How would you describe your experiences in shcool (grades 1-12) with regard to sports? I've been thinking of the sedintary life that I, and countless other people leave. We either sit on the phone and talk to people to make things happen, or stare at CRT's and push electrons about to do things. For more and more people, "an honest days work" is less physical and more mental, to the point that some people I know gripe at having to walk 5 minutes to get the occaisonal prinout. How all this is changing us isn't quite the focus of this item--but I *am* interested in what the educational system did to you (or with you) to help you keep your body fit. I remember in the early 60's, the "presidents counsel on fitness" and having fitness drives back then, so it seems to have occured to some governmental types that it would be a good idea to keep kids fit. But has it worked? I'm not sure at all. I'll be interested to see if people that went through the public school mills fared any differently than those who went to private schools.69 responses total.
The neighborhood I grew up in and my father were much more influential than my school experiences. In my neighborhood, there were eight to ten of us who would get together for baseball, basketball, football, or street hockey, depending on what professional season was happening at the time. My father encouraged us to take part in athletics as he played high school baseball and basketball as a kid. Looking back, I doubt that phys ed classes would have much success in encouraging kids tostay fit later in life. They tended to concentrate on teaching kids how to play sports, and mine had no training in nutrition. Perhaps classes are better these days.
Actually, it is my own negative experience that makes me ask not what good things the school system can instill in children, but can they stop turning them off so completely? My experience at Angell school (elementary) Tappan (Jr high) & Huron high goes like this. I grew up without my father; I lost him when I was 6. So I didn't have a "dad" to coach me through the years of learning about sports like all the other kids did. I mean all, too. I'd say nearly all the girls at Angell knew more about, and were probably better at most sports events than I was. So the first thing I came across was the simple fact that I didn't *know* the rules of say, football. When we tried the pull-tag variety, I just didn't know what to do. Granted I learned something by watching others, but I couldn't get direct answers about how the game worked from the "coach" at Angell. Either he didn't belive me when I said I didn't know, or it made him uncomfortable to explain, but I could not get direct help from my supposed educator(s). For football and basketball at least, I was able to get to the public library and finally I found a book that explained the rules about a number of games. A continuing problem I saw was the incredible amount of cheating that went on, with the teacher being a) brain dead, b) not caring one way or the other, c) being paid to not notice. Now, I was never a good student in the athletic areas, but I always tried to what was asked. Do you remember when it rained, having to run around the gym some number of times before other things could happen? I do, because I was always, always one of the last few people running around, trying to get in the required number of laps before sitting down. The joy I felt in having everyone look at me as I plodded around, alone, isn't something I care to go over, much. After some months of this crud one year, (think it was second grade), I came to the conclusion that a lot of people were cheating in that if they raced at high speed around the gym once or twice, they were seen as the "quick runners" and could then slow down and get to their sitting place and plop down with lots of others still running. After a while I got so that I knew how much people had run before they sat down, and went to my teacher about it. Not the gym teacher, but my regular teacher. She agreed to look into it and noticed one day during running that there were a lot of people who had sat down rather quickly. And there I was, plodding along, alone again as usual. My regular teacher had a talk with the gym instructor and he was rather surprised that any one would do such a thing. He said he'd never noticed anything wrong, but would look into it. He never did, and I was always the last person at any form of running event. At Tappan, we carried on just like before, except there was a vicious tone to the games that I hadn't seen before. If I got the ball (game being irrelevant) I was sure to do something wrong and get the other people on my team mad at me. Once, there was a particularly abusive person yelling at me when I lost the ball (football) and came over screaming at what an asshole I was. I finally lost it, and socked him in the mouth. This did three things: a) scared the shit out of the idiot, who never, ever yelled at me again, b) got the interest of my supposed educational instructor, who finally, after an hour and a half session got the idea that the sports system wasn't particularly sportsmanlike at Tappan and c) got me reassigned to a different gym class that wasn't quite as bad. There was still no instruction, and there were only blank stares when I asked if we would be getting any "instuctions" on how to play things. The public library, and sometimes Tappan's library came to the rescue several times. But I still couldn't get the help I needed to really understand things, or help in *learning how to play anything*. We did run on rainy days however, and this time, being in a larger group I found to my amazement that there were people ever slower than I. High school was about as inane, except for the fact that there was a course called "lifetime sports" in which you got to try things like bad mitten(sp?), golf, etc. The idea being that you might find something that you might want to do later on in life. Except for the completely insane part that if you missed class for any reason, you had to run six laps at the track (mind you, this is the outdoor Huron track). So when the bus I took to get me from Community to Huron was late, six laps. The designer of this little trick has since left the Ann Arbor school system and it likely torturing people at his current place, Eastern. That, in a nutshell, is the sum total of my sports experiences in the Ann Arbor school system. It taught me: a) cheat. You probably won't get caught. b)Winning is what is important, not how you go about it. Use rule a). c) You have to know how to play the game already, in order to play the game. You can't not play the game or get out of it. So I wonder how much better off I'd be today, if I hadn't had such a *completely* negative exposure to sports in general. Every person is responsible for their own health, I know. But I wonder how much more active I would be today, how much more willing to play in sports today if only I had some help in that area. Thank God for walking and bike riding.
It sounds like part of the problem with your phys ed classes were the size. It's hard enough for teachers to supervise kids when they are supposed to be sitting down and learning much less when they are running around and playing. Maybe one of the things they have to do (and maybe they are doing it already) is divorce sports and competition from physical fitness. For many people, exercise means engaging in some athletic activity. Since they may not be real athletically inclined, they are not likely to do them. Another thing, obviously, is to adopt a more humane approach to sports. I attended a Catholic grade school. At our school, we had a "little league" sports system that required coaches to teach all of the kids how to play the game, and also required that coaches play all of the players in each game. When I was in college, I went back and coached a basketball team one year. I honestly tried to make it fun for all the kids, while at the same time trying to win.
RE #2, (He still doesn't know the difference between a home-run and a touch down. We must be one of the few families in the US where the wife has to explain what is going on in a game to the husband :-)
Would one rather play dodge ball or watch a movie on TV?
[This item is linked from '-ing' 11 to sports 24]
I was discouraged from sports before high school, too, because, try
though I might (and I did try), I was never very good at any of them. The
gym classes became, for me, another place where I could be abused by the
other kids, only with the approval and cooperation of the teachers. I
couldn't throw a dodge ball hard; I could dodge it, though; finally it
became the biggest kid on one side, and me on the other, with him getting
madder and madder and throwing harder and harder. And then he had another
excuse to beat me up at recess.
In high school I finally grew to be the same size as the other kids,
but they had years of background in being good at sports, and I didn't.
It didn't matter what my skills were. By then they were normal, but no
one believed it. I could throw a football 60-70 yards and was still the
last kid picked for a team, to be put on the offensive line so I wouldn't
hurt my team's chances to win.
I didn't play high school sports. It was obvious to me that I
wouldn't get to play. I would get to practice, and then warm the bench
for all the games. (I was the statistician and equipment manager for the
baseball team, though, for my final two years.)
In college, no one cared or knew who I was, and in gym classes I got
to play (and even succeed, sometimes) in volleyball and tennis. I still
play both those games recreationally. I'm in the rec volleyball leagues i
Ann Arbor, and play tennis during the summer with friends and relatives.
If I could go back and erase all the experiences I had with sports
before I was 18, I'd do it in a minute. It was hell.
STeve, I could enter much the same paragraph as you did. I attended Angell/Tappan/Huron, and until my father had open heart surgery when I was in 8th grade, he was athletically "useless". Football and baseball were literally foreign to him, as might have been basketball. My development was a bit different, though. In 1-3rd grades, I vaguely remember being decent at whiffle ball. But in 4th grade I was over-seas, and somehow never adjusted to softball upon my return. That started the bad years, which were only muzzled by my speed and dexterity -- which I didn't really know how to put to use. It was at that time that my love affair with football began. In 1973, for reasons I have never understood, my father purchased UM season tickets. I was a little bit under the weather for the first game that year, but I think copped out as I didn't really want to go. But I went to the rest of the games (and haven't voluntarily missed one since). Thus I learned the rules of football. By 9th grade, I started playing football with half a dozen friends. We all became "decent", but never really good. But it was fun. My love affair found a new dimension. The real turn-around, however, came in 11th grade, when the captain of the football and track teams told me I should join the track team (oddly enough, just yesterday I thought to send him a thank-you note for doing that -- in a minute you'll see why I hadn't thought of thanking him until now). After some stubborness, I figured I'd give it a try, and for the next year and a half I ran 10-14 miles at leat 5 times a week (thank him for that?). Then came college. My freshman year I was still in good enough shape to participate in IM track and football. My speed and endurance had increased, and I had learned more about the mechanics of football -- learning to be at the right place in the right time. I stopped running regularly about then, but still participate in IM football (despite no longer being a student). So here I am today. I find that I still have better speed and endurance than the average UofM IM football player, and while I am no longer in the "peak condition" I was at high school, I hold my own. After Thanksgiving, I noticed that I was about 10 pounds too heavy. I put myself on a crash work-out (3 times a week) and was more careful about what I ate, and lost those pounds in a hurry. As I get older (and busier with other pursuits), it gets more and more difficult to stay fit. It has become increasingly harder to "get up to speed" if I let-down for a while. But all-in-all, I think that year and a half at the end of high school taught me a lot. And not just about my body. As they say, "Winners don't quit; quitters don't win". It takes a lot of motivation to go out and run a 10 mile race -- and even more to finish it. So now you know why I'm so persistant at times.... <Um, did I answer the question?>
Heh...
I was never in terribly good shape, and moved in the middle of second grade,
becomeing the youngest in a class of 2nd through 6th grades...
Jr. High PE was unpleasant, to be kind. I always did fairly well, but
the actual sports were more of a social thing, which circles I did not
run in, and I wasn't truly pro-sports until high school.
Then, I went to community high, which has no sports, really. Played soccer
every day for an hour at lunch, informally, and was pretty good, but
informal.
(oh, in elementary school I played soccer with the rec dept. for a couple
of years, and we never lost a game...my strongest memory is of getting
hit in the face with te ball about every other game... :)
Lesse...I tried out for baseball at Huron, sort of, but while the
team was civil, I had a bunch of nagging injuries and felt a little lost,
besides, not having done organized sports.
So, through school, I always had an aptitude, never the social
standing in the right groups, and wasn't in too good of shape.
Then I bicycled a million miles, discovered I was really really fast,
and can play up to what I consider "my level". Fun fun fun.
I sport at any opportunity, these days.
I think I might have in high school, if Community had had teams (so
I'd known the players and coaches, and not had to make a long bus ride).
Oh, and I'm only 5'7", which tends to screw you in basketball, among
others... :)
I didn't like sports while I was growing up, learned to hate them through junior high school gym classes, and haven't done anything athletic since, including going to football games in college.
I never did anything worthwhile sportswise until I got out of high school. I wasn't any good at any of the normal sports (and still don't know the rules for most games - or really care, for that matter). After high school I got involved in whitewater kayaking and paddled slalom fairly competetively for a number of years (made it into the top 25% nationally). I also started playing soccer as an adult and have been doing that off and on for the last 10 years. I am now coaching a girl's under 11 soccer team and administering a girl's under 9 league. My attitude is still pretty bad toward the more traditional sports (although I now occasionally enjoy watching football on TV).
I always seem to live next door to U-M basketball players. Weird.
I play Hockey and Skydive. One for physical reasons, The other for pure intellectual excitment. Anyone who thinks Skydiving is not an intellectual adventure should experiance the types of new concepts your mind will dig up while while racing toward the ground at 150 fps. :)
"Geez, I can't believe how ****ing stupid I am" ?
(should have been a :) with that...)
By request, this item has been linked from ing 11 to agora 235.
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I was forced into becoming physically fit at a young age in order to escape the clutches of 7 year old New Zealand girls who wanted to play 'catch & kiss' with a studly 7 year old Yank...
I would like to personally thank all of you who went thru the illustrious Ann Arbor Public School System. I see all of you had mch the same time and experience that I did: bad. Know I am sure it wasn't really 'just me' as I was then told. (I graduated in '79) BTW: I went to Carpenter--->Scarlett--->Huron--->Clemente. If I have only one purpose in life, it is to see that my children *DO NOT* go thru the AA schools, but if they must, their experience must be a damn sight better than my own.
I guess AA Achools didn't teach the notion of personal responsibility or accountability, either.
I grew up hating sports and phys ed. classes, also. I don't
remember my phys. ed. classes being quite as bad as those described here,
but they were still pretty awful. At least the Ann Arbor school systems
value something besides sports -- Portland, MI does not.
I remember hating gym class. I was very relieved when we were
told that we had a choice of 2 years of gym or 4 years of band
in high school. I did the band, gladly.
Like most small (I was, then) people, I was not terribly great
at team sports. I did try the basketball team in junior high, and was
the last-string player. I got to play once all season. I also
tried wrestling for a year when I was in high school, and actually
got my letter by a fluke -- of the four competition matches I got
to wrestle, the opposing team forfeited two of them. I never
actually won a match against another school. (The only reason
I wrestled was because all my friends at the time also wrestled.
We also formed a chess club. )
One of the things that has always bothered me about school
sports are the social aspects -- the activities are usually
team activities, so there is always a lot of in-group/
popularity crap going on, as well as the pressure to win
rather than play and have fun. While I was growing up,
my parents made sure I learned how to swim (lessons),
and let me learn how to ski. I still enjoy doing both.
My father never had any interest in team sports, so a lot of
his attitudes rubbed off on me. I can't name all the prominent
teams in any sport, and barely know who makes the playoffs in
spite of reading newspapers regularly. ( I did develop a taste
for soccer when I was an exchange student, but I think that's
just a symptom of rabid Europhilia. :) )
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Interesting. I never grew to love gym, but I never had some of the worst experiences described here. I was generally the weakest and least coordinated kid, so I never did very well on most things. They kept telling me I ought to be a really good runner, but it never seemed to help - I was always one of the slowest ones around the track. I never managed to do chin-ups either. I never much liked baseball -- since I couldn't run, catch, hit, or throw, I was always relegated to outfield and terminal boredome. Fortunately, the teachers weren't the sadists described here - when they introduced grading, the fact I was (almost) always willing to make an effort ensured I never flunked. I remember the rules took a bit of doing to learn, but I don't recall finding them all that impossible. I don't remember any sort of formal effort, so I presume I was just good enough at acquiring them to scrape by. Despite my lack of coordination, I actually did manage to occasionally do half-way decently (ie, not the last to be selected) in a few sports. Curiously, I think football was one of them -- I can't quite imagine why today, since I've basically always been the proverbial 90 lb weakling. Perhaps because it was one of the few I actually did manage to practice outside of school for a bit. I also managed to do reasonably well at soccer, although again, I can't imagine why. I don't think I actually became really good at wrestling, but I found it one of the more fascinating sports -- perhaps because it seemed to involve a surprising amount of strategy and surprise. Perhaps also because it involved a fair amount of leverage and 3-d thinking, so was a place where I could apply a lot of mechanical aptitude. I think I probably did best at volleyball -- I managed to became half-way decent at hitting the ball & become a real expert at serving. Unfortunately, I never got tall enough (or a good enough jumper) to learn how to spike the ball. But knowing how to serve into the holes in the other side's team was good enough. The sport I grew to hate with the most passion was dodge ball. It seemed to bring out the worst in the other kids. I eventually figured out how to cheat though -- the trick was to get hit early in the game before the other side got really vicious.
I'm not very athletic, haven't been for many years. Still, I'm happy to remember the two years when I was one of the best in little league. After those two years, everyone seemed to get much better at the game than I was. My brother for instance became the best catcher I've ever seen play the game, though he now suffers knee problems. I also like to remember how terrible I was at all the games I played at this one private school until they got around to soccer. I had been in a private prep school for four years before that, so I had played more soccer than anyone. Amazing how fun it is to rule the field after being a total loser. No sports in high school, just gym, and I skipped gym the last two years. By that time I was fencing.
Yes, his brother is Lenny Webster, sometimes major-league backup catcher... (well, probably not, but what the hell)
What *I* remember from HS days was the gym requirement. In my day, if I remember correctly, they required *four years* of gym class. They only required 1 year of science and 2 of math. Weird. I distinctly remember taking the "lifetime" sports class, where we learned tennis, golf, archery, badminton, and...believe it or not....chess.
Huron now requires only one year of "gym" -- 1 semester of "Personal Fitness", which is a general gym type of class, and 1 semester of another phys. ed. class. The first semester is required for everyone; the second semester can be waived for people who play a sport, do cheerleading, or are in marching band.
Didn't *anyone* here excel at anything?
Geez, no wonder we all wound up a bunch of computer geeks!
The system I went through, Mt. Pleasant Public Schools, only requires one semester of gym in your four years in H.S.. Which I find as quite odd considering the big emphasis on sports up there.
I went to Community high...I dunno if I was required to take any phys ed. I took a couple of years of weight training, that's all we had besides dance.
I did excel at little league. I made the all star team two years in a row. I was also a very good fencer.
Well, "excel" is a tricky term. I always enjoyed and played basketball. I was never on school teams, but I organized and played on recreation and intramural teams. I am now an avid bicyclist, and do well enough to ride with the fast club riders most of the time.
Hey, me too. Except for those couple of psycho riders who like to go a million miles an hour :)
I usually did pretty well in gym or sports in general in school. When we played class games in elementary school, I was the first girl picked for a team, usually even before most of the boys. (Course since I had grown up with most of the boys (no girls my age in my neighborhood) I was a tom-boy and considered just one of the guys, not a -horror of horrors- a girl. I was the only girl that didn't have trouble getting a partner for dance class.) I could hit a mean baseball and didn't pitch too bad, either. I held my own shooting hoops and wasn't afraid of playing tackle football, though Daddy did restrict football to touch football because we didn't have pads. In high school we took 2 years of gym. Most of the time I did well. I did very well in swimming (Dad still insists that I am half fish), fencing, baseball, basketball and such. I didn't like field hockey and still can't get the hang of/or enjoy golf. I was unfairly flunked 2 different marking periods during those 2 years. Once I couldn't participate because I had pulled all the muscles and ligaments in my shoulder while skiing and once when I had mononucleosus. That teacher felt that since I was well enough to attend school, I was well enough to participate in class, even though the mono left me without enough energy to walk between classes let alone strenuous physical exercise. (Actually I think that she gave me an incomplete, but since it was my senior year I didn't have time to make it up.)
I'm a good swimmer (swam on an intramural team in college), and was once a pretty good downhill skiier. Not quite racing caliber, but good enough to go down the black diamond slopes with grace. I did a lot more sports in college, and enjoyed it a lot more. I did crew (for an intramural crew team), gymnastics and fencing (for fun), and kept up swimming and skiing. I really loved crew -- there is something exhilarating about the way the boat moves when everyone is perfectly in sync., it just flies. Also, we were not terribly serious about it, which made it a lot more fun (for some of the races, we took beer along in the boat, which added weight and made it harder to win. We never won very often, anyway.) My main objection to high school sports was how seriously everyone took it. When I played on the middle school basketball team, the team almost made it to the championship. The coach broke down and cried when we lost our final game. I just am not comfortable taking something basicially frivolous that seriously. Unfortunately, most of the community did not see sports as I do.
Back when I was at Huron ('81), gym was a 4 year requirement -- but
one wasn't graded on ability but effort. I opted for team sports,
and really did like it. Was a little bit of a problem when I had
gym first hour during the track season, and following a 6am work-out
had gym class at 7:40. The instructor (yes, the Axe Murderer, literally)
stated that running track was my perogative and that just because I had
just finished a 4-5 mile run and would do another 6-10 miles after school
didn't mean I should get out of running yet another mile at the beginning
of class -- as a track person I should be able to handle it. Actually,
I think he may have been right.
I never did get much of my exercise from gym classes. Elementary school PE was actually fun, thanks to the excellent PE teacher the North Muskegon elementary schools had, and junior high PE wasn't bad either. High school PE wasn't miserable, but it wasn't really enjoyable, probably because I had just changed to a new school, didn't know anyone, and the format was different than what I was used to (no longer coed, more calisthenics, less interesting activities, blah blah blah..) Most of my exercise was outside of school. In the summers there was about a 90% chance on any given day that I'd be doing something in one of the lakes (swimming, boating, waterskiing, sailing, body surfing, fishing, brief flirtations with windsurfing, etc..) In the spring and fall, things had to fit around school and the water quickly got too cold so I'd do something with friends that was usually fairly active but not competitive. Soccer was about the only exception to this. I played in the YMCA soccer leagues until I got too old for the oldest one in our area and then stuck around as an assistant coach for a while. Winter was the time for skiing, sledding, skating or walking out on the frozen lakes, snowball fights, etc.. Anyone paying attention may have noticed a pattern: no organized and competitive individual or team sports (except for the soccer..) and nearly everything (again, except the soccer) was something you could do on your own or with very few people. I still don't care much for team games and/or sports: I don't even like to be on a team in games like Trivial Pursuit.
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A friend of mine had a gym teacher who would not give a female student a mark higher than "B." I wonder if he spoke of "effort."
I didn't get much out of gym classes in school for the most part. I think the idea behind team sports was to teach you to work as a team, not lead you to a life of wanting to stay in shape. Those who exceled at team sports have a hard time getting together a team later in life when others start jobs and famlies. Most of them wind up behind the tube, with a beer balance on their bellie, watching the top 1% playing team sports and being paied top $$$ so we can at least watch. I was lucky. My dad was wasn't into such sports. He did things for himself, without the need of others. He often took us kids with him. Ice skating across lakes and rivers, hiking through the woods, paddling down rivers and across lakes in a row boat, walks around the block, etc. Having always been a loaner myself, I have followed this thread. I got involved with bicycle touring early in high school. Next, my youngest brother introduced me to cross country skiing and a little later, to kayaking. I didn't get married till I was 32, so I had a lot of time to develop these "sports". My wife is also intrested in this sort of sport. She loves to row her single shell out on the Huron River and last weekend she won 1st place in her age cat. at a cross country ski race up in Lakeview near Grayling. Next summer the kids will be old enough so we can take them out on the river and on more camping trips.
My teacher said that, I got an "A" in my class, but I had NO natural ability. It would be best said that no one wanted me on their team for anything.
I think that many people--myself included--learned to hate physical activity at the knee of the public school pys. ed. department. I was a resonabley active tyke until first grade, when I took my first gym class. I had been active, but I was slow and clumsy. No one wanted me on the team and it was far from unusual for te entire team to boo or moan when it became clear that they were stuck with me. I took refuge in books;that was a place where I could succeed beyond the expectations of my teachers and peers. It was miserable while it continued...but I was diagnosed as epileptic during the fourth grade. By the middle of the fift grade the doctors had determined that my seizures could not be controlled by any existing medication, so I was released from the onerous gym hour to read in the library. (Balls flying at my face, being up in the air during gymnastics or on the trampoline, and similar situations were considered far too dangerous since I was having 50-60 seizures a day. I was so grateful that I considered epilepsy a gift for several years! (That, and my aura were pretty cool) I was twenty five or so before I figured out on my own just how much fun physical exertion can be--I wish that gym class had emphasized competition far less and taught us how to enjoy what our bodies can do. Long walks, swimming, bicycling, weight lifting--all activities where a personal best can be sought without a fear of failure. (Actually, trampoline looks like it was pretty fun, too.
50-60 seizures a day? Ouch!
I attempted to avoid sports classes at all costs. That's how I started being in band.
Ohmigod, gym class. Please let me share my pain. Hated gym class. Hated gym teachers. I never liked team sports or running. I always was the slowest runner. Junior high was the worst. We spenta whole 6 weeks on volleyball, which I hated. I did not want balls flyijng towards me and could not serve to save my life. If I did the slightest thing wrong, other kids would get all pissy and scream at me. The teacher did give a short "It's not noce to tear people down" lecture but never followed through on it. If I brought a note from home saying I could not participate in class (sometimes running/heat made me cough until I wanted to die), I'd still have to negotiate with her on sitting out because she felt that "If you're well enough to come to school, you're well enough to take my class." Most gym teachers I had over time finally realized I was not going to get into PE class ever and they'd best tolerate me until it was over. I am so glad I will never take another PE class again as long as I live. In college I took karate as my PE credit and loved it. I am now back in Taekwondo class and am liking it too. But I still get the flashbacks, the feeling that I am being judged and will be laughed at in class. This is hardly the case, since everyone in my classes are friendly and we make sure to support each other eith cheering and encouragement. No one would ever put someone down in class. But there's still that fear, and I hate that. :(
I was one of those kids who, while everyone else ran 5 laps at the *start* of class and then played sports, would take the whole period to limp through three. I was also small and slim and looked like I should be able to cope, so it's not like they shrugged and said; "What do you expect from a blimp". I was always the last one picked on any team, and blamed (usually with reason, but that didn't help) for any screw up, I just couldn't see the ball- barely could see a biiiiig red kick ball coming- and I was afraid of it flying toward me anyway. Even so, with all the misery of gym class (and I knew it was futile to try and evade it), one of the strongest influences on me, to this day, was a female gym coach who told me, once when I had a stitch in my side or my ankles has locked up or something, to "work it out". No one had ever told me I *could* do that, that I *could* work past my pain and clumbsiness to some measure of competence. I still make imense demands on myself, just to come within range of the "average", and don't accept a lower standard. THere's no good reason to, and I hate to be left out. It sucks to have to fight just to reach the "bottom rung", but that's the way it is. I'm so glad I remember that one, kind, sincere young woman as a role model. I've mostly forgotten the kids and the teachers who didn't show them what was meant by "not making fun" or "being nice" or whatever. Oh- in college, I took swimming, ice skating, fencing (that was fun, but my knees hated it) and horseback riding, all of which were marvelous; no teams, no group goals, just improving myself.
People say that team sports build character and self esteem. Ha. If anything it tore down my self esteem. I only recall one good PE teacher ever when I was maybe in 3rd grade. She was a substitute until the school found a permanent teacher for it. But we did cool things, like bounce a ball on an old army parachute shaking it. We even did duck-duck-goose and we all loved it. But the school made sure to get rid of her and hire a merciless teacher who basically didn't give a crap as to what happened in class. There was a bully in class who once pushed me to the floor, and I landed so hard I ws in tears. Since I don't think school is a place to be terrorized, I went to tell her what happened. She was like "no no, I don't want to hear it." Required gymnastics in 9th grade gym class? Ugh don't get me started.
(Boy, do I hate the way Fixseen works. This item I don't recall ever seeing pops up, nearly 700 lines of it, but all "new".) My own experiences were of always being the worst or (usually) second-worst in the class at everything, but while "You take him! No, *you* take him" type arguments hurt quite a bit, I really didn't find athletic activities in school all that bad. For the most part I don't really remember gym as particularly distinct from recess. Little League baseball, now ... the pressure the coaches felt to win sometimes militated against their desire to give everyone a chance to play, & *that* hurt. Interestingly, when I went into junior high, something changed. I remember the gym teacher picking (apparently at random) two guys as team captains. (This is softball, & the school had kids from all the elementary schools in town.) One of the captains started out by announcing that he didn't know most of us, had no idea of abilities, so would just pick as best he could ... & chose me like 2nd or 3rd. And I got a hit, & otherwise managed OK, & just dumped the reputation of being *terrible* overnight. Don't know how much was a turning point in my abilities as I grew up & how much was living up to expectations ... My real problem always was that I'd rather read than do anything else at all. I enjoyed informal sports just fine - probably would now, except that I never *do* anything & so am so out of shape that I'd never be able to keep up even minimally. As far as attitude toward sports, I think that the widespread view that it *matters* which team wins in something that should be no more than light entertainment is really dumb. ***Really*** dumb. I don't know how school experiences affected this opinion, though.
I generally spent recess hanging upside down from the parallel bars, or tucked behind a tree, reading, when I could...
I raised my children, as best I could, on the idea that whoever has fun wins the game, whatever the score.
I agree with that. The problem was that with a lot of the games we played in gym class, not only was I not any good, but I didn't have fun either. I remember gym classes as being places where we had to do lots of physically demanding things, no matter how tired we were, for no reason other than to get excersize. There were some things that we did that were fun -- in my year in England in third grade I remember really getting into Cricket, Tennis, and Field Hockey, while I really hated Rugby -- but for the most part I did not look forward to gym class. That didn't keep me from being pretty active, though. At recess and after school I was always running or biking around, or playing various games, for fun rather than because somebody made me. I also played soccer all the way through elementary school after getting into it in first grade because my best friend's dad was coaching the team, and I usually enjoyed that despite not being particularly good at it. The key seemed to be that the stuff was fun to do for itself, not for the excersize, and that nobody was making me do it. Then came middle school, when gym became a much more unpleasant experience. Grades in gym were there, but I can't remember them being a big issue. Maybe it was pass/fail, or satisfactory/unsatisfactory, or maybe we all got As, or maybe it was something else. I never cared that much about grades anyway. What did matter, though, was that the other kids, well, a lot of them anyway, were the typical unsensitive middle school kids and in a lot of these ball games I'm somewhat of a klutz. Still, it didn't turn me off excercise. At about the same time, I was getting more and more serious about my once casual interest in cycling, and by the time I was part way through eighth grade I was biking out to Dexter and back after school almost every day. The next year I started racing, and have been having even more fun with biking since then. High school seemed a much more pleasant experience for a lot of reasons, but one of them was certainly the lack of a gym class, most of the time. The requirement was for one year of gym, but I was able to get half of that by biking, with my coach serving as my gym teacher. The other semester had to be taken as an actual class, but I was able to combine the in class weight ttraining (which I put off until the last semester of my senior year) with biking instead of the other parts of the class. That went pretty well, although the class schedule didn't do all that well at mixing with my cycling schedule indicated that I should be having off days. One thing I've noticed in all of this is that despite all of this talk I keep hearing about natural athletic ability or lack thereof, it seems to, for me anyway, be much more a function of how hard I work at something than any sort of "natural ability." The one year I've had time to be really dedicated to cycling I was able to do really well, even winning the state road race championship for my age group and doing pretty well at Nationals. Other years, when I've found other things to do with my time, I've been routinely off the back during the first couple laps of a race.
Steve, I'm convinced that natural ability varies as much as does any other personal characteristic. Some people are good at a physical endevour with very little or no effort. For some people, a serious effort is really required to get good at that endevour, but the effort does pay off. For others the same (or any amount of) effort makes the difference between completely hopeless and slightly less hopeless. For people in the first two categories, or for people lucky enough to have enlightened teachers, gym class seems to have been no big deal. For people in that last category, though, gym class had the potential to be a horrible experience.
Well I now know why I ran so slow as a child. I have a disease where the ligaments and tendons in my ankles/legs are deteriorating, which manifested itself when I was 3 to 5 years old. I was diagnosed at 20. So I spent 15 years thinking I was slow and clumsy.
When I first started school, I loved gym. Everyone would watch the clock and as soon as we knew it was time to leave the classroom and go to gym, we all ran to the door. Then I started junior high. First they started making us change our clothes for gym, which might not have been that bad but the lockerroom reeked of hairspray and the temperature of this said lockerroom was often colder than the outside temperature, which was not very appealing in the dead of winter. Second our gym instructor was completely unsympathetic to the needs and fears of 7th grade girls, who although can be vicious on the outside, are very fragile on the inside. Third, I personally stopped growing at age 13 and all of a sudden, all my friends outgrew me and had longer legs and could run faster, etc. I hated gym from then until the end of high school. My junior year, I was in the same gym class as that year's senior class valedvictorian, who was also really athletic and the captain of three sports teams. To humor him and the rest of us basically good kids, our gym teacher turned our class into the "A.P. Gym Class" which basically meant we didn't have to change for gym and we could choose the activity, weather permitting. I liked gym again. When I got to college, I had to fulfill the standard gym class requirements. I didn't mind at all. I admit now I'm not as active as I'd like to be. But I do have to walk 12-13 minutes to get to classes every day and that much to return from classes, so I do move.
re 52:
While I'm sure there are some people with medical conditions and such
that cause problems, I think talk of natural ability is really more of an
excuse by those who claim not to have it than anything real. It's very easy
for somebody to be doing something physical that they find to be really hard,
and then look at somebody who is doing a lot better at it than them and assume
the other person must have some natural ability, but that's just denying all
the work that the stronger person is probably putting into it. Chances are
that the people who appear to be naturally much stronger are really musch
stronger because they put a lot of work into it, and because, rather than
saying, "this is painful, so I'm going to stop," they just push even harder
when it starts to hurt. They're probably also putting a lot of work into
whatever sport it is out side of the gym class as well. I ger really sick
of hearing people complain about how difficult something is for them, and
pretending there's nothing they can do about that.
Of course, to put that kind of work, and be willing to stand the kindof
pain it takes sometimes to be good at something athletic, requires some sort
of desire to get good at it. Anybody who just doesn't care is not going to
do what it takes to be a good runner, or cyclist, or swimmer, or football
player, or whatever, and why should they? That's a lot of effort to put into
something, and it's far better spent on something somebody cares about, and
is going to have fun doing. The problem with gym classes is that they try
to get people to do things like that because they have to, not because they
want to.
I have somewhat-mixed feelings about gym classes ... I was never good at that stuff, but it didn't matter a lot. Decent teachers who must have graded partly on learning-how and effort-and-attitude, since I usually got Bs. Illinois in the 1960s required 4 years of high school gym. From grade school I remember liking PE better than recess because I wasn't responsible for hunting up my own "play"mates, and I remember that by 6th grade I was beginning to be a little coordinated (once I even *hit* a ball pitched to me! & I could jump double Dutch some), & I suspect that my more-skilled classmates put up with me because I was willing to try (& fail) where some other girls just hung back & tried to get out of it entirely. But as far as lifetime skills -- the conditioning exercises we did at the beginning of gymnastics class in h.s. I have tried to remember, also those we did for fencing class in college. I learned to swim in college (section for those afraid of the water) but have rarely done so since. I learned table tennis at home, was runner-up in the 8th-grade-girls opposite-hand tournament, and haven't played that since (that I remember). Walking to school, now, *that* had a big influence on me (3/4 mile 4x day for 6 years, 1 1/4 mile 2x day for 2 years, 1 1/2 mile 2x day for 4 years).
Re: #55 I very much disagree.
I heard the "you're just not trying hard enough" speech a lot in gym class. And I DID try, and just hate myself more when I couldn't do whatever it was as well as the other kids. Gym wasn't about honing athletic ability, it was about showing off and doing better than everyone else and not coming in last. No teachers even attempted to encourage me. Since I didn't have the ability they wanted, I was't worth spending time on. Last week in Taekwondo class, I was called in front of the class (about 10 people) to do a set of self-defense moves with the instructor. I flaked out halfway though and basically froze. It was like PE class all over again. Then about 5 voices from the class came up saying "You can do it!". That made such a difference for me.
I guess I was lucky *not* to have gym classes be about showing off. It bothered me to be at the bottom of the class, but not like that. I don't think I ever was in a gym class where I felt pushed to do something other than do my best. I never got an A in gym, I think, & may have gotten a few Cs; but then some other kids got Cs in academic classes when they did all the assigned work to the best of their ability, as far as they could see; this doesn't seem unfair to me. Certainly natural ability makes a tremendous difference, in athletics as in any field whatsoever. Within that very large range we call "normal", at least, it's possible to compensate to a great degree for (relative) lack of ability by hard work, but this requires motivation in proportion to the amount of work, which can be really large; and no amount of work is going to allow the truly untalented to outdo the very talented if the latter put in only a reasonable amount of effort. I experienced this very clearly in learning to play guitar. I'm quite uncoordinated (though rather above average in *musical* ability), & found myself desperately wanting to play guitar; I spent virtually all my free time in high school & college practicing, & wound up very good in particular genres (basically finger-picked folk). But I saw other folks, much less able musically, pick up in a few minutes or hours things that took me literally months of drudgery. And no amount of practice would ever have made me able to compete with the real stars; there are only 24 hours in a day. I'm now struggling to master hammered dulcimer. I very quickly got to the level of advanced beginner, & there I'm likely to stay; hand-eye coordination just isn't good enough to really go on beyond that, in a reasonable amount of practice time. The same goes for athletics. The same lack of coordination would have held me back, as would other physical factors. It's quite likely that by putting *all* my efforts into that rather than academics, music, etc. I might have become good enough at (say) track or tennis to make the team, but I'd always have been second-rate in *that* environment no matter how hard I worked. (And I could never have made myself care enough about sports for that to be a satisfying tradeoff.)
I got a C in junior high because I grew to hate it so much, I stopped going. I would go do my violin sectionals (we had to miss one class a week, it was supposed to be random and rotating but everyone just "missed" the class they hated the most) during gym because I hated the teacher. I am so glad my attitude was reversed at the end of high school, or else I still wouldn't move.
It seems that a lot of what's being said by those who feel that there is now way they could have done well at the sort of physical activity that people have to do in gym class is being said specifically about being able to do things in class. The problem with that attitued is that in just about any subject doing really well requires putting a lot more time into it than just in class activities. People accept that being good at math, or English, or science, or whatever else requires a lot of out of class study time. That's what all that homework is. Yet, when it comes to gym, suddenly we have all these victims who find it difficult to do as well spending just a little in class time on something as those who spend several hours a day. I think that most of you who are complaining about not having the ability to do the things some of your classmates could do in gym might feel very differently if you had spent a few hours a day for a few years working on whatever you were having trouble with there. Of course, you're probably thinking that would be a big waste of time. For most people it probably is, but it's a choice everybody, including those who some have said were just naturally tallented, have had to make. I spent far too long believing this stuff about just not being able to do various things. Mostly my problem was in math, not gym, but it was the same problem a lot of people in this item are talking about with gym classes. We would be given these complicated problems that took a lto of work to understand, and I didn't care enough about math to put in that kind of work. I preferred to spend my time riding my bike, or playing with my computer, and the math became too difficult to do in the time I was willing to spend on it. It didn't take too much of this to convince me that I was bad at math, and then I had an excuse and didn't need to worry about it. It would be easy to just go on believing that, except that I know it's not true. Whenever I've had a difficult math problem, or anything else that really confuses me and frustrates me in the same way, and I've been really interested in it or had a reason to do it, and have had time to do it, I've figured it out eventually. It's just that understanding those concepts takes a lot of time and effort, and doesn't work if I don't care. We all have to decide what we want to spend time on and be good at. There isn't nearly enough time in a day to be good at everything. The difference between school and the rest of life is that in school people are expected to be able to do so much more than at other times. In school, I generally had six or seven different subject areas that I was expected to stay on top of at once, and to be good at some of them I really had to choose to ignore some of the others. I chose to ignore math and science classes, and my grades in those classes showed that. It sounds like many of the others here made that decision, consiously or unconsiously, about gym. Now that I'm out of school, at least for a while, the situation is quite different. Being able to choose to do something interesting, rather than what some school board thinks I should be doing, I can bike to work, spend my time there doing computer stuff, and then go out and ride my bike some more, without having to ignore some classes to make time for it. Maybe I should be entering an item about how my school experiences shaped my attitudes about math.
Math... ugggh. Another issue in which I felt I was stupid and no mater how much I tried and worked, I never did well. I didn't know I had a learning disability in it until I was 19. Uh, what practice do you need to do for gym? Practice running? Practice layups? By the time you may have done better in that, the class has moved on to something else. And you can't practice team sports alone. No child is going to work for gym class like they do for a math class. I don't know of any parent who said "Now Jenny, I want you to shoot baskets for 2 hous after school. Forget about that math test tomorrow, you MUST do well in gym! It will serve you well in later life!". Adulkts don't stress exercise as being imprtant, so why should kids think it's important? I did not like running, aerobics, basketball, softball, soccer, or any of those other stupid games that my gym teacher though up. It was't until I discovered Taekwondo on my own that I found a sport I LIKE to do, and is also practical. I don't have any more ability for Taekwondo than anything else, this is just something I like to do and therefore put time into it. It is practical because if someone tries to attack me, I can do more than aerobicize them to death. The stuff they make kids do in gym will not suit all 40 kids in a class. SO they keep trying more team sports, more running, more repetition until the kid learns to hate gym altogether. Would you want to spend extra time on something you hate and that kills your self esteem? No.
There's some truth in that. However, my own high school 5.0 academic GPA did not reflect a *lot* of time spent outside of class, but rather a mind bent in that direction & a certain kind of good memory & *some* time *well-spent* outside of class. The gym teachers did not usually assign homework; the specific things we did in class were not usually something I could figure out how to do at home anyway (I do remember many occasions of practicing headstands, which required neither equipment nor other people), but I personally would have benefited from more emphasis on general conditioning.
Headstands... why? All they do is place uneccesary pressure on the neck and head, which are not designed to hold your body weight. In 9th grade PE wwe had to jump over a bench laid sideways for 2 minutes straight. Nice way to break an ankle, which several girls did. In 7th grade our teacher made up this stupid game where it was like baseball, only we had to hit a basketball with our wrist and dribble it to the bases. Hello, it's stupid to use your wrist to hit something as hard as a basketball!! I had bruises for a week and one person broke a wrist. And i just felt llike a dork for not being able to rebound the ball immediately and dribble it. I haven't needed to dribble anything since.
I think beeswing hit the nail on the head in the last paragraph of #62. Getting good at a sport, or anything else, requires a lot of hard work, and can be really frustrating if it's not somethign you care about. I really don't think it works too well for people to force themselves to do something for excersize that they are just going to regard as suffering, but finding somethign you enjoy doing can make it seem worthwhile. As for the "Uh, what practice do you need for gym..." paragraph, the answer would be whatever you want to get good at. If it's layups that you want to get good at, then layups. If it's running, then running. Training is probably a better word for it than practiceing, since, especially with something like running, it's far more a matter of building strength and endurance than skill. The human body (well, just about any animal's body, actually, adapts to what it does a lot. If you spend a lot of time doing things you need a lot of endurance for, you will gradually build up more endurance. If you spend a lot of time doing things that require a certain muscle or group of muscles, you will build strength in those muscles. So, the way to become a good runner is to do a lot of running. The way to become a good cyclist is to do a lot of cycling. OTOH, if you spend a lot of time sitting on the couch, your body will become very good at sitting on the couch. It's pretty simple, actually. This item's being quite useful. It's getting me to think about this sort of thing, and to spend less time sitting in front of the computer and more time out riding.
But kids don't care about practicing layups because it's not something they want to do in the first place. Gym curriculums need revamping.
Actually, a lot of kids do want to be able to do layups. I think when I was in elementary school, and maybe even middle school, I knew a lot more kids who wanted to do layups (you mean layups, as in basketball, right?) than wanted to do math.
My kid's wierd. All the preschool and young elementary programs at the Y, local pool, etc. try to couch the warm-up and skills drills as games or "animal movements" or something since little kids tend to like such imaginative play, but haven't much sense of "practice" or "preparation". Timothy resents that "baby stuff" but if you explain that x exercise is a leadup to y *real* skill, he'll do it with a will. I have to tell all his teachers, when he's being difficult, to tell him why he needs to learn something, and then I try to reinforce it myself. Same seems to be true of academics. I guess he just doesn't like spinning his wheels. Oh well, at least he does respond to reason.
I equally hate gym (and basketball layups) and math. But that is just me. But... in junior high, my PE teacher said girls didn't really need to practice much anyway since they weren't strong enough to do most spaorts (and this teacher was a woman!). Really encouragaing... doesn't insipre me to practice.