic or dud. we danced to the oak ridge boys and the "dirty dancing" soundtrack (the latter because it had a song in 3/4, one in 4/4, and one in 2/4 in sequence, i believe). this horrible girl who would wear a shiny silver dress refused to dance with me!

miserable overweight unable-to-perform-one-situp gym instructors, alternately classic or dud depending on whether their misery translated into them harassing the students or letting play leisurely games of badminton every day for a semester.

go-go-go evil baseball coach gym instructor definitely dud, he was fired a few years after i graduated for verbally abusing some kids on the j.v. team.

god i'm having adolescent insecurity flashbacks

CLASSIC!!

and the freaking BEEP TEST!

i can swim ok actually, it's just the profound awfulness when everyone is perched beside the pool in their suits (we had to wear speedos) waiting to take their turn at laps. it's an amazing distillation of adolescent anxieties.

Classics:
Team Handball
Flag Football
Bowling

Oh my god! I forgot about bowling! Bowling kicked ass. The bowling alley was actually on the embassy compound, next to the school, so we got to spend half the class walking to or from the alley, and it was air-conditioned.

Football (US) I enjoyed a lot, too. Most everyone else wasn't very good, so I got hella interceptions and would catch anything thrown near me on offense.

xpost YES THE MILE SUCKED RHINO COCK. goddamn. I thought I was gonna die doing that, although now I can run one no problem. The last time I did it I run each quarter-mile lap in precisely 2 minutes. I don't think I coulda achieved that kind of tempo consistency if I tried.

Actually, this became a politically thorny issue as we got older and puberty set in. Whenever you had to choose who to dance with, did you choose your homely female friend or the hot girl you secretly had a crush on, thereby outing yourself as a crusher? Best of all, I suppose, is choosing your friend on whom you were secretly crushing, since you don't hurt her feelings and get some stealth physical contact into the bargain.

Did anyone else ever play Team handball?
http://www.usateamhandball.org/sport.html
I didn't know it was an olympic sport...

although i don't remember enjoying it at the time, the square dancing has certainly stuck in my memory, since i was able to demonstrate the do-si-do, promenade and other moves after drinking all day on saturday.

- the communal showers;
- it was taking up space on my schedule that meant I couldn't skip ahead in my science classes, ergo I missed out on advanced biology and advanced chemistry.

Oops, fret not. We all escaped and now we're here! Er.

The only reason I liked PE was so I didn't have to go to real class. Of course thats why Dans a Harvard Grad and I'm a Junior College Chump.

(xpost haha! "fuck! i got the half-deflated one with half its skin missing")

lauren mentioned it already but

KICKBALL
KICKBALL
KICKBALL

dan where did you grow up?? we had good facilities, although we had to run several laps around the track to do the mile run, curse its name.

parachute was in grammar school, not high school. for me.

most of the dancing was group style folk dancing. although there was also tango (!!) and waltz etc. also basic slow dancing which was the occasion for much nervosity on my part.

this thread is gathering steam fast, i cannot read it all today, apologies.

best thing though was to have gym as your last class, cos then you had time to shower afterward and you had that nice post-exercise glow when you were going to meet the honies for snacks after school.

i am such a space cadet, that once when running laps indoors, i ran straight into the rope holding up the volleyball net (it was volleyball that month, but we always started with a few laps), and totally got this wicked bloody rope burn and had to go to the school nurse. i still have a scar! i tell people it's from a knife fight of course.

i got lots of stupid bloody injuries in gym class, like ripping off a huge chunk of skin on my knee while diving for a ball in volleyball, or breaking almost all my fingers (not at the same time!) during basketball or soccer.

hott, except for the injuries and getting-your-period-at-age-20 thing

football--because this was the only time in my life a 130 pound kid could play something like this and be somewhat successful. (YEA, TWO TOUCHDOWNS IN THE FIRST GAME 8TH GRADE YEAR omg i'm pathetic for remembering that)

Middleball--like a combination of volleyball and tennis, good for those who couldn't serve worth shit in the former or were too slow to play the latter

bombardment--for some reason I was good at this.

Most irritating summer ever.

I grew up in MN (apparently in the land of Wonderful School Facilities).

Destroy
Swimming (1st period swimmming = wet hair all day YUCK)
Mile run (if I ever I feel depressed I remind myself I never have to do mile run or ride the school bus and then I feel better)
Field Day
Volleyball tournament

Most classic:
PE teacher asking if I would like to grade papers instead of playing basketball. That's probably some sort of Title IX violation but like I gave a shit.

Super destroy:

Mrs Davis:
Me: "Can I not do field day? I'm getting my period that day"
Mrs Davis: "NO"

also she blamed ME when I got hit by a basketball when it was the thrower's fault.

we had genteel things like golf and x-country skiing

and badminton! oh how fun was badminton!

Now a major motion picture starring Rick Moranis.

"Boner?" asked Sonya. "What's a boner?"

Debra, sensing comedy gold, says, "Oh, that's just something girls get every now and then," and REFUSES TO ELABORATE.

About a week later, Sonya sidles up to Debra in the hallway and says, "Debra? Don't tell anyone, but I think I got a boner."

Debra, of course, immediately ran down the hallway shouting "SONYA'S GOT A BONER! SONYA'S GOT A BONER!" while Sonya ran behind her saying, "Shhhh! Don't tell everyone! Shhh!" Bedlam and pandemonium ensued.

I drew several cartoons commemorating this incident that were classic not so much for their subject matter but for my limited art skills; the best one was the one with the owl in a tree asking a girl with a suspicious bulge raising the front of her skirt "What's wrong?" and the girl replying "I think I got a boner." Why an owl? Because I couldn't draw more than one distinct person and I wasn't going for the pervy twin angle.

We had to do PE and sport as well - PE was like the class subject, whereas sport was all Weds afternoon. PE usually ended up being shit like basketball, gymnastics and some theoretical stuff, or... you know, I don't even remember, I think I blocked it all out.

Sport was where you got to choose what you wanted to do from a list of things, I hated all forms of sport and exercise as they served nothing but to humiliate anyone unpopular or at all weak/different. But we got to do ice skating, squash and table tennis in later years, that ruled pretty hard.

We didnt have a pool but swimming and track n field happened at least once a year as a school contest, which I also hated becaue I can neither swim nor run, but we were forced to attend nontheless, and sit around getting horribly sunburnt.

In year 10 I developed some kind of liver problem and was medically forbidden to exercise for 12 months. That was the best.

Dud: The Mile, of course. I've never been diagnosed, but I'm sure I have some kind of exercise triggered ass-mar. It's so frustrating to have your legs and everything in good condition and then finish only like 30 secs ahead of the pudgiest boy (well, the pudgiest boy that could finish the thing).

I hated playing basketball until I was in HS, when a kindly coach actually took me aside and taught me fundamentals, such as how to shoot a basket. Believe it or not, this important task had not yet been taught to me. But once I was able to do those things, I was thrilled to play basketball in P.E.

Other fun P.E. activities -- volleyball, bowling (yes, we did bowling in P.E.), (HS) flag football, strength conditioning, hockey (minus the skates, prob due to liability reasoning or something).

Everything else I hated, from those stupid repetitive gym exercises (whoo, sprinting to Pat Benatar PLEASE KILL ME NOW) to badminton (really bad news if you're a near-blind person such as myself) to any/all track activities to anything from before high school. And considering the fact that everyone at my HS was female, the whole "time of the month" excuse didn't fly. Also, the time of day our P.E. class was to be held was pretty much determined by how good you were at P.E. The first year I had P.E. I was in the last (i.e. 7th) period of the day, and then in the second year (we had to have two years' worth of P.E.) I was moved up to 4th period, which was conveniently before lunch.

My child is in gym right now, the teacher isn't nice but is real popular with the administrators. My kid is athletic but is bullied. I wish I could change the classes.

I would love to pull the kid out of school but don't want to upset them.