The Only Thing Scarier Than a Mama Bear: P.E. Class

Raise your hand if you liked P.E. when you were in school.

Anyone? Anyone?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=NP0mQeLWCCo

Now raise your hand if you thought P.E. was a stupid waste of time and made you hate the idea of exercise.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdqjPCynGUc

Ok, whew. Even Bon Jovi agrees. There were many, many things I did in school that pegged me as unpopular (band, theatre, honor roll…), but hating P.E. wasn’t one of them. The fact that every non-jock had to take Physical Education did single out us nerds but even the athletes hated P.E. (but were smart enough to join a team to get out of it). Yes, in addition to reading, writing and arithmetic, we were totally educated in how to hate everything related to breaking a sweat. Not the least of which was having to shower afterwards in front of peers when we were already self-conscious about our fully-clothed bodies.

Everything about P.E. was humiliating, with one exception: bowling. Bowling was a true sign there is a God. No sweating (or showering) involved. And everyone sucked at it since the school gym. obviously, didn’t have lanes to keep the ball on the straight and narrow. We were all on equal footing.

Then there were the days the devil ruled supreme and possessed the gym teacher. One of my middle school gym teachers was a real, uh…witch with a, um…bee in her bonnet. And I don’t mean witch or bee or bonnet. She was awful. We hadn’t taken ten squeeky-sneakered steps into the gym before she began barking:

Fifteen laps, NOW!!!

And since our class had just finished a unit on the sedentary “sport” of bowling, we hadn’t run a single lap in a very long time. She was torturing us because she could. And maybe because her cat looked at her wrong that morning.

www.empoweringparents.com/blog/giving-kids-consequences-exercise-as-punishment/

Middle school P.E. was mandatory for everyone, but high school P.E. singled out the (unspoken) losers. If you didn’t play a sport, P.E. automatically showed up on your class schedule. And in my high school, this was a class taken from the least physically active human in town. Nice enough guy, but still. Not a fit bone in his body. Which is probably why he liked to hide in his office and not supervise the wildly inappropriate stuff he assigned us to do. For example, the Lyle Alzado aerobics video, which wasn’t cute-leg-warmers-and-coordinating-leo aerobics…it was proscribed torture at the hands of an oversized, mean football player, an excellent way to ensure none of us would be able to walk right for a week. Another time the same teacher rented a stack of cross country skis and sent us out on our own to figure it out. One of three things happened that day: kids broke the skis because they didn’t know what they were doing, kids got hurt trying to downhill ski because they didn’t know what they were doing, or kids ditched P.E. and skied home because they DID know what they were doing.

Renting skis, breaking several, and the resultant injuries cost a lot of money. It was no surprise that the next year we didn’t cross-country ski for gym class.

Fast forward to today, and my daughter is taking P.E. She hates it, of course. There’s no conditioning, no warm-up. There is, however, “Fitness Mondays” which include stadium runs. And injuries. And blatant misogyny. One particular Monday there were several injuries in my daughter’s P.E. class alone. The boys got to fetch ice. The girls were told to suck it up. It’s the 21st Century for god sake. But today’s 12-year-old girls are discussing how sexist the gym teacher is. They are not wrong.

And BTW, why is the fitness only happening on Mondays? My daughter has P.E. every day. Could the teacher make it more obvious he only bothers to do his job one day a week?

So it’s no wonder that kids grow up hating physical fitness, or at least take decades to come around to the idea that exercise can feel and be good doesn’t have to be torture. I was 30 before I became a regular fitness addict. 30. And I didn’t get to that point Alzado-style (or Jane Fonda-style, for that matter…). It doesn’t take a degree in Physical Education to understand the idea of starting low and going slow…until your muscles just begin to fatigue. This is not that hard.

I didn’t start my training for a half-marathon by running 13 miles. I ran one. Then I ran one-and-a-half. After a few days, I ran two.

It’s not rocket science. But judging from how P.E. classes are run, it may as well be.

My husband is one of the fittest people I know. He is 50 and can run an 8-minute mile at altitude. He didn’t get himself to this level of fitness overnight. It took him years. And he educated himself by read books on fitness and nutrition, likely fewer than it takes to get a bachelor’s degree in physical education. He believes P.E. should teach kids how to get and stay fit and maintain their fitness in a realistic and healthy way. Kids should take a fitness test at the beginning of the class, and the class itself should emphasize improvement. Then, at the end of the course the students should take the fitness test again to see how far they have come.

Would it be so darn much to ask for P.E. to be structured in this way?

It shouldn’t. But as it stands P.E. is not at all about getting an education in how to become physically fit, it’s about brow-beating kids by a sadistic ex-athlete who gets off on a cruel power trip. Ok, I’m being a tad over-dramatic, but it seems to me that an excellent way to combat the obesity epidemic in this country would be to have motivated, knowledgeable P.E. instructors who guide our kids through real activity that does the body good, teach them how to maintain the fitness they gain, and to work toward improvement in a safe, supervised way.

P.E. could be a really good experience. Teaching kids to hate physical activity and that they are incapable of developing healthy bodies without pain is tragic. I know I felt that way: that my classmates and I weren’t worth the effort, so were punished through unsupervised physical abuse for being so lazy and un-American as to not go out for sports because sports are everything. Ok, I’m being dramatic again, but you didn’t see that Alzado video. Sweet mother, I still shiver at the I’m-gonna-kill-you look on that mass of skin-covered steroids…

Bon Jovi and I gave our throwback-to-the-80’s opinions on P.E. class, so here is a much more recent article on the topic:

www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/01/why-pe-is-terrible/581467/