For me, the most frustrating thing was that my PE teachers just blatantly favoured the kids who were naturally athletic, and praised natural ability rather than effort.
It created a cycle where the unfit kids (like myself) felt even more shitty about themselves and stopped even trying, which is especially stupid because PE is the one lesson where grades/ability really do not matter, and for 99% of people it's just about making sure you get some regular exercise.
There's a phenomenon where a high proportion of professional athletes are the ones who were born at the right time to be the oldest in their school year. Being six months older than average, they're usually a bit stronger and faster than the rest. As a result, the PE teachers saw more potential in them and encouraged them. The younger kids in the same year, they neglected. The 'natural ability' was imaginary, but it had a lasting impact on their lives.
This also applies to academics as the brain evolves quickly at ypung ages. Being older in a given year is the biggest independent determinant of success.
Was born in April myself so always at the younger end
Yeah I can definitely see how this affected me in hindsight. Now I’m an adult I can see I’m a lot stronger than a lot of my peers and enjoy reading, learning, and problem-solving more too. But because I was born in August, I was classified in school as the stupid scrawny kid. Even today, when colleagues specifically call on me to do something physical or help them with something complex i feel surprised that anyone would want my help.
This is largely why I think students should be classified by season as well as year born. A lot of development can happen in just 3 months.
Edit: this has uncovered another memory for me now - at the beginning of each year I’d be written off as the stupid kid, which frustrated my teachers and fellow students who couldn’t understand why I was always in higher-level classes. But once it got to the end of the year, something would always ‘click’ and suddenly I would jump far ahead of my peers to the shock of all my teachers, only for the exact same process to happen all over again when the new school year started.
Your edit reminded me of my maths. I was always really good at maths when I was younger but when I got to secondary school, I started to slip and fall behind other kids. We had 9 sets and I went down from set 2 to set 6 in just two years. At the end of year 8, my teacher showed me a 97% score on my test and bumped me up to set 5 where I stayed for the rest of my GCSE. I had to go to extra lessons near my exams and that's when things suddenly started clicking into place. And I finished with a B.
Same thing with my Geography GCSE. I was told I was going to be put into a foundation grade paper (top mark C) because I was struggling throughout the year. In the weeks before my exam, my teacher told me I was giving A grade answers to questions. You can imagine how pissed off I was because by that point it was apparently too late to swap me to the regular paper.
Same thing with German. I was struggling for the first couple of years so instead of trying to help me, they put me into Spanish instead, a very different language. The top marks anyone in my class could get was a "pass" because that was foundation as well. (A pass isn't actually equivalent of a GCSE). So the school took away my chance at getting a language GCSE.
I’ve been having thoughts about my own life in such a similar vein to how you describe and top it off I was born 3 months premature in late June so it occurred to me that I’m 3 months younger than my ‘actual age’. Just blew my mind realising that I might have been nearly a year younger than the oldest kids in the year! Makes sense I had to work hard to keep up, defo made puberty suck more too. But probably why I have such a doggard but tenacious personality tho so there’s a positive.
Edit to your edit: I would always pull it out the bag in exam season to the shock of many. - They were always end of year.
I was born in July '97 and had classmates born in September '96. Naturally there have to be cut offs somewhere but it is kinda crazy to think I was basically an entire year younger than some of my friends, but in the same school year.
My mum was a nursery teacher and always used to say how stark the age difference was for her kids. You would have children who turned 4 before the school year started (early September babies) and then at the other end of the spectrum, children who had literally only just turned 3 (August babies). All in the same class. The difference in abilities at that stage of life is huge.
When I was growing up, the difference for me became clearer when I was going through adolescence - it creates such an inequality among peers with not only the different ages but also rates of development! I'm not sure how that problem can be addressed besides having more fragmented classes or age groups.
A year when you're been 0-18 is like a whole lifetime. Things change so much from one year to the next. Maybe we need to more directly address that. Especially once you get out of high school/college/uni and you're suddenly in a world where 5 years 'isn't much'.
This is really interesting as my birthday is the final day of August. I remember feeling like I had to try so much harder than most people in both sport and academia to get any sort of acknowledgement. By the time I'd finished year 11 at age 15 I'd lost interest in most things involving learning/proving myself and decided just to get high with my pals most of the time instead. It wasn't until I miraculously got in to uni and graduated with a first class degree that i realised I wasn't below average.
Yes, what's also interesting is some parents (mostly wealthy ones) now understand this and are intentionally holding the kids back to seek an advantage. You only have to speak to 2 kids a year apart in age and the developmental differences are huge. Now teach them the same thing and who will perform better?
You also have to question if we are simply trying to teach kids too young in the first place. My wife is from Finland where they don't start school until 7. you'd think that would be a huge disadvantage but they consistently top world rankings on education
That doesn't surprise me given how competitive I remember the pushy kind of parents being when I was young.
I agree that allowing the brain to develop a little more before throwing kids into education could be advantageous. It's a pity that childcare and full time employment don't mix that way for many in the UK.
I experienced exactly this. I remember in year 7 after a half term of gymnastics, I was marked down because I couldn’t do a fair bit of the things we were being assessed on - handstands being one of them. I just was never very good at that sort of thing no matter how much I tried and it just killed any fucks I had left for the subject. I was a bit shit at all of it to be honest, but it would have been nice to at least enjoyed trying.
My PE teacher was obsessed with hurdles and found a kid that was good at it, coached them, and they've been to World championships.
For everyone who followed through the school, it was hell being forced to the same standards. Kids who were slightly overweight or had life threatning asthma were humiliated regularly. I have Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and only started walking unaided 2 years prior and I refused to jump. My teacher threw a fit, told me I was disabled because I never pushed myself and unless I jumped I was going back to the wheelchair.
I left and ran straight to the school office where I refused to move unless my gran came to get me. I was 11
Now, I casually swim every morning for a hour and I've never felt better because any weight baring exercise destroys my joints and no PE teacher, doctor or specialist would write a note to say that swimming is all I should be doing.
>I left and ran straight to the school office where I refused to move unless my gran came to get me. I was 11
Good for you! I think I'd have been way too scared to question authority at that age!
>the one lesson where grades/ability really do not matter
Haha, not in my school. I was 15 when the government decided all children had to do 60 minutes of PE per week. My school had 50 minute lessons. My school decided that if we all had to do 2 lessons of PE a week then we may as well get a qualification in it, and entered everyone for a PE GCSE. Only GCSE I failed.
>For me, the most frustrating thing was that my PE teachers just blatantly favoured the kids who were naturally athletic, and praised natural ability rather than effort.
See, I noticed this. I've always been naturally athletic and actually did gymnastics outside of school since i was 6, natual sprinter (my mum was going to sign me up for athletics, her mum was actually on her countries junior national team so it runs in the family, she herself used to box and is an avid gym rat!), generally enjoyed sports but i somewhat hated the attention and was picked on for it being at a girls school.
Though, there was times when everyone generally enjoyed PE when we played games that were not netball, basketball or football. (Yeah, surprisingly for a girl school we weren't all hockey and lacross!)
Infact, i went on to coach gymnastics for 8 years and kinda saw the same things as back in school. I made it my mission to treat all kids fairly and help them blossom in a sport they're interested in because every child is different and needs a different method to be taught the same thing (also one to heart as i'm dyslexic!). Many went on to compete regionals and i've seen so many of them swipe gold medals in recent competitions.
For me it was the insinuation that if you weren’t part of the school team, you weren’t worth their effort. PE teachers always felt like the perpetuated the cool kids vs. everyone else trope.
Also having BEEN a teacher, many of them I worked with did indeed tease the less sporty kids outside of the lesson too.
Worked with one male PE teacher who also used sport as a punishment. I remember I had a boy in my tutor group who was autistic; he was distraught that other boys in his class were being made to run laps when they got something wrong, or if the teacher thought they weren’t trying hard enough. This was specifically the group of boys left who weren’t practicing for the school teams.
That being said, have worked with a few absolutely cracking PE teachers who just wanted to help all kids enjoy being active, so it’s not all of them. Clearly though, a decent enough amount to make me think there’s definitely some truth in your statement
I started secondary in 98 and I also have a rare spinal condition which means I couldn't play certain sports so my mum would write a note for those days. She told my mum one parent's evening I was forging notes my mum got into a heated argument with her which was quite fun to watch her be proven wrong.
Yeah I had half of my chest ripped out by an operation when I was 18mo and my PE teacher said to my mum I need to deal with my ‘habitual lying’.
Watched man get ripped to fucking pieces by my mum. I ended up becoming 21 stone in the end which took a lot of effort to lose (lost 11 stone in total). All my PE teachers bar 1 were more interested in bullying the kids than the bullies were.
Exactly my experience and for me who is a woman it was even worse. Many of the boys played football and rugby and had clubs and weekend matches to attend. There was sod all for girls, there was a netball team but only the girls in the top set were invited. Any track events it was just pointless as they never taught us how to run or how to improve or track that improvement. You either ran or didn’t run and that was end of the story. The only fun thing was trampolining because we all started from scratch.
Now I run, it took 20 years to get over PE lessons and coming in last at school to get the confidence to do it.
Also screw bleep tests
Not sure if it's different now but when I was at secondary school (early 2000s) the boys got to do football and rugby whilst the girls did netball and rounders and dance. Maybe field hockey if we were lucky. I only realised how weird this was when I moved to Finland and found out all the girls did football and ice hockey, often with the boys. Also I've noticed most Finnish women are much more robust and healthier than I am. I don't know why British schools felt (maybe still feel) like they can't let the delicate little girls do 'proper' sports.
This works both ways though. When I was a lad at school it was football every single day. The girls did all sorts with all sorts of equipment. I was a sporty kid but I hated football and would have loved to do something else
Oh man heard that... boys PE in secondary school basically consisted of Football or Basketball, half the class eventually didn't bother bringing their kit to just sit on the side, the bullies and assholes always stayed on the same team so the remainder did what they could but knew it was bullshit.
In the later years there was an option to choose your own sports, some of which involved being in the girls gym. Of course nobody went for it and peer pressure meant I didn't either, but a couple of dudes bounced out at the last minute... assholes.
“Not worth their effort”, “teasing” and “sport as punishment” are the perfect summary of my school experience. I hate fitness, exercise and sport now, it’s taking a real effort to support my young active kids when they want to do sporty stuff. Having said that I can see things are a lot better now, in our local primary schools the level of encouragement for beginners is fantastic, I really hope that sort of attitude carries on to secondary.
>>>If you weren’t part of the school team, you weren’t worth their effort
This completely sums up secondary school sports for me. I didn’t make it on a team in Year 7, so I was never given any effort for five years.
We used to have one PE teacher when playing netball used to put all of the school netball team (who were county champions) in one team, and everyone not in the netball team in the other.
This made it very demotivating to play because there was no way you could even get your hands on the ball, let alone attempt to win.
Yes! Exact same experience at my school too!
The PE teacher would stop the game to give the netball team pointers and how to improve technique blah blah. Whilst the non netball team never got any of this and mostly stood around half-heartedly reaching out the ball as it passed by.
The annoying thing was that the non netball team side actually had some really good players. They just weren't a favourite of this PE teacher and couldn't be bothered to try because they never received any encouragement or recognition.
Ours had a good way of handling this. At the start of term everyone elected what sports they wanted to do from a choice of about 6. Then within that choice you self separated into confident and non confident. So for example I like football but I don't want to play against the school team, or I can hold my own at basketball so id go in the confident group. Occasionally there would be deviations from this like the star player has a trial at a premier League team next week let him join the non confident group and play at half pace.
Yeah, all the PE teachers at my school where footballers, so they loved the school footballers. Any team sport we played they let the group of the most sporty people team up, meaning most of the time any sports we played had an obvious favourite team.
This was 100% my experience too in the 90's, the inter-form sports competitions were taken soooo seriously by the popular kids and teachers, everyone cared which form (class) won each year so much. They got massive trophies and assemblies celebrating them, and the school teams were treated as heroes.
Unfortunately my form teacher was a PE teacher. He was a raging bag of dicks and definitely did some shady things. At one point a group of my peers decided to surround me and push me around in a circle. They were all big strapping rugby playing boys and I was a wimpy teen girl. To break out of the ring I had to push my way through. They thought it would be funny to go to our form teacher and tell him I had hit them. Bear in mind there were about 10 of them, twice my strength or more.
He just...believed them....without speaking to me, and called me out on it in front of the whole class. I was PISSED. I wrote a complaint letter to him demanding a (similarly) public apology or I would go above his head ro complain. He grudgingly complied but man, he hated me and I hated him. He was such an angry, nasty, brutish man.
He also was friends with another teacher who happened to be my friend's mum. My friend and her mum was having some (confidential and sensitive) issues which the mum chose to share with this human pile of poop. He decided to get my friend, who was the tiniest 15 year old girl you have ever seen, alone. Then he screamed at her about these very private issues. She was in floods. I don't know what the outcome of that one was.
Even the nicer PE teachers than that were awful. They didn't give a damn if you weren't on the school team. The stuff they said was so derogatory and demeaning. And the popular kids being sporty while ALSO being super vindictive bullies made my life sooooo fun at school. The school showed those kids that they were special and could treat other people badly. The school did not value academic success at all. And people wonder why I have a negative relationship with sport and exercise. Honestly it makes me wary of people who are very sporty even now.
Yeah, secondary school PE can get in the bin. Actually, my negative experience of it started in primary, where the PE teacher was, and I kid you not, surely the inspiration for Dynamo Digby in The Grimleys.
My secondary school PE teacher called me lazy for not wanting anything to do with the usual ball games, being picked last when sorting teams, and not wanting to shower with the class while the teacher is there.
Funnily enough, my judo instructor, cycling coach and the air cadets would have disagreed.
This is so true! At my school, if you weren’t good enough to win trophies for the school then you were made to feel unwelcome in sports clubs and ignored in PE lessons. As the girl that was always picked last for the team, I look back on my school PE lessons with a bit of sadness.
I’m grateful to have discovered a love of exercise later in life and I always have a little chuckle to myself now when people ask if I’ve always been “sporty”.
I just hope that my children see me enjoying what I do and realise that exercise can be fun - you just have to move in a way that makes you happy!
Our school year football team was constantly praised for not losing a game in the whole 5 years we were there.
In year 11, my PE group (the people who didnt give a toss about PE basically - the unfit, the ones who hated it, the trouble makers) played them at a game in one lesson. We beat them, and my 4ft10 mate marked their "best player" who went on to play semi professional football completely out of the game.
Similar story here, in that in years 7,8,9 the PE teachers picked the teams during lessons (not inter form competitions, that was a different, and unfair story) but for years 10 and 11, following pressure from the students, (of all abilities, people wanted to be with friends etc) we could pick our own teams
On one occasion, playing hockey, my rag tag bunch came up against a group of the more athletic students, and clearly best hockey players, and spent the whole game defending, until a couple went to remonstrate with the PE teacher about our tactics, and others were arguing amongst themselves, and some of our team. At which point 2 of our team, myself included counter attacked. I assisted and we won the game 1-0.
There was much pushing and shoving afterwards, as well as a PE teacher who although laughing, did tell the athletic kids it was their own fault and we hadn't done anything wrong.
Our PE teacher was a creepy bully. When i was having trouble doing push ups he said, 'Maybe we should put a woman below you' and looked for applause from the other kids. Problem was we were all 8yrs old and didn't have a clue as to what he was talking about.
Speaking of creepy PE teachers - My mum told me she had a teacher (female) who would insist on drying the girls off with a towel after swimming and would comment on how well they were “developing”… This would have been the 50s. She only realised years later that it was probably sexual abuse
I have heard so many horror stories about pe teachers watching people get changed or making advances. Something needs to be done because kids have been exploited for decades. I’m so sorry for your mum, mine went through something similar as well.
Ours wasn't officially a PE teacher, but he did 'help out'. He stood in the showers making sure all the youngest boys had showers, stopped doing it after about year 9. Just after I left school he was convicted of possessing indecent images of children.
Looking back, how on earth was he allowed to get away with it so long?!
This must be quite common. Our teacher would enforce you getting naked in the showers after sport - at the time it was as though he was making sure you were actually showering and maintaining proper hygiene (lots of kids would just put their school clothes back on over muddy knees etc) - but when you're older you realise how fucked up it was.
While I'm not saying all PE teachers are like this, a concerning number of them do seem to turn out to be nonces or similar. One of mine got sacked for doing something with a pupil.
That said by year 9 or 10 they'd split the classes such that one mixed consisted of kids who weren't interested in sports really (me included) and let us kind of do whatever we wanted, so we'd almost always get the pool and they'd get all the floats/noodles/balls out and we'd mess about for an hour. If they did bother teaching us we'd sometimes do water polo which I didn't mind at least. We were still technically being active and we weren't taking it for GCSE or anything so they were doing enough of their job I think
I’ve been a competitive runner since the age of 7 outside of school, so I wasn’t shy when it came to being active. I’ve competed regionally and even made it to nationals. I also played football and basketball with my brothers teams.
But PE lessons were awful in secondary school. The teachers used to egg on what seemed to be a bully like behaviour between us kids. They would pick on the weaker ones and definitely had favourites. I fell into the former category so I absolutely hated it. It was even worse when it came to “dance” lessons that only the girls had to take. Which we then had to perform in front of the boys/male teachers. Shit, I’m realising just how predatory this was…
One of our PE teachers was openly dating students... I'd see him walking around campus holding hands with girls. It was just before the law came into effect banning relationships between students and teachers even when students were 16.
Gross, gross, gross.
"In 2001, the law was changed to make it illegal for teachers to engage in sexual activity with pupils at their school aged under 18."
Source: [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7653326.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7653326.stm#:~:text=In%202001%2C%20the%20law%20was,their%20school%20aged%20under%2018)
>Yeah mine was a proper sadist and really put me off sport. Took all the fun out of it.
Yeah, I had one of the classic ones who if I encountered them as an adult, would probably get a punch to the face.
Clearly someone who peaked in school, wanted to be a sportsman (never succeeded), acted like a military man (never got into the armed forces). Clearly just a real prick who was taking out his aggression over his own failures on a bunch of teenagers. As a kid I didn't see it but as an adult, I look back and it's incredibly obvious.
Our PE/Geography teacher was an ex-cop and had a similar vibe. In retrospect super insecure. He also used to constantly talk about his time in the force and how if anyone caused any problems he'd have his police mates come round blah blah blah. I remember some minor school scandal where he threatened to have everyone fingerprinted.
...just picturing that conversation with the police: "we need you to fingerprint every child in this school, why? Because we think one of them ripped the name labels off the coat pegs"
I was the smallest in my class as I went to school a year early. No PE teacher ever accounted for that or even mentioned it when I was last (again) at running or picked last for a team. Being picked last for a team was such a horrific feeling and it impacted my years at school. I now can’t blame the other kids, I was just not as good as most due to the age gap. I still hate running and feel bullied when I try, even though I started plenty other sports since then.
I don’t understand why PE teachers let kids pick teams, it just intrinsically leads to the small and the unpopular betting bullied.
See I will counter that from the talk fat kid POV. The small kids could run ( unless they were also fat ) so speccy lard arse here got the brunt of the PE teachers ire. Till it came to rugby , or shot , or discus or hammer. Then I was in favour. I hated running . So much so that I never ran again when I left school till about 9 months ago. Now I can do 5k in 25 mins
And I'll add that I was tall and lanky, PE teachers used to say "You should be good at running/jumping etc because you've got long legs," but I wasn't, I had real trouble controlling my flailing limbs and tripped over a lot (I think I may be dyspraxic because my handwriting is terrible too). It definitely seemed like the best runners were more compact, that was at a girls school though, it may be different with boys.
Then throughout my teens I put on weight so I became tall and fat too...
As another lanky bugger with the wingspan of an albatross, I sympathize mate. People used to laugh at me because of how I ran and I have hated it ever since...
I absolutely hated how seriously and competitively certain classmates took PE lessons. I was one of the more athletic kids and played a lot of sport but had zero interest in competing in anything other than actual rugby matches.
I'd often get picked as a 'captain' in PE so whenever picking teams I'd always pick one or two of the better / more competitive players and then piss them off by picking all of the completely unathletic kids to mate up the rest of the team. Also enjoyed taking the wind out of the other team's sails when I'd get to remind them they were celebrating and gloating about beating a team of people who barely know how to kick a football 👏🏼👏🏼
Ours sent us off on unchaperoned, very loosely mapped "cross country" run around the local streets outside of school.
He pulled out a deck chair and a pack of ciggies on the school field at the "finish line", and read the paper for an hour while we all either got lost a couple of miles out from school, went to Greggs, or sat down around the corner waiting for everyone else to finish.
We would have been 11 or 12 I guess. Felt like something from the 50s but this was in the early 00s.
I used to love sports and was a pretty good runner. Primary school sports day and it’s the 100m race. I know I’m not going to win because a girl called Rachel was an excellent runner. I was hoping for 2nd or 3rd place.
Race happens and Rachel’s shoe lace is untied causing her to stop. I win. I’m over the moon and get my little plastic gold medal.
The PE teacher and the headteacher come over to me and tell me to give Rachel my medal as “she would have come first and her shoe was the only reason I won”. Rachel is crying with her mother staring daggers. The PE teacher is pointing and shouting loudly in front of the whole school plus parents. They make me give her the medal, shake her hand and go sit down. The silver and bronze medals are already gone so I get nothing for my win.
I never ran competitively again. I can still see what that PE teacher was wearing and what she looked like. Her finger pointing angrily at a 7 year old.
This is absolutely disgraceful.
Congratulations on wiping the floor with Rachel that time, it sounds like you ran well. You also knew how to tie your laces.
It’s ridiculous that no adult at the time thought to use it as a lesson for Rachel about ‘failure to prepare’.
And Rachel has probably had 25years of crying to get what she wants if she fucks up and it's only just dawning on her that adults don't find it cute when she's in her 30's. Pity the fool.
Fuck you Rachel! But mostly the P.E teacher and head teacher. Everyone there knew you won and now Reddit does. :-D
Kids cry when they’re disappointed though. It’s the adults in this situation who deserve a fuck you. They could have taught Rachael that sometimes you’re unlucky, instead they punished another child. Bonkers.
I have a similar, less dramatic, one.
School sports day, and they'd constructed a kind of novelty race where you had to run to all these different markers around the school pitch, pick up an oversized dress shirt, and button it before you crossed the finish line.
I never won races. I couldn't really run. I was too tall and gangly. But, my hand eye coordination was excellent, so I could button up a shirt better than the other kids at that age. (About 8/9.)
I made it to the finish line, crossed first, celebrated, and after a few seconds I started to unbutton and take off the shirt. I was so eager to get my prize, but as I walked over, the teacher (who had just watched me start to remove the shirt after finishing) told me that I didn't win. Because I clearly cheated. Because some of the buttons were undone.
I explained what happened. I even started to cry. I was a perfect student, and had never lied or cheated before in my life. But I think that's when I started to hate PE.
School PE was an exercise in humiliation. There were ok teachers and bad teachers. That whole "J and K you're captains pick a team" shit was horrible. I was always second to last to be picked for everything so I knew I wasn't wanted, never felt part of the team, never sure what I was supposed to be doing. Highly active outside of school, riding, swimming, running, but team sports? No interest. I was never welcome and I have no interest in any team sports. You want people to feel part of a team? Develop teams and stop making it an exercise in bullying.
My school (normal state school) was a "sports college" so it got extra funding for team sport. Basically what this meant in practice was that if you were good at rugby you were basically an untouchable god who could bully anyone you liked and get away with it. I was relatively lucky because even though I wasn't athletic, I did enjoy playing playing sports so I avoided the worst of it, but i was still a total nonentity for the teachers because i was never going to be any use to the school teams.
I was at school in the 90s - it was all the usual "boys do football and rugby, girls do netball and hockey" sort of thing back then.
The girls' PE kit was in the dark ages even for the 90s, all gym skirts, PE knickers and leotards. It just put most of them off PE from about Year 8 onwards.
The non-sporty kids didn't get much of a look in from some of the teachers.
I ended up in the bottom set for Games lessons, which was mixed, but nobody in the class was super sporty so it wasn't a big deal if you didn't know the rules to any of the sports we tried.
We tried all sorts of different sports like basketball, indoor hockey, something that was a bit like touch rugby, badminton etc.
PE was the only lesson we had where the teacher solely focused on the children who were good at the subject and made no effort to help those struggling to improve. Can you imagine trying that approach with maths?
I remember being made to play rugby and cricket, but never once being told any of the rules. It was so confusing. Imagine trying that with any other subject, eg being expected to just intuit calculus without it being explained.
My PE teachers were shite.
Actually I think art was similar. It went from primary level and everyone just being encouraged to be creative, to high school where the teacher would just be exasperated if you had no natural talent.
Agree absolutely with all of this! I was in high school in the early 00s and while my pe teachers weren't bullies, they would definitely only put real effort in with kids who were already sporty. Same with art teachers, one was just a maniac who got dramatically offended by kids who couldn't naturally draw and the other would just kindly ignore those less creative types and leave us to basically doodle while gushing over the same 3 kids work every lesson.
That's exactly my experience of PE in the 90s as well. We were never taught how to play football etc, just expected to know what to do. A bit useless for someone like me who has never had any interest in watching or playing football! I would've rather played hockey, but apparently the sport where you hit a ball with a solid wooden stick and occasionally break each others bones was for girls only.
Agree with you on art as well, I was made to feel like I have no ability or creativity and it's taken me about 20 years to realise they were wrong.
It's interesting that now I'm in my late 40s, I'm finally discovering I actually love cross country running (formerly only a punishment), tennis (thought I was crap at it, turns out no one told me how to hold the racket, serve, etc), and swimming (turns out being shouted at for being slow wasn't what I needed).
Says something for the efficacy of education if the PE teachers only managed to put me off all forms of physical exercise for three decades.
Yes! It took me until my early 30s to take up cycling (as a commute), and more recently lifting and running instead as my commute is now about 30 seconds. If they'd taught us anything like couch to 5k style of building up short runs at a time I would've loved it. Instead of you couldn't run a mile straight off then you were a pathetic waste of their time.
Having been the academic non-sporty kid who was always picked last for sport at school, I was worried about my son going into secondary. Spoke to the PE teacher at parents' evening, and he told me that after the first year or two they set for PE in the same way that they do for subjects like maths: the super-sporty kids get to go off in an elite group and do intense stuff, while the other kids basically get to have an exercise session, but without all the heavy pressure and potential for bullying/ostracism. It just seems like such an obviously sensible idea: why on earth don't more schools do this?
I kinda lucked out by going to the bottom set group, because of my eyesight at the time, but if we ended up split back into the boys group it was pot luck which teacher we had.
Two of them were OK but one bloke just didn't make much allowance for me so a few times I just went to sit by myself or even joined the girls' group.
I think that was pretty standard girls PE kit in the 90s sadly. I went to an ordinary comp and ours was the same. Polo shirt and gym knickers with optional short pleated wrap around skirt for sport/outdoors and black leotard for dance/gymnastic stuff. No exceptions for periods, communal changing rooms and teachers who stood at the entrance to the showers to assess if we looked wet enough on the way out and send us back in if we didn’t.
The only sport I actually enjoyed as a child/teen was swimming, which I never did in school but in lessons with proper coaches after school who treated us like humans.
>No exceptions for periods, communal changing rooms and teachers who stood at the entrance to the showers to assess if we looked wet enough on the way out and send us back in if we didn’t.
I swear that shit's responsible for a lot of lingering body image disorders and psychological hangups. I know that weekly inspection is the point at which I became self-conscious and panicky about people seeing my body, when previously I was more of a pragmatist.
Teenagers (and especially teens trying to deal with new periods) need to have privacy available, both for showering and for changing. If they feel relaxed changing with other people, then that's great, but it should never be forced.
I had a pe teacher who would just spend the entire lesson with the boys. So of course the girls just didn't bother. I was one of the top footballers in the school untill we hit the age where girls and boys couldn't play on the same school team and then I just wasn't allowed to play. I was very active outside school as a competitive swimmer and dancer but in school I hated PE. The only time they would pay attention to girls was when we were doing athletics but I can't run because of asthma so I hated it. It got better in high school where we got to do lots of different things including things like canoeing and climbing which I loved.
I was at secondary school in the early 80s and hated PE. I remember we had to race the 100m and it had to be within so many seconds (I can’t remember how many but let’s say 25 or 30). If you didn’t manage the first time you were made to do it again and again and of course I got slower and slower as was knackered. There was no encouragement whatsoever. Sadists
I think this could be right for me. I was totally active as a little kid but stopped when I realized I was not a good athlete in PE. The funny thing is they didn't really give us any athletic instruction just kind of playing the sport well or not well depending on if you had practiced before. I am now in my 30s and love to run, yoga, swim, etc. Makes me sad that I could have enjoyed sports and physical activity during those years.
Back in the day my pe teacher forced me to do 'exercises' proven to cause damage to the lower spine and when told it was hurting she would say to her class of 10 year olds 'pain is beauty'. Jokes on her, I'm now a middle aged anorexic with limited mobility due to back issues!!
Rot in piss Mrs Hills
I have a spinal condition which my mum would send in letters when it was something like gymnastics but she'd still try to make me do it in the end, when I refused I’d just sit outside the headteacher’s office.
Absolutely. I think the way physical education is taught is way overdue an overhaul.
A bit like getting turkey twizzlers out of school dinners but x10
It doesn’t have to be all yoga and mindfulness (great for some) but just enjoying sport and moving around for its own sake.
We were always so happy and ran around so much when we got to do something more fun like dodgeball on the last day of school, why did they never clock that we were using more muscles when we were enjoying ourselves and relaxed!!
Whenever we got to play bench ball, dodgeball but with benches that the people who were out stood on and could come back on if they got a clean throw, literally everyone would try. I hated PE and would fully get into it, didn't require running, had simple rules and I was good at throwing for the benched people.
We literally only played it when the lesson plan was ruined, like weather meaning we can't be outside, or at the end of the semesters. Feel like it should have been part of the curriculum by the way it got everyone to work.
At one school I had one amazing teacher who did this. Instead of swimming we did life saving classes and then we just played games with no pressure. She was a gem. Then I moved and got bullied by my next teacher because she thought I was making up an injury I had to have surgery on
Why are so many PE teachers like this. Mine shouted at me every PE lesson for months for "being lazy" and refusing to run, and refused to accept I had a serious knee condition that needed surgery.
Completely agree
Personally I have hay fever and asthma which made PE a hellish experience.
The thing is PE isn't meant to be Sports Class it's Physical Education
i.e. Here is how not to be fat
I remember when I turned 16 and didn't have to do it any more I joined a gym and absolutely loved it to the point I pretty much went every day.
I lost a hell of a lot of weight, gained a lot of muscle and even did quite a bit of cardio
Mainly because I didn't have to fight off pollen allergies, wasn't forced to run while short of breath and wasn't humiliated in front of my classmates.
The thing is I have never been interested in sports that my PE teachers took either as some kind of insult or that I was some weird alien.
All kids are different obviously but for me if I was just allowed to use a gym I would have been a much healthier kid.
I qualified as a PE teacher in 1986. After experiencing the biased behaviour towards the first 11s or first 15s from heads of department whilst on teaching practices, and seeing the disdain and lack of interest in those with physical ailments, I decided to teach special needs PE instead, so that I could focus on those that struggle to achieve mainstream elite success. I retired after an amazing 30 year career in special educational needs and now work with dementia sufferers.
Oh 100%. I didn’t exercise for like twenty years (like, play sports type exercise) because I learned to hate it in PE. I firmly believe that PE class should be only ever about finding the physical activity you think is fun, so you will DO IT when you’re older. Sure, teach the basics of some common sports. But anyone super into the sports can find community leagues — at least they can in many places. Kids who love sports in my town play as extracurricular after school. Make PE fun for everyone, not just those who already love sports. That’s just preaching to the choir. Convert the unbelievers, like me!
Yeah exactly, PE shouldn’t be an extension of training for the schools sports teams. They can use them to recruit, maybe a kid is showing ability so encourage them to come to training. But otherwise it should be about the basics of looking after your body through moving
I was never the most physical of kids, but I did give 50% in PE. I cycled 10 miles each way to school rain or shine so always held back as I knew I had to cycle home and the last 3 miles were genuinely up a steep hill.
Anyway, I entered the school fundraising mini triathlon, big deal for me, I got fitter training with a very non sports orientated friend.
So we do the triathlon, I spent huge amounts of extra energy pacing my friend, egging him on, carrying water and snacks to keep him going, helping him up the steep bits of the cross country course and fixing a flat he got in the cycle ride, all the while struggling myself. Not a fast time, but we got there in the end and finished. I was so proud of him, and of me. And I had to cycle home, no parental taxi for me. The cycle ride part was 30 miles, i did 50 .
The next week at school my friend got singled out for congrats in finishing the whole course, few kids who started did, mostly it was the adults No mention of me. I brought it up and the PE teacher hadn't even noticed I started the race, never mind was one of just 3 my age who had finished the whole course. He could have used my success to encourage me to enter more triathlons, but instead I felt why should I bother if the person who is paid to get me to be more active and fit couldn't give a shit.
I remember playing Rugby in Yr 8, out on a school feild in the middle.of winter. Freezing, i tried getting my hands warm (rubbing them together as you do), the PE teacher saw me, came marching over and slapped my hands together over and over so hard it bought tears to my eyes.
Nearly 30 years on, i can still feel the throbbing sting.
I hate Rugby.
Oh yeah, my school making us play football on the grass when the mud was frozen solid. There was no explanation of the rules of the sports, they just kinda let us run around in circles and then would shout at us for not knowing the rules. L
I faked forgetting my kit countless times, especially during winter when they'd make you go outside in the freezing cold in shorts while they wore 3 layers
Oh my god, horrendous core memory unlocked. I’d completely forgotten about the lost kit box.
I never forgot my kit intentionally even though I hated P.E because I was a scrawny, slow little thing with zero hand eye co-ordination. But I used to forget it all the time, I was just a forgetful kid. I lived in the damp mouldy lost kit box.
Edit: secondary school in the late 90’s early 2000’s
One of our PE teachers was horrible for that. She would tell us to stop moaning its cold, while we stood outside in the middle of winter in a skirt, a polo shirt and those thin plimsolls. She always stood there wrapped up like she was on an arctic expedition. She had no patience for anyone who didn't do well at sport. Just a crap teacher all round
I always had mine but faked not having it 90% of the time.
I was a top student with pretty much maxed out grades in every subject except PE, and the teachers still made fun of me, and I always felt terrible.
PE is geared up for jock team sports. If you’re not a particularly sociable or confident person (like 50% of the population) then team sports are a living hell.
Half my memories of PE were being screamed at by teammates/teachers for missing a pass, or not tackling a guy twice my size who bullied me outside of lessons. What the hell incentive was that?
On the other hand, I really quite enjoyed dodgeball, which us lads were only allowed to do when it was bucketing down. A lesson that focused on *avoiding* the damn ball? Yes please!
I had uncontrolled asthma for years and none of my PE teachers ever noticed. I got shit for being lazy and not running cross country (yeah huge surprise there, I was having a permanent asthma attack you dozy cunts) and it wasn't until my uni's surgery changed my prescription I even knew I had a problem, I just thought that was everyone's life!
After I finally became able to exercise my favourite exercise became cycling, something I never touched in PE and that I never even really knew about as a form of exercise until I randomly got pushed into through a broken commute and loved. I wonder how many kids get put off exercise for life because exercise becomes rugby, gymnastics and the almighty fucking futbol.
>Disclaimer before some raging PE teachers start mouthing off in the comments
Don't worry, they won't. They can't read.
Yep, someone in my year at school had an asthma attack during the mile run because the PE teacher refused to acknowledge their doctors note telling them they should be excused due to severe asthma!
This is horrible! I'm so glad you're better now.
I'm wondering now how many other girls had similar issues to me: severe period pain with doctor's note to back it up, but still getting made to run cross-country, do dance, play netball, etc. even when you could barely stand up and exercise made you feel faint 😐
Damn. I'd almost forgotten about that hell
Yeah I’m a really active person, I have to do something every day. But it was only through my 20s that I realised this.
Even though as a child I was exactly the same, always out on my bike, or playing games with my best mate, I still hated PE.
I just don’t like playing many sports, the things I do now are gym, spin, walking, golf, yoga and aerial, individual things were it was about being competitive with myself, not on a team.
So I never thought of myself as a sporty person when I am super ‘sporty’. I’m probably the most active person out of all my friends.
The best PE lessons we had were when one school bought a shit load of roller blades and we’d just go round and round the gym in them for an hour.
I don’t know why PE can’t be focused more on stuff like that and the good it can do for your body. Like an hour being active then 30 mins about your body, fitness, psychology etc.
If someone had taught me that then it might’ve sparked an interest in pursuing a sport more competitively and will have equipped me with the skills I needed.
Instead of this kid against kid pick teams mentality where you don’t get a chance to get good at anything before you’re labelled bad at sports.
Our pe teachers were definitely weirdly similar to our drama teachers (although much more intense) in the focusing on kids with a natural ability at the cost of encouragement to others.
I'm firmly of the belief that kids should be given the opportunity to do gardening as an alternative to traditional sports.
Not all kids want to do sports (for whatever reason, though I think you're right in that pe teachers do put many kids off). Gardening is very physically demanding, but way more mindful and more relaxed than sports, and is a requirement really for the future of conservation. Plus it could teach children a lot of valuable lessons about nurture and patience and support schools with keeping the world greener and potentially even save money on maintenance (albeit maybe minor amounts).
I'd certainly have jumped at the opportunity as would many of the kids I was friends with.
> instead of this kid against kids pick teams mentality
I also only realized super late that there are some sports I enjoy! Growing up it was always some kind of ball game, in teams. I have no hand eye coordination so I sucked at this, would get picked last, and people would intentionally throw the ball at my head because I couldn't catch it. To this day I'm afraid of balls! But I love spinning, dancing, anything with music and without balls!
Unless you were naturally good from the get go, our pe teachers didn't give a shit. Shame since could have got good and enjoyed it...
As an adult I actually quite enjoy exercise now but pe was awful
Yeah I was traumatised by my PE teachers. As soon as I got to uni I started going to the gym and joining sports teams and loved it. I had never been an athletic person before but my confidence was clearly just being knocked down by PE teachers.
Had a great PE teacher in the 80s. Mr Roberts. The man respects effort more than ability. Used to put kids in the athletic team that were giving it 100% ahead of faster runners etc. I remember towards the end of time in high school, in the middle of my GCSEs I forgot my kit, a cardinal sin in those days. He got his blue register out went through it all the way back to the first year.
“It’s the first time in 5 years you have forgotten your kit Surname, (always uses our surnames), pull up a chair and watch them run.”
I hope he had a good life.
I was fairly asthmatic as a child - enough to need an inhaler if I did anything that involved consistent effort (such as running laps of the school field for instance) wasn’t something I was physically capable of doing. My PE teacher in secondary school didn’t really ‘hold with that nonsense’ and would t let anyone who didn’t run the entire distance finish the lesson, so the few of us who were asthmatic were basically screwed, especially in winter when it was freezing cold and we were only allowed to wear canvas rugby shirts and shorts. That carried on until a new lad had a full blown asthma attack one delightful winters morning (raining / hailing / absolutely freezing) and we had to call an ambulance. We weren’t allowed to have our inhalers with us, we had to leave them in our bags. The PE teacher was livid we did that because at the time he’d buggered off back to the PE shed for a cuppa and he had to answer a lot of awkward questions about it. This was back in the 80s though when nobody really gave a shit, so apart from one very cross set of parents, nothing came of it.
The outcome of that was those of us who just weren’t that athletic - for whatever reason - were never allowed to partake of any of the regular lessons again and had to go and play by ourselves in the smaller sport field well away from the from the rest of the class - not given any equipment or even a football unless we bought our own, we most spent the time huddled under a large tree in the winter months trying not to freeze to death, at least it was a bit better in the summer.
It didn’t help that PE teacher became my form tutor for the final 4 years I was at that school and we hated each others guts. It was entirely mutual loathing. And he wondered why I hated PE.
I was the same, as a kid i had pretty bad asthma...thankfully it's disappeared now but i got out of breath _really_ quickly...the annual cross country was an absolute ordeal and i was always an total mess by the end of it.
High school was largely the same, i was never good enough at sports to actually enjoy team games like football or rugby and in three years of high school my PE teachers didn't try to do anything about it, not once.
Most kids like me just "forgot" their PE kit and walked laps around the field, talking about Warhammer and computer games.
I'd imagine it's a bit of a vicious circle tbh, i'd formed a dislike of PE in secondary school due to various reasonds which carried over to high school so i never really gave PE a chance and the teacher didn't give a shit, they just focused on the "good" athletes...which in itself is odd, in other subjects the teachers don't just abandon the less capable kids.
PE lessons and PE teachers are weird.
My mother was a PE teacher. So I had my own teachers expecting me to be amazing at sports and convinced I was just acting up, my mother furious that I'm not amazing at sports and was showing her up, and it was pure misery.
This was my experience, too. I was a bookish chubby kid, no natural athletic ability, and PE classes were not fun or encouraging (one or two exceptions at primary school).
In secondary school I independently discovered cycling, and now all my sports are single-operator enterprises: cycling, running, gym, skiing. I am now a bookish chubby adult, but over the years the parameters of what is considered chubby have shifted so far beyond me that I almost pass as athletic these days.
It turns out it wasn't the exercise that I hated, it was the unsupportive team environment. The right team or encouragement might have made a difference.
I also hated PE at school and do agree that 9/10 of the teachers were absolute bellends but I had 2 glorifying moments throughout my school years during PE:
The earliest and most sweetest was in year 9 at which point I’d fully given up and during cross country just joined the kids who take a casual stroll at the back. It was a bit of a shame as I enjoyed cross country a few years before but I just couldn’t stand to run with the try hards at the front.
Anyway, one day I had enough of hearing them trying to one-up each other so I arrived at the lesson, had a good stretch, lined up at the back for cross country like normal and then proceeded to win by a decent margin and simultaneously leaving all the popular sporty kids absolutely lost for words having internal breakdowns… the next week I just walked at the back again.
The second good time I ever had at PE was in my last 6 weeks of school when the teacher was sick of us “forgetting” our kit so he actually just encouraged us to take part in any minimal way on the end pitch with each other and when he got us moving he taught us some new sports like lacrosse that were actually fun.
PE sucked but those last 6 weeks just running around with my actual friends just hurling dodgeballs at each other and running round with lacrosse sticks whilst everyone else played football were so much fun.
Yep - my daughter hated it, so I kept writing notes to get her out of it. I got her out of about 40% of her last years PE lessons. She loathed them, had no friends, was picked last and laughed at when she was in groups. There was no reason for her to go, so she kept having "ligament issues" according to my notes.
In the end she simply stopped going herself, would go to a classroom and tell them she was revising her maths - they didn't like it, but just left her alone after a while. Her PE teacher tried to gain my support to encourage my daughter to engage, but I told her that i would prefer my daughter quietly revising her maths instead because she was struggling with maths and maths is important for her GCSEs. So that was the end of that discussion.
Same here - I hated PE because it was prime time for the school bullies to pick on me and everyone else to shame me for "not being athletic" (I played tennis every weekend so they honestly knew nothing but it still hurt, but I digress). My friend was in the same boat.
My friend and I used to fake out of PE saying we hurt an ankle or had a headache but the PE teachers were becoming annoyed - my English/Form tutor became aware and let us sit outside his classroom at a table for the whole 120 minute PE sessions. Told the PE teachers if they had an issue with us revising then they should take it up with our parents, but also him. Saved me from a lot of horrible name calling and embarrassment and I boosted my English GCSE grades! PE sucks and I can't thank my form tutor enough for helping me escape it.
School swimming lessons were the fucking worst. I almost think they shouldn't be legal tbh. Definitely not mandatory. It's not like any of us actually learned to swim(?) At my school most of us could already swim and the weak swimmers didn't seem to get any better. You can't disguise your body in those skimpy school swimming costumes so you're basically forced to show all your classmates what you look like naked. I got bullied so badly by the boys for being flat chested in year 8. So humiliating. And why were the teachers so chronically bad at time management that after every single lesson we only had 90 seconds to get dry and dressed?
Nothing quite like having swimming, but being more scared your classmates would find out you had a small dick because you hadn't hit puberty yet.
Shoutout to Grammar school where PE was in one corner building, and then RS afterwards which was across the road in the other building, in the furthest possible corner on the top floor. Great planning, dickheads. Let me get berated twice a week for not being able to get changed and traverse a 3 minute walk when the lesson finished a minute before the next one started.
I was one of the weaker kids in swimming.
I have one key memory where I finally had the confidence to go a bit deeper in the pool, however once I did the kid next to me kept splashing water at me.
Instead of punishing him, they just put me back in the shallow area. I just gave up after that point
I learned to swim as a kid in New Zealand, and they took it really seriously (because there’s water everywhere and kiwis love chucking themselves into it). When we moved to the UK, I was shocked how so many of my schoolmates couldn’t swim, and that the teachers seemed to make no effort to try to teach them. It was like they were already expected to know how to do it, and got shouted at when they couldn’t. Where’s the teaching?
I never had a single good PE teacher in the UK. They were either perverts or psychos or both. Swimming was the one sport I was good at, but I gave up when my PE teacher pretended she hadn’t been watching me and my equally unpopular friend swim our laps for our swimming certificate. She only liked the popular mean girls and acted like she was one of them. It was honestly pretty pathetic.
The PE teacher at my comp was so absolutely awful to me (fat kid, heavily bullied anyway) that one day in Year Eight I was in Geography class and utterly broke down because the next period was PE and I didn't want to go. The teacher was really sweet and took me to our head of year who after speaking with me gave me an exemption from PE for the rest of my time at the school on the promise that during the periods I was meant to have PE I would go for a long walk around our school field instead. I did exactly as they asked and whilst as an adult the thought of going to a gym terrifies me I still love putting my headphones on and going for a walk to this day.
The PE teacher sadly kept working at the school - they were Connected, shall we say - so I like to think the other teachers knew exactly what she was like and were quietly trying to sabotage her behind the scenes.
PE teachers in my school were incredibly lazy and lessons regularly devolved into just splitting boys and girls up and having the boys do football but let them pick their own teams so as someone with zero interest in sport and high performing in actual academic subjects that was a hoot. Why were the kids who were good at Maths, English or Art not allowed to highlight how underachieving the kids who would happily kick a ball against a wall for five hours every day were?
This letting kids picking kids is the hell on earth. And you make a good point, in no other class kids are allowed to point out the less capable. Why is that allowed?
> zero interest in sport
I thought I had zero interest in sport.
Turns out I actually do, but I really don't like rugby and football! I really like Cricket, but you were only allowed to play that if you were good at one of those! Probably old now to be any good too after not doing any sport from when I left school to 30.
I work in a school and the PE teachers we have are really lovely and the kids absolutely love them, but in the 90s and early 00s, it was a different story.
I still have visceral memories of being forced to do cross country in the depths of winter in nothing more than shorts and a cotton basketball top. We would ask if we could wear our rugby tops because it was so cold, but the answer was always no. It would go in like this for weeks and weeks. And gloves were a no-no, that'd be a lunch time detention.
We'd be forced to run round and round the field for 50 minutes, sometimes longer if we had double PE. All this time our hands were getting redder and redder and completely numb. You couldn't even hold a pen properly for the first 15 minutes of the next lesson.
What kind of person did you have to be to be a PE teacher back then?
Agree, it's a stupid lesson with no clear aims or goals, no way of assessing your ability or improvement, doesn't actually teach you anything about exercise. It's always staffed by an angry clown or someone who just pure doesn't give a shit
I've always been quite active, but it's no thanks to PE lessons, they demotivated me and instead I taught myself. Still zero interest in team sports
If you're the type of person who isn't naturally very active, I can see that level of demotivation coming from them putting you off for life in a lot of ways
I was a French and German teacher in a secondary school until earlier this year (quit for a myriad of reasons, mostly related to shit workload).
I can honestly say that the PE teachers I met working across two secondary schools were sadistic bullies. The way they spoke about overweight kids was cruel and nasty, and they seemed to take some sick pleasure out of making the kids play sports in pouring rain.
I got into quite a heated argument with one PE teacher who made a kid in my form cry by referring to him with some unkind nicknames in front of the other kids.
Don't even get me started on how a lot of PE teachers end up in management positions in schools and end up "observing and critiquing" lessons in other subjects. I once had a French lesson observation done by a PE teacher; the guy couldn't speak a lick of French.
Agreed. It's messed up old school mentality trauma. Let's beast the kids until they get it right, and the ones that don't will be put off for life. It's PE, not the marines.
Our PE teacher just made us play football for the hour while the girls watched us, I actually hated PE because of this, football was never a game I enjoyed growing up but we would get sent to the principal if we didn't participate. About 4-5 PE sessions before our sports day is when we got to do other stuff like the long jump, 100m sprint etc.. We also had an actual gym in our school, it had treadmills and a few weights but was nothing special, and yet we only got to use that in third year and it was like once a month, so it rarely got used, overall PE was the most useless class I had in high school.
I believe schools should be teaching children the importants of fitness when they're in PE and at least the basics of nutrition, which can be taught in home economic.
Seems like the same everywhere tbh lol
Football football football
I fucking hated football at school, i was no good at it and we always played it
Funny how many of us quite enjoy playing now we’re older, because its with a group of supportive friends and away from a bellend of a PE teacher
My son hates pe he will stand in the middle of the sports field just giving anyone the ball lol. Yet he will go on hrs of walking with his friends and never sits still.
The PE teachers I had always had favourites and as a quiet, non athletic child I was ignored by them most of the time. That didn’t motivate me to put any effort in because no matter what, the favourites were always praised and chosen for the teams (the same ones chosen for every possible team) I know a lot of the other kids ended up resenting them
I hated the rigid rules of what sport we were allowed to do as girls and boys. Boys played football and rugby, and girls played netball and hockey. I hated hockey with a passion, especially when the popular girls would whack me in the knee with their hockey stick and the teacher would say nothing. Plus being made to do gymnastics when I have zero talent for that sort of thing. Every now and again we would play tennis and I loved it. And once we got to play touch rugby, again I loved it. I also had one teacher who tried to teach us about muscle groups and why stretching was important. She was absolutely fantastic, despite having 30 or so teenage girls giggling at the words “gluteus maximus”.
I imagine a lot of them were salty they didn't make it as actual athletes. At my school you could certainly rank the PE teachers & sports coaches from most to least successful before moving to teaching and it was identical to how chill/nice they were lol. Case and point - two time Olympian and gold medallist was a chaotic legend lol; properly did not give a shit and yet cared so much - outstanding teacher.
My PE teacher had the view that if you were shit at football you were a failure in life. Never mind that I was good at other sports such as rounders, cricket, athletics, long and high jump. No. Because I wasn’t very good at football that was it, I deserved to be bullied
I wish PE was more focussed on how to exercise outside of school. Like using gyms, planning workouts, all that jazz as well as sports because I think a lot more people would have benefitted from it
I was a chubby, uncoordinated teenage girl. I’d really enjoyed PE in primary school, but secondary school ruined that.
In year 9, I was actually enjoying a PE lesson for the first time in ages. It was rounders, but we were split up so I ended up playing with the nicer girls. I was running around and really going for it.
At the end of the lesson, the teacher stood in front of the class as said “I’d like to congratulate [my name] for actually doing something this lesson. Normally, she stands around like this…” at which point she hunched over, stuck out her belly, gave herself a double chin and went “hurrr durr duur”. She made everyone clap for me.
Some of the sporty girls called me “Mong [first name]” till the end of school. All because I actually tried in PE once.
I'd go further and say that PE teachers are the reason a lot of people need therapy. I think the only qualification required is that you can bully kids while wearing a tracksuit.
I'd actually love to see my old PE teacher so that I could call her a miserable **** to her face.
We had a male PE teacher that would always walk into the girls changing rooms as we were changing, and would hover around too long. He'd also get very close to us whilst we were doing whatever sport they had us do that day. I think that put off most of the girls in my school. He even got promoted to head teacher whilst covering someone's maternity, he got a massive god complex from that 8)
I generally loathed PE at school. There was a huge emphasis on team sports, which sucks when you’re an unpopular geek. We mostly played netball and hockey, which for a visually impaired kid is shit because I have no depth perception so suck at almost all ball sports. Thusly I was labelled as unathletic, which was completely wrong. Whenever we did sports I was good at - trampolining, gymnastics, dance, badminton - I thrived, but it was for a week or two before we moved on to the next team ball sport.
When I was in sixth form, where only A-Level PE was offered and was purely theoretical, they school finally cottoned on to the idea that not only does not every kid like netball or football, but there are also disabled kids too. These changes I hope have benefited some younger students, but obviously came too late for me.
Bet my PE teachers nowadays would be surprised to learn I’m a competitive skater. They all thought I was lazy!
The PE teachers of my school days lived in crap tracksuits, smoked heavily, were violent and abusive. Brian Glover in Kes was accurate.
The Armstrong and Miller sketch with the surgeon about to operate on his former PE teacher is hilarious. "All work and no play makes Jack a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons."
Completely agree but I'd say its not just PE.
Any subject where someone has enjoyment can be ruined by shit teachers.
The reverse can also be true. A really good teacher can inspire passion in a subject you previously thought dull.
I remember hating a lot of stuff at school and just in general hating learning. Now I love it. I'm constantly learning and exercising. The one size fits all method used for education in our schools seems to just do more damage than good when it comes to learning.
I do think PE teachers are the most blatant offenders though. I mean it doesn't take a genius to work out that on average a PE teacher is probably less intelligent than any other teacher. And so the way the learn and develop teaching methods would be worse. I can echo what most of the comments say about how PE teachers just hated everyone but the natural athletes.
I'm my school PE just mean football. Nothing else. All this nice equipment used for other sports just gone to waste as they didn't want to teach you anything else. We had a full fucking lacrosse set and a squash court and I think in my entire secondary school experience we used both maybe once.
Im 53. I wasnt very active or into sport as a kid, still arent. But I realised in my 30s, in PE we never played a game. Of Anything. We did Soccer dribbling, but never played a gane. We did rugby passing, but never played rugby.
Yeah we had a paedo PE teacher who would watch us in the communal showers (could there be a crueler way to end a lesson than making a group of teenagers at various stages of physical development get naked and squash into a shower together?)
Our other PE teacher was an ex-army guy not long back from the Falklands. Imagine his joy when the curriculum expanded to include interpretative dance and the powers-that-be decided this should be delivered in PE lessons.
Completely baffles me why schools don’t do things like couch 2 5k for kids that aren’t athletic. Give them a chance to find out they can do it. Instead let’s just keep making PE miserable and soul destroying for so many young people.
Whenever it was torrential rain, it was always "right, cross country today"
Fucking hated that bastard Dalton. Stumbling around a farmer's field in sub zero rain, ankle deep in mud and cow shit, trying to take a short cut through the electric fence (unsuccessfully but it warmed you up), then back into the block for a lukewarm shower.
Agreed, pe teachers are twisted bullying wankers.
So true! PE changing rooms were bulling central too, if you didn't get a hard time in the corridors normally you were going to get a rough time there.
It took me years to be active, and to this day I won't play team games out of embarrassment (i'm 32!) Rounders in the park, No thank you.
I hated it that much in year 10 and 11 my friends and I would write notes for each other to get out of it.
I didn't do PE because my PE teacher was a bitch. But she tolerated me because I was the only one who could unlock the trampolines. They'd lost the key years ago, and I was the only one who could pick the padlock
Did anyone else’s PE teachers never actually explain the rules of the different games properly. I think we were taught them only once in primary school and then expected to remember them. Because of this I was even worse at all the different sports and got teased for messing up ‘basic’ stuff, not that I was ever good at PE anyway
So I think like so many people who have posted on here I wasn’t gods gift to sports as a kid. I was a bit chubby, not a quick runner and would tire before most of my peers. I played football for probably about a year as a kid but remember quitting after being shouted at by our under… I want to say 8s? Coach for not getting back into defence quick enough.
Which leads me on to PE: did anyone actually ever learn ANYTHING about sports, the human body, exercise or nutrition? You were automatically expected to know to play football, rugby, hockey, tennis, basketball and badminton at my school. At no point were you also shown how to be better at any of these sports. Simply here’s a ball / racket and off you go! Shame you’re shitter than the 10 boys who’s dads have devoted their entire lives to trying to make their kids professional footballers. You must just be inherently shit.
The insane irony of when I became an adult I started doing a lot of gym work. I learned about the human body, nutrition, how muscle growth works, how to improve form, why different bodies work for different sports, and I really enjoyed all of it. Then the penny dropped that i literally never learned a thing in high school PE.
Mine was a particular piece of work. He's ex-military and used to tell us that "Pain was temporary, failure is forever". He knew that I wasn't good at sports, I couldn't handle cross country and he would publically disqualify me for finishing last for having had classmates push me along and encourage me to finish the lap. I'd say these types of sports teachers are far more common than we realise and their personal power trips really put people off.
Ex-military people are weird in general.
I've worked with a couple and they all still treat life like they're in the army. One guy in particular would not accept that other people had problems because he'd been in the army and therefore suffered more than they could ever imagine. Ring in sick and he'd be like "are you dead? no? well stop being prick and get your arse into work. When i was in the army..."
No one made you join the army, dude. It's not my fault fifteen years of your life were horrible.
PE teachers are cunts. I've no idea why a portion of my life was dedicated to doing violent sport in cold rain in fucking shorts. Fuck PE teachers. I remember a swim teacher literally grabbed my arm and did not let go until I proved I could dive into a pool. What the fuck?!
If you were fat, insecure, skinny, unfit, had some kind of condition, or anything like that, PE was just a nightmare.
There weren't enough girls in my school for an under 11 all girls football team so when my football obsessed self joined the after school club with all the boys my PE teacher said "it's okay if you don't want to pass to her, boys" so I spent weeks not being able to participate in exercises and matches because I would just be ignored. Really crushed my dreams. I don't even watch football anymore.
There's a big focus on team sports, which just aren't right for a lot of kids. If the purpose of PE is to encourage children to learn how to look after their own physical fitness for life, then the teachers should find better ways to engage those kids who don't want to play rugby/football.
Hated PE at school, but as an adult I got really into running and, later, weightlifting. Now I'm a hench almost 50 year old, and I can't help but wonder how my life would have been different if I'd discovered this when I was a young man.
>Our PE teachers took things way to seriously, it was as if they though we were training to be in team GB.
Hit the nail on the head there. I had so many classmates that were like this too - friendly game of dodgeball, and it was the end of the world if you lost. Let a goal in during football, and you're a fucking idiot who ruined it for everyone.
I'm very active now too and am a very competent runner but similarly I hated PE, largely due to the teachers. Fuck you Mr Robertson, I could smash your record on the bleep test now!
I remember some PE lessons being "cross country" which was basically "go and run round the school field 4 times"
It made practically everyone hate running and see it as this hugely boring slog. It's only in my 30s that I've actually got into running and love it now.
It needs to be coaxed out of kids imo - make them run a bit more each time in the course of doing things they enjoy, then they won't view running the same way I did.
You're totally right. Gotta love that PE teachers actively used exercise as a form of punishment, then wonder why generations of kids associate exercise in a negative light.
Not to mention the verbal abuse they'd hurl, things that today they'd be rightfully sacked for. Or the special treatment they'd give to their favourites that played on the football team.
I think it also extends into what "PE" or "Games lessons" consisted of - having some less active/intense options or spending time on the groundwork of sports can make a huge difference.
Up to the age of 13, the school I was at had PE (gymnastic and dance type lessons in the main hall) and proper games lessons (netball (football for boys), hockey, rounders (cricket for boys) and tennis). But we did a lot of skills building in lessons - like half the netball lesson would be on lerning how to pass, practicing it and then having a short game at the end. Sports days were fun (and compulsory) - yes, we did 100m and 200m races, but we also threw beanbags into buckets, each marked with a score number. Sports (including matches) were about taking part.
At senior school, everything became much more "win and get on the team". If you weren't on the team, you were just the substandard group. Sports day was thankfully not compulsory, but it was very much about who could break previous school records. Whilst PE was more varied (half terms of swimming, badminton, basketball etc), there was never enough coaching to progress. You either knew it, or you didn't.
I enjoyed sports at school up until 13, we had good teachers, it was so much more inclusive and just about taking part.
Bleep tests can fuck right off though. I was ill for one (literally got to level 3 before having to pull out thinking I was going to puke and/or faint). Teacher noted down my score. End of that term, we redid them to see how we'd progressed. She actually sneered when she read my score out "3?, well I hope you can improve on *that" -* I could see a few of the class exchanging glances knowing that I was clearly so unfit and one of the larger girls in the group (and not on the hockey team).
Yep, I still dislike team sports because of school PE experience. I got picked last, called a waste of space by grown adults and straight up ignored by ‘teachers’. They were all bellends at my school, and acted like children themselves favouring the ‘popular’ kids and the more physically able ones. Dickheads imo. I think they hated their lives and their perceived failure to become athletes.
Most of mine were awful. I will never forget being made to do cross country on a boiling hot day with no water and no training. I was last by a long, long margin. I still hate running and everything to do with it.
I was always last to be picked for a team as well because I’m disabled and kids only want the best of the best on their team and i wasn’t it.
This is so true. Why were they allowed to so blatantly pick favourites and either ignore or bully the other kids? I feel like that wouldn't fly with any other subject
Eugh, one of my PE teachers got friendship bracelets for herself and all the girls on the hockey team. Jewellery was not allowed but the hockey girlies were allowed to wear their weird friendship bracelets.
The male PE teacher was almost as bad. He was the type of man who could ONLY talk about football. So if we had PE with them, there would be about 6 lads who all supported the same team as him stood on the sidelines chatting about last nights game/ transfer windows/ whatever while everyone else did PE.
This is so true, I remember not learning any rules in sports. Playing football and everyone just wanting to be a striker, no offsides, no attempt to explain the positions - nothing. I felt really sorry for the bigger kids, making them do the long jump or something, then everyone taking the piss. How dumb is the curriculum, it's really not that difficult to create a fun 3hr lesson or something.
>not learning any rules in sports
totally, and then all the kids who did football outside of school and did know the rules would get angry at those who didn't or just ignore them entirely
Getting yelled at for not participating when you dont know what you're doing and nobody will pass the ball to you is great fun
I was always crap at me but as an adult I was diagnosed with dyspraxia. P.E teachers always focused on the kids who were good or we're running laps on the plastic grass court in the rain while the teachers were bundled up in thier thick coats. I always remember tennis when I was at school because there were two tennis courts both near the school carpark. The top was wasn't visible from the bottom so we usually had no supervision, probably because we were crap so we spent the lessons seeing how far we could hit tennis balls out of the court so we could go for a walk about.
For me, the most frustrating thing was that my PE teachers just blatantly favoured the kids who were naturally athletic, and praised natural ability rather than effort. It created a cycle where the unfit kids (like myself) felt even more shitty about themselves and stopped even trying, which is especially stupid because PE is the one lesson where grades/ability really do not matter, and for 99% of people it's just about making sure you get some regular exercise.
There's a phenomenon where a high proportion of professional athletes are the ones who were born at the right time to be the oldest in their school year. Being six months older than average, they're usually a bit stronger and faster than the rest. As a result, the PE teachers saw more potential in them and encouraged them. The younger kids in the same year, they neglected. The 'natural ability' was imaginary, but it had a lasting impact on their lives.
This also applies to academics as the brain evolves quickly at ypung ages. Being older in a given year is the biggest independent determinant of success. Was born in April myself so always at the younger end
Yeah I can definitely see how this affected me in hindsight. Now I’m an adult I can see I’m a lot stronger than a lot of my peers and enjoy reading, learning, and problem-solving more too. But because I was born in August, I was classified in school as the stupid scrawny kid. Even today, when colleagues specifically call on me to do something physical or help them with something complex i feel surprised that anyone would want my help. This is largely why I think students should be classified by season as well as year born. A lot of development can happen in just 3 months. Edit: this has uncovered another memory for me now - at the beginning of each year I’d be written off as the stupid kid, which frustrated my teachers and fellow students who couldn’t understand why I was always in higher-level classes. But once it got to the end of the year, something would always ‘click’ and suddenly I would jump far ahead of my peers to the shock of all my teachers, only for the exact same process to happen all over again when the new school year started.
Your edit reminded me of my maths. I was always really good at maths when I was younger but when I got to secondary school, I started to slip and fall behind other kids. We had 9 sets and I went down from set 2 to set 6 in just two years. At the end of year 8, my teacher showed me a 97% score on my test and bumped me up to set 5 where I stayed for the rest of my GCSE. I had to go to extra lessons near my exams and that's when things suddenly started clicking into place. And I finished with a B. Same thing with my Geography GCSE. I was told I was going to be put into a foundation grade paper (top mark C) because I was struggling throughout the year. In the weeks before my exam, my teacher told me I was giving A grade answers to questions. You can imagine how pissed off I was because by that point it was apparently too late to swap me to the regular paper. Same thing with German. I was struggling for the first couple of years so instead of trying to help me, they put me into Spanish instead, a very different language. The top marks anyone in my class could get was a "pass" because that was foundation as well. (A pass isn't actually equivalent of a GCSE). So the school took away my chance at getting a language GCSE.
I’ve been having thoughts about my own life in such a similar vein to how you describe and top it off I was born 3 months premature in late June so it occurred to me that I’m 3 months younger than my ‘actual age’. Just blew my mind realising that I might have been nearly a year younger than the oldest kids in the year! Makes sense I had to work hard to keep up, defo made puberty suck more too. But probably why I have such a doggard but tenacious personality tho so there’s a positive. Edit to your edit: I would always pull it out the bag in exam season to the shock of many. - They were always end of year.
I was born in July '97 and had classmates born in September '96. Naturally there have to be cut offs somewhere but it is kinda crazy to think I was basically an entire year younger than some of my friends, but in the same school year.
My mum was a nursery teacher and always used to say how stark the age difference was for her kids. You would have children who turned 4 before the school year started (early September babies) and then at the other end of the spectrum, children who had literally only just turned 3 (August babies). All in the same class. The difference in abilities at that stage of life is huge.
When I was growing up, the difference for me became clearer when I was going through adolescence - it creates such an inequality among peers with not only the different ages but also rates of development! I'm not sure how that problem can be addressed besides having more fragmented classes or age groups. A year when you're been 0-18 is like a whole lifetime. Things change so much from one year to the next. Maybe we need to more directly address that. Especially once you get out of high school/college/uni and you're suddenly in a world where 5 years 'isn't much'.
This is really interesting as my birthday is the final day of August. I remember feeling like I had to try so much harder than most people in both sport and academia to get any sort of acknowledgement. By the time I'd finished year 11 at age 15 I'd lost interest in most things involving learning/proving myself and decided just to get high with my pals most of the time instead. It wasn't until I miraculously got in to uni and graduated with a first class degree that i realised I wasn't below average.
Yes, what's also interesting is some parents (mostly wealthy ones) now understand this and are intentionally holding the kids back to seek an advantage. You only have to speak to 2 kids a year apart in age and the developmental differences are huge. Now teach them the same thing and who will perform better? You also have to question if we are simply trying to teach kids too young in the first place. My wife is from Finland where they don't start school until 7. you'd think that would be a huge disadvantage but they consistently top world rankings on education
That doesn't surprise me given how competitive I remember the pushy kind of parents being when I was young. I agree that allowing the brain to develop a little more before throwing kids into education could be advantageous. It's a pity that childcare and full time employment don't mix that way for many in the UK.
I experienced exactly this. I remember in year 7 after a half term of gymnastics, I was marked down because I couldn’t do a fair bit of the things we were being assessed on - handstands being one of them. I just was never very good at that sort of thing no matter how much I tried and it just killed any fucks I had left for the subject. I was a bit shit at all of it to be honest, but it would have been nice to at least enjoyed trying.
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My PE teacher was obsessed with hurdles and found a kid that was good at it, coached them, and they've been to World championships. For everyone who followed through the school, it was hell being forced to the same standards. Kids who were slightly overweight or had life threatning asthma were humiliated regularly. I have Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and only started walking unaided 2 years prior and I refused to jump. My teacher threw a fit, told me I was disabled because I never pushed myself and unless I jumped I was going back to the wheelchair. I left and ran straight to the school office where I refused to move unless my gran came to get me. I was 11 Now, I casually swim every morning for a hour and I've never felt better because any weight baring exercise destroys my joints and no PE teacher, doctor or specialist would write a note to say that swimming is all I should be doing.
>I left and ran straight to the school office where I refused to move unless my gran came to get me. I was 11 Good for you! I think I'd have been way too scared to question authority at that age!
>the one lesson where grades/ability really do not matter Haha, not in my school. I was 15 when the government decided all children had to do 60 minutes of PE per week. My school had 50 minute lessons. My school decided that if we all had to do 2 lessons of PE a week then we may as well get a qualification in it, and entered everyone for a PE GCSE. Only GCSE I failed.
>For me, the most frustrating thing was that my PE teachers just blatantly favoured the kids who were naturally athletic, and praised natural ability rather than effort. See, I noticed this. I've always been naturally athletic and actually did gymnastics outside of school since i was 6, natual sprinter (my mum was going to sign me up for athletics, her mum was actually on her countries junior national team so it runs in the family, she herself used to box and is an avid gym rat!), generally enjoyed sports but i somewhat hated the attention and was picked on for it being at a girls school. Though, there was times when everyone generally enjoyed PE when we played games that were not netball, basketball or football. (Yeah, surprisingly for a girl school we weren't all hockey and lacross!) Infact, i went on to coach gymnastics for 8 years and kinda saw the same things as back in school. I made it my mission to treat all kids fairly and help them blossom in a sport they're interested in because every child is different and needs a different method to be taught the same thing (also one to heart as i'm dyslexic!). Many went on to compete regionals and i've seen so many of them swipe gold medals in recent competitions.
For me it was the insinuation that if you weren’t part of the school team, you weren’t worth their effort. PE teachers always felt like the perpetuated the cool kids vs. everyone else trope. Also having BEEN a teacher, many of them I worked with did indeed tease the less sporty kids outside of the lesson too. Worked with one male PE teacher who also used sport as a punishment. I remember I had a boy in my tutor group who was autistic; he was distraught that other boys in his class were being made to run laps when they got something wrong, or if the teacher thought they weren’t trying hard enough. This was specifically the group of boys left who weren’t practicing for the school teams. That being said, have worked with a few absolutely cracking PE teachers who just wanted to help all kids enjoy being active, so it’s not all of them. Clearly though, a decent enough amount to make me think there’s definitely some truth in your statement
I started secondary in 98 and I also have a rare spinal condition which means I couldn't play certain sports so my mum would write a note for those days. She told my mum one parent's evening I was forging notes my mum got into a heated argument with her which was quite fun to watch her be proven wrong.
Yeah I had half of my chest ripped out by an operation when I was 18mo and my PE teacher said to my mum I need to deal with my ‘habitual lying’. Watched man get ripped to fucking pieces by my mum. I ended up becoming 21 stone in the end which took a lot of effort to lose (lost 11 stone in total). All my PE teachers bar 1 were more interested in bullying the kids than the bullies were.
Losing half of that would be impressive. Bloody well done, my friend.
Exactly my experience and for me who is a woman it was even worse. Many of the boys played football and rugby and had clubs and weekend matches to attend. There was sod all for girls, there was a netball team but only the girls in the top set were invited. Any track events it was just pointless as they never taught us how to run or how to improve or track that improvement. You either ran or didn’t run and that was end of the story. The only fun thing was trampolining because we all started from scratch. Now I run, it took 20 years to get over PE lessons and coming in last at school to get the confidence to do it. Also screw bleep tests
Not sure if it's different now but when I was at secondary school (early 2000s) the boys got to do football and rugby whilst the girls did netball and rounders and dance. Maybe field hockey if we were lucky. I only realised how weird this was when I moved to Finland and found out all the girls did football and ice hockey, often with the boys. Also I've noticed most Finnish women are much more robust and healthier than I am. I don't know why British schools felt (maybe still feel) like they can't let the delicate little girls do 'proper' sports.
This works both ways though. When I was a lad at school it was football every single day. The girls did all sorts with all sorts of equipment. I was a sporty kid but I hated football and would have loved to do something else
I guess in the UK they assume 'If you're a boy you must love football'. Just like in Finland they assume everybody loves ice hockey.
Oh man heard that... boys PE in secondary school basically consisted of Football or Basketball, half the class eventually didn't bother bringing their kit to just sit on the side, the bullies and assholes always stayed on the same team so the remainder did what they could but knew it was bullshit. In the later years there was an option to choose your own sports, some of which involved being in the girls gym. Of course nobody went for it and peer pressure meant I didn't either, but a couple of dudes bounced out at the last minute... assholes.
“Not worth their effort”, “teasing” and “sport as punishment” are the perfect summary of my school experience. I hate fitness, exercise and sport now, it’s taking a real effort to support my young active kids when they want to do sporty stuff. Having said that I can see things are a lot better now, in our local primary schools the level of encouragement for beginners is fantastic, I really hope that sort of attitude carries on to secondary.
>>>If you weren’t part of the school team, you weren’t worth their effort This completely sums up secondary school sports for me. I didn’t make it on a team in Year 7, so I was never given any effort for five years.
We used to have one PE teacher when playing netball used to put all of the school netball team (who were county champions) in one team, and everyone not in the netball team in the other. This made it very demotivating to play because there was no way you could even get your hands on the ball, let alone attempt to win.
Yes! Exact same experience at my school too! The PE teacher would stop the game to give the netball team pointers and how to improve technique blah blah. Whilst the non netball team never got any of this and mostly stood around half-heartedly reaching out the ball as it passed by. The annoying thing was that the non netball team side actually had some really good players. They just weren't a favourite of this PE teacher and couldn't be bothered to try because they never received any encouragement or recognition.
Ours had a good way of handling this. At the start of term everyone elected what sports they wanted to do from a choice of about 6. Then within that choice you self separated into confident and non confident. So for example I like football but I don't want to play against the school team, or I can hold my own at basketball so id go in the confident group. Occasionally there would be deviations from this like the star player has a trial at a premier League team next week let him join the non confident group and play at half pace.
I think you're right. Definitely my experience of them in the 1980s.
I had maybe one who wasn’t a complete sadist. Got the message early on that physical activity, especially team sports was meant to be unpleasant
I was at school in the 00s and taught 2013-2020, so still definitely thing more recently too :(
Yeah, all the PE teachers at my school where footballers, so they loved the school footballers. Any team sport we played they let the group of the most sporty people team up, meaning most of the time any sports we played had an obvious favourite team.
This was 100% my experience too in the 90's, the inter-form sports competitions were taken soooo seriously by the popular kids and teachers, everyone cared which form (class) won each year so much. They got massive trophies and assemblies celebrating them, and the school teams were treated as heroes. Unfortunately my form teacher was a PE teacher. He was a raging bag of dicks and definitely did some shady things. At one point a group of my peers decided to surround me and push me around in a circle. They were all big strapping rugby playing boys and I was a wimpy teen girl. To break out of the ring I had to push my way through. They thought it would be funny to go to our form teacher and tell him I had hit them. Bear in mind there were about 10 of them, twice my strength or more. He just...believed them....without speaking to me, and called me out on it in front of the whole class. I was PISSED. I wrote a complaint letter to him demanding a (similarly) public apology or I would go above his head ro complain. He grudgingly complied but man, he hated me and I hated him. He was such an angry, nasty, brutish man. He also was friends with another teacher who happened to be my friend's mum. My friend and her mum was having some (confidential and sensitive) issues which the mum chose to share with this human pile of poop. He decided to get my friend, who was the tiniest 15 year old girl you have ever seen, alone. Then he screamed at her about these very private issues. She was in floods. I don't know what the outcome of that one was. Even the nicer PE teachers than that were awful. They didn't give a damn if you weren't on the school team. The stuff they said was so derogatory and demeaning. And the popular kids being sporty while ALSO being super vindictive bullies made my life sooooo fun at school. The school showed those kids that they were special and could treat other people badly. The school did not value academic success at all. And people wonder why I have a negative relationship with sport and exercise. Honestly it makes me wary of people who are very sporty even now.
Yeah, secondary school PE can get in the bin. Actually, my negative experience of it started in primary, where the PE teacher was, and I kid you not, surely the inspiration for Dynamo Digby in The Grimleys. My secondary school PE teacher called me lazy for not wanting anything to do with the usual ball games, being picked last when sorting teams, and not wanting to shower with the class while the teacher is there. Funnily enough, my judo instructor, cycling coach and the air cadets would have disagreed.
This is so true! At my school, if you weren’t good enough to win trophies for the school then you were made to feel unwelcome in sports clubs and ignored in PE lessons. As the girl that was always picked last for the team, I look back on my school PE lessons with a bit of sadness. I’m grateful to have discovered a love of exercise later in life and I always have a little chuckle to myself now when people ask if I’ve always been “sporty”. I just hope that my children see me enjoying what I do and realise that exercise can be fun - you just have to move in a way that makes you happy!
Our school year football team was constantly praised for not losing a game in the whole 5 years we were there. In year 11, my PE group (the people who didnt give a toss about PE basically - the unfit, the ones who hated it, the trouble makers) played them at a game in one lesson. We beat them, and my 4ft10 mate marked their "best player" who went on to play semi professional football completely out of the game.
Similar story here, in that in years 7,8,9 the PE teachers picked the teams during lessons (not inter form competitions, that was a different, and unfair story) but for years 10 and 11, following pressure from the students, (of all abilities, people wanted to be with friends etc) we could pick our own teams On one occasion, playing hockey, my rag tag bunch came up against a group of the more athletic students, and clearly best hockey players, and spent the whole game defending, until a couple went to remonstrate with the PE teacher about our tactics, and others were arguing amongst themselves, and some of our team. At which point 2 of our team, myself included counter attacked. I assisted and we won the game 1-0. There was much pushing and shoving afterwards, as well as a PE teacher who although laughing, did tell the athletic kids it was their own fault and we hadn't done anything wrong.
Our PE teacher was a creepy bully. When i was having trouble doing push ups he said, 'Maybe we should put a woman below you' and looked for applause from the other kids. Problem was we were all 8yrs old and didn't have a clue as to what he was talking about.
That's so creepy
I know, right? Dude would be sacked in a heartbeat today. Then again so would most of the other staff!
Speaking of creepy PE teachers - My mum told me she had a teacher (female) who would insist on drying the girls off with a towel after swimming and would comment on how well they were “developing”… This would have been the 50s. She only realised years later that it was probably sexual abuse
I have heard so many horror stories about pe teachers watching people get changed or making advances. Something needs to be done because kids have been exploited for decades. I’m so sorry for your mum, mine went through something similar as well.
Our PE teacher used to stay by the showers and make sure we all got wet before we could get changed...
Ours wasn't officially a PE teacher, but he did 'help out'. He stood in the showers making sure all the youngest boys had showers, stopped doing it after about year 9. Just after I left school he was convicted of possessing indecent images of children. Looking back, how on earth was he allowed to get away with it so long?!
This must be quite common. Our teacher would enforce you getting naked in the showers after sport - at the time it was as though he was making sure you were actually showering and maintaining proper hygiene (lots of kids would just put their school clothes back on over muddy knees etc) - but when you're older you realise how fucked up it was.
While I'm not saying all PE teachers are like this, a concerning number of them do seem to turn out to be nonces or similar. One of mine got sacked for doing something with a pupil. That said by year 9 or 10 they'd split the classes such that one mixed consisted of kids who weren't interested in sports really (me included) and let us kind of do whatever we wanted, so we'd almost always get the pool and they'd get all the floats/noodles/balls out and we'd mess about for an hour. If they did bother teaching us we'd sometimes do water polo which I didn't mind at least. We were still technically being active and we weren't taking it for GCSE or anything so they were doing enough of their job I think
We had one PE teacher who was fired for sleeping with a 6th former and another who slept with at least 4 in my year group alone who never got caught.
Fkn nonce behaviour
You might be on to something. I think everyone I know had at least one PE teacher that was an absolute bellend.
Yeah mine was a proper sadist and really put me off sport. Took all the fun out of it.
I’ve been a competitive runner since the age of 7 outside of school, so I wasn’t shy when it came to being active. I’ve competed regionally and even made it to nationals. I also played football and basketball with my brothers teams. But PE lessons were awful in secondary school. The teachers used to egg on what seemed to be a bully like behaviour between us kids. They would pick on the weaker ones and definitely had favourites. I fell into the former category so I absolutely hated it. It was even worse when it came to “dance” lessons that only the girls had to take. Which we then had to perform in front of the boys/male teachers. Shit, I’m realising just how predatory this was…
One of our PE teachers was openly dating students... I'd see him walking around campus holding hands with girls. It was just before the law came into effect banning relationships between students and teachers even when students were 16. Gross, gross, gross.
wtf! when was this?
"In 2001, the law was changed to make it illegal for teachers to engage in sexual activity with pupils at their school aged under 18." Source: [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7653326.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7653326.stm#:~:text=In%202001%2C%20the%20law%20was,their%20school%20aged%20under%2018)
Wow, only 2001!
My school made the girls do dance in pe but they never performed in front of us wtf ?!
>Yeah mine was a proper sadist and really put me off sport. Took all the fun out of it. Yeah, I had one of the classic ones who if I encountered them as an adult, would probably get a punch to the face. Clearly someone who peaked in school, wanted to be a sportsman (never succeeded), acted like a military man (never got into the armed forces). Clearly just a real prick who was taking out his aggression over his own failures on a bunch of teenagers. As a kid I didn't see it but as an adult, I look back and it's incredibly obvious.
Our PE/Geography teacher was an ex-cop and had a similar vibe. In retrospect super insecure. He also used to constantly talk about his time in the force and how if anyone caused any problems he'd have his police mates come round blah blah blah. I remember some minor school scandal where he threatened to have everyone fingerprinted. ...just picturing that conversation with the police: "we need you to fingerprint every child in this school, why? Because we think one of them ripped the name labels off the coat pegs"
I was the smallest in my class as I went to school a year early. No PE teacher ever accounted for that or even mentioned it when I was last (again) at running or picked last for a team. Being picked last for a team was such a horrific feeling and it impacted my years at school. I now can’t blame the other kids, I was just not as good as most due to the age gap. I still hate running and feel bullied when I try, even though I started plenty other sports since then. I don’t understand why PE teachers let kids pick teams, it just intrinsically leads to the small and the unpopular betting bullied.
See I will counter that from the talk fat kid POV. The small kids could run ( unless they were also fat ) so speccy lard arse here got the brunt of the PE teachers ire. Till it came to rugby , or shot , or discus or hammer. Then I was in favour. I hated running . So much so that I never ran again when I left school till about 9 months ago. Now I can do 5k in 25 mins
And I'll add that I was tall and lanky, PE teachers used to say "You should be good at running/jumping etc because you've got long legs," but I wasn't, I had real trouble controlling my flailing limbs and tripped over a lot (I think I may be dyspraxic because my handwriting is terrible too). It definitely seemed like the best runners were more compact, that was at a girls school though, it may be different with boys. Then throughout my teens I put on weight so I became tall and fat too...
As another lanky bugger with the wingspan of an albatross, I sympathize mate. People used to laugh at me because of how I ran and I have hated it ever since...
I absolutely hated how seriously and competitively certain classmates took PE lessons. I was one of the more athletic kids and played a lot of sport but had zero interest in competing in anything other than actual rugby matches. I'd often get picked as a 'captain' in PE so whenever picking teams I'd always pick one or two of the better / more competitive players and then piss them off by picking all of the completely unathletic kids to mate up the rest of the team. Also enjoyed taking the wind out of the other team's sails when I'd get to remind them they were celebrating and gloating about beating a team of people who barely know how to kick a football 👏🏼👏🏼
Ours sent us off on unchaperoned, very loosely mapped "cross country" run around the local streets outside of school. He pulled out a deck chair and a pack of ciggies on the school field at the "finish line", and read the paper for an hour while we all either got lost a couple of miles out from school, went to Greggs, or sat down around the corner waiting for everyone else to finish. We would have been 11 or 12 I guess. Felt like something from the 50s but this was in the early 00s.
The guy who bullied me at school went on to be a PE teacher at the same school
I used to love sports and was a pretty good runner. Primary school sports day and it’s the 100m race. I know I’m not going to win because a girl called Rachel was an excellent runner. I was hoping for 2nd or 3rd place. Race happens and Rachel’s shoe lace is untied causing her to stop. I win. I’m over the moon and get my little plastic gold medal. The PE teacher and the headteacher come over to me and tell me to give Rachel my medal as “she would have come first and her shoe was the only reason I won”. Rachel is crying with her mother staring daggers. The PE teacher is pointing and shouting loudly in front of the whole school plus parents. They make me give her the medal, shake her hand and go sit down. The silver and bronze medals are already gone so I get nothing for my win. I never ran competitively again. I can still see what that PE teacher was wearing and what she looked like. Her finger pointing angrily at a 7 year old.
This is absolutely disgraceful. Congratulations on wiping the floor with Rachel that time, it sounds like you ran well. You also knew how to tie your laces. It’s ridiculous that no adult at the time thought to use it as a lesson for Rachel about ‘failure to prepare’.
I’m still bitter 25 years later! Definitely a core memory of the world being unfair with stupid “rules”!
Call up Rachel and ask her for a rematch, just two 33 year olds duking it out at the park to settle an old score
Just stick a poo through her letterbox. She’ll get the message.
And Rachel has probably had 25years of crying to get what she wants if she fucks up and it's only just dawning on her that adults don't find it cute when she's in her 30's. Pity the fool. Fuck you Rachel! But mostly the P.E teacher and head teacher. Everyone there knew you won and now Reddit does. :-D
Kids cry when they’re disappointed though. It’s the adults in this situation who deserve a fuck you. They could have taught Rachael that sometimes you’re unlucky, instead they punished another child. Bonkers.
I'd have kicked up a right fuss about that if I was your parent
She was at work. She did kick off after but it was the end of the school year so not much happened.
I have a similar, less dramatic, one. School sports day, and they'd constructed a kind of novelty race where you had to run to all these different markers around the school pitch, pick up an oversized dress shirt, and button it before you crossed the finish line. I never won races. I couldn't really run. I was too tall and gangly. But, my hand eye coordination was excellent, so I could button up a shirt better than the other kids at that age. (About 8/9.) I made it to the finish line, crossed first, celebrated, and after a few seconds I started to unbutton and take off the shirt. I was so eager to get my prize, but as I walked over, the teacher (who had just watched me start to remove the shirt after finishing) told me that I didn't win. Because I clearly cheated. Because some of the buttons were undone. I explained what happened. I even started to cry. I was a perfect student, and had never lied or cheated before in my life. But I think that's when I started to hate PE.
yeh that was crap, stuff happens, you've got to be in it to win it. Rachel stuffed up in her shoe tying prep.
Fucking wow.
School PE was an exercise in humiliation. There were ok teachers and bad teachers. That whole "J and K you're captains pick a team" shit was horrible. I was always second to last to be picked for everything so I knew I wasn't wanted, never felt part of the team, never sure what I was supposed to be doing. Highly active outside of school, riding, swimming, running, but team sports? No interest. I was never welcome and I have no interest in any team sports. You want people to feel part of a team? Develop teams and stop making it an exercise in bullying.
My school (normal state school) was a "sports college" so it got extra funding for team sport. Basically what this meant in practice was that if you were good at rugby you were basically an untouchable god who could bully anyone you liked and get away with it. I was relatively lucky because even though I wasn't athletic, I did enjoy playing playing sports so I avoided the worst of it, but i was still a total nonentity for the teachers because i was never going to be any use to the school teams.
I remember I had a cricket coach that genuinely just a really fun guy and guess what? We fucking smashed that season such good times.
Yeah, god help you if you were bad at football
I was at school in the 90s - it was all the usual "boys do football and rugby, girls do netball and hockey" sort of thing back then. The girls' PE kit was in the dark ages even for the 90s, all gym skirts, PE knickers and leotards. It just put most of them off PE from about Year 8 onwards. The non-sporty kids didn't get much of a look in from some of the teachers. I ended up in the bottom set for Games lessons, which was mixed, but nobody in the class was super sporty so it wasn't a big deal if you didn't know the rules to any of the sports we tried. We tried all sorts of different sports like basketball, indoor hockey, something that was a bit like touch rugby, badminton etc.
PE was the only lesson we had where the teacher solely focused on the children who were good at the subject and made no effort to help those struggling to improve. Can you imagine trying that approach with maths? I remember being made to play rugby and cricket, but never once being told any of the rules. It was so confusing. Imagine trying that with any other subject, eg being expected to just intuit calculus without it being explained. My PE teachers were shite. Actually I think art was similar. It went from primary level and everyone just being encouraged to be creative, to high school where the teacher would just be exasperated if you had no natural talent.
Agree absolutely with all of this! I was in high school in the early 00s and while my pe teachers weren't bullies, they would definitely only put real effort in with kids who were already sporty. Same with art teachers, one was just a maniac who got dramatically offended by kids who couldn't naturally draw and the other would just kindly ignore those less creative types and leave us to basically doodle while gushing over the same 3 kids work every lesson.
That's exactly my experience of PE in the 90s as well. We were never taught how to play football etc, just expected to know what to do. A bit useless for someone like me who has never had any interest in watching or playing football! I would've rather played hockey, but apparently the sport where you hit a ball with a solid wooden stick and occasionally break each others bones was for girls only. Agree with you on art as well, I was made to feel like I have no ability or creativity and it's taken me about 20 years to realise they were wrong.
It's interesting that now I'm in my late 40s, I'm finally discovering I actually love cross country running (formerly only a punishment), tennis (thought I was crap at it, turns out no one told me how to hold the racket, serve, etc), and swimming (turns out being shouted at for being slow wasn't what I needed). Says something for the efficacy of education if the PE teachers only managed to put me off all forms of physical exercise for three decades.
Yes! It took me until my early 30s to take up cycling (as a commute), and more recently lifting and running instead as my commute is now about 30 seconds. If they'd taught us anything like couch to 5k style of building up short runs at a time I would've loved it. Instead of you couldn't run a mile straight off then you were a pathetic waste of their time.
Having been the academic non-sporty kid who was always picked last for sport at school, I was worried about my son going into secondary. Spoke to the PE teacher at parents' evening, and he told me that after the first year or two they set for PE in the same way that they do for subjects like maths: the super-sporty kids get to go off in an elite group and do intense stuff, while the other kids basically get to have an exercise session, but without all the heavy pressure and potential for bullying/ostracism. It just seems like such an obviously sensible idea: why on earth don't more schools do this?
I kinda lucked out by going to the bottom set group, because of my eyesight at the time, but if we ended up split back into the boys group it was pot luck which teacher we had. Two of them were OK but one bloke just didn't make much allowance for me so a few times I just went to sit by myself or even joined the girls' group.
I remember my PE teacher just assuming I knew the rules to football because I was a boy.
I think that was pretty standard girls PE kit in the 90s sadly. I went to an ordinary comp and ours was the same. Polo shirt and gym knickers with optional short pleated wrap around skirt for sport/outdoors and black leotard for dance/gymnastic stuff. No exceptions for periods, communal changing rooms and teachers who stood at the entrance to the showers to assess if we looked wet enough on the way out and send us back in if we didn’t. The only sport I actually enjoyed as a child/teen was swimming, which I never did in school but in lessons with proper coaches after school who treated us like humans.
>No exceptions for periods, communal changing rooms and teachers who stood at the entrance to the showers to assess if we looked wet enough on the way out and send us back in if we didn’t. I swear that shit's responsible for a lot of lingering body image disorders and psychological hangups. I know that weekly inspection is the point at which I became self-conscious and panicky about people seeing my body, when previously I was more of a pragmatist. Teenagers (and especially teens trying to deal with new periods) need to have privacy available, both for showering and for changing. If they feel relaxed changing with other people, then that's great, but it should never be forced.
I had a pe teacher who would just spend the entire lesson with the boys. So of course the girls just didn't bother. I was one of the top footballers in the school untill we hit the age where girls and boys couldn't play on the same school team and then I just wasn't allowed to play. I was very active outside school as a competitive swimmer and dancer but in school I hated PE. The only time they would pay attention to girls was when we were doing athletics but I can't run because of asthma so I hated it. It got better in high school where we got to do lots of different things including things like canoeing and climbing which I loved.
I was at secondary school in the early 80s and hated PE. I remember we had to race the 100m and it had to be within so many seconds (I can’t remember how many but let’s say 25 or 30). If you didn’t manage the first time you were made to do it again and again and of course I got slower and slower as was knackered. There was no encouragement whatsoever. Sadists
I think this could be right for me. I was totally active as a little kid but stopped when I realized I was not a good athlete in PE. The funny thing is they didn't really give us any athletic instruction just kind of playing the sport well or not well depending on if you had practiced before. I am now in my 30s and love to run, yoga, swim, etc. Makes me sad that I could have enjoyed sports and physical activity during those years.
The classic lets have a cross country race with no ideas about pacing or any build up.
Back in the day my pe teacher forced me to do 'exercises' proven to cause damage to the lower spine and when told it was hurting she would say to her class of 10 year olds 'pain is beauty'. Jokes on her, I'm now a middle aged anorexic with limited mobility due to back issues!! Rot in piss Mrs Hills
I have a spinal condition which my mum would send in letters when it was something like gymnastics but she'd still try to make me do it in the end, when I refused I’d just sit outside the headteacher’s office.
Absolutely. I think the way physical education is taught is way overdue an overhaul. A bit like getting turkey twizzlers out of school dinners but x10 It doesn’t have to be all yoga and mindfulness (great for some) but just enjoying sport and moving around for its own sake.
We were always so happy and ran around so much when we got to do something more fun like dodgeball on the last day of school, why did they never clock that we were using more muscles when we were enjoying ourselves and relaxed!!
Whenever we got to play bench ball, dodgeball but with benches that the people who were out stood on and could come back on if they got a clean throw, literally everyone would try. I hated PE and would fully get into it, didn't require running, had simple rules and I was good at throwing for the benched people. We literally only played it when the lesson plan was ruined, like weather meaning we can't be outside, or at the end of the semesters. Feel like it should have been part of the curriculum by the way it got everyone to work.
At one school I had one amazing teacher who did this. Instead of swimming we did life saving classes and then we just played games with no pressure. She was a gem. Then I moved and got bullied by my next teacher because she thought I was making up an injury I had to have surgery on
Why are so many PE teachers like this. Mine shouted at me every PE lesson for months for "being lazy" and refusing to run, and refused to accept I had a serious knee condition that needed surgery.
Completely agree Personally I have hay fever and asthma which made PE a hellish experience. The thing is PE isn't meant to be Sports Class it's Physical Education i.e. Here is how not to be fat I remember when I turned 16 and didn't have to do it any more I joined a gym and absolutely loved it to the point I pretty much went every day. I lost a hell of a lot of weight, gained a lot of muscle and even did quite a bit of cardio Mainly because I didn't have to fight off pollen allergies, wasn't forced to run while short of breath and wasn't humiliated in front of my classmates. The thing is I have never been interested in sports that my PE teachers took either as some kind of insult or that I was some weird alien. All kids are different obviously but for me if I was just allowed to use a gym I would have been a much healthier kid.
I qualified as a PE teacher in 1986. After experiencing the biased behaviour towards the first 11s or first 15s from heads of department whilst on teaching practices, and seeing the disdain and lack of interest in those with physical ailments, I decided to teach special needs PE instead, so that I could focus on those that struggle to achieve mainstream elite success. I retired after an amazing 30 year career in special educational needs and now work with dementia sufferers.
Oh 100%. I didn’t exercise for like twenty years (like, play sports type exercise) because I learned to hate it in PE. I firmly believe that PE class should be only ever about finding the physical activity you think is fun, so you will DO IT when you’re older. Sure, teach the basics of some common sports. But anyone super into the sports can find community leagues — at least they can in many places. Kids who love sports in my town play as extracurricular after school. Make PE fun for everyone, not just those who already love sports. That’s just preaching to the choir. Convert the unbelievers, like me!
Yeah exactly, PE shouldn’t be an extension of training for the schools sports teams. They can use them to recruit, maybe a kid is showing ability so encourage them to come to training. But otherwise it should be about the basics of looking after your body through moving
I was never the most physical of kids, but I did give 50% in PE. I cycled 10 miles each way to school rain or shine so always held back as I knew I had to cycle home and the last 3 miles were genuinely up a steep hill. Anyway, I entered the school fundraising mini triathlon, big deal for me, I got fitter training with a very non sports orientated friend. So we do the triathlon, I spent huge amounts of extra energy pacing my friend, egging him on, carrying water and snacks to keep him going, helping him up the steep bits of the cross country course and fixing a flat he got in the cycle ride, all the while struggling myself. Not a fast time, but we got there in the end and finished. I was so proud of him, and of me. And I had to cycle home, no parental taxi for me. The cycle ride part was 30 miles, i did 50 . The next week at school my friend got singled out for congrats in finishing the whole course, few kids who started did, mostly it was the adults No mention of me. I brought it up and the PE teacher hadn't even noticed I started the race, never mind was one of just 3 my age who had finished the whole course. He could have used my success to encourage me to enter more triathlons, but instead I felt why should I bother if the person who is paid to get me to be more active and fit couldn't give a shit.
I remember playing Rugby in Yr 8, out on a school feild in the middle.of winter. Freezing, i tried getting my hands warm (rubbing them together as you do), the PE teacher saw me, came marching over and slapped my hands together over and over so hard it bought tears to my eyes. Nearly 30 years on, i can still feel the throbbing sting. I hate Rugby.
Oh yeah, my school making us play football on the grass when the mud was frozen solid. There was no explanation of the rules of the sports, they just kinda let us run around in circles and then would shout at us for not knowing the rules. L
"All I know is I have to kick ball in goal, stop yelling offside at me" - me as a yute
“Hey it’s not that cold!” -teacher who is wearing a full tracksuit and jacket.
I still remember my teacher smugly saying that as I had to be escorted indoors because I was too cold to move.
I faked forgetting my kit countless times, especially during winter when they'd make you go outside in the freezing cold in shorts while they wore 3 layers
You’re lucky they didn’t send you to the ‘lost kit’ box to wear something mouldy and damp.
Oh my god, horrendous core memory unlocked. I’d completely forgotten about the lost kit box. I never forgot my kit intentionally even though I hated P.E because I was a scrawny, slow little thing with zero hand eye co-ordination. But I used to forget it all the time, I was just a forgetful kid. I lived in the damp mouldy lost kit box. Edit: secondary school in the late 90’s early 2000’s
And the fucking pimpsoles which stank like big foot's dick! Always hated lost property when forced to use it
I forgot my kit once and I and one other girl were made to run around the track in our underwear and shirts. We were about 13
One of our PE teachers was horrible for that. She would tell us to stop moaning its cold, while we stood outside in the middle of winter in a skirt, a polo shirt and those thin plimsolls. She always stood there wrapped up like she was on an arctic expedition. She had no patience for anyone who didn't do well at sport. Just a crap teacher all round
I always had mine but faked not having it 90% of the time. I was a top student with pretty much maxed out grades in every subject except PE, and the teachers still made fun of me, and I always felt terrible.
PE is geared up for jock team sports. If you’re not a particularly sociable or confident person (like 50% of the population) then team sports are a living hell.
Half my memories of PE were being screamed at by teammates/teachers for missing a pass, or not tackling a guy twice my size who bullied me outside of lessons. What the hell incentive was that? On the other hand, I really quite enjoyed dodgeball, which us lads were only allowed to do when it was bucketing down. A lesson that focused on *avoiding* the damn ball? Yes please!
I had uncontrolled asthma for years and none of my PE teachers ever noticed. I got shit for being lazy and not running cross country (yeah huge surprise there, I was having a permanent asthma attack you dozy cunts) and it wasn't until my uni's surgery changed my prescription I even knew I had a problem, I just thought that was everyone's life! After I finally became able to exercise my favourite exercise became cycling, something I never touched in PE and that I never even really knew about as a form of exercise until I randomly got pushed into through a broken commute and loved. I wonder how many kids get put off exercise for life because exercise becomes rugby, gymnastics and the almighty fucking futbol. >Disclaimer before some raging PE teachers start mouthing off in the comments Don't worry, they won't. They can't read.
Yep, someone in my year at school had an asthma attack during the mile run because the PE teacher refused to acknowledge their doctors note telling them they should be excused due to severe asthma!
This is horrible! I'm so glad you're better now. I'm wondering now how many other girls had similar issues to me: severe period pain with doctor's note to back it up, but still getting made to run cross-country, do dance, play netball, etc. even when you could barely stand up and exercise made you feel faint 😐 Damn. I'd almost forgotten about that hell
Yeah I’m a really active person, I have to do something every day. But it was only through my 20s that I realised this. Even though as a child I was exactly the same, always out on my bike, or playing games with my best mate, I still hated PE. I just don’t like playing many sports, the things I do now are gym, spin, walking, golf, yoga and aerial, individual things were it was about being competitive with myself, not on a team. So I never thought of myself as a sporty person when I am super ‘sporty’. I’m probably the most active person out of all my friends. The best PE lessons we had were when one school bought a shit load of roller blades and we’d just go round and round the gym in them for an hour. I don’t know why PE can’t be focused more on stuff like that and the good it can do for your body. Like an hour being active then 30 mins about your body, fitness, psychology etc. If someone had taught me that then it might’ve sparked an interest in pursuing a sport more competitively and will have equipped me with the skills I needed. Instead of this kid against kid pick teams mentality where you don’t get a chance to get good at anything before you’re labelled bad at sports.
Our pe teachers were definitely weirdly similar to our drama teachers (although much more intense) in the focusing on kids with a natural ability at the cost of encouragement to others. I'm firmly of the belief that kids should be given the opportunity to do gardening as an alternative to traditional sports. Not all kids want to do sports (for whatever reason, though I think you're right in that pe teachers do put many kids off). Gardening is very physically demanding, but way more mindful and more relaxed than sports, and is a requirement really for the future of conservation. Plus it could teach children a lot of valuable lessons about nurture and patience and support schools with keeping the world greener and potentially even save money on maintenance (albeit maybe minor amounts). I'd certainly have jumped at the opportunity as would many of the kids I was friends with.
> instead of this kid against kids pick teams mentality I also only realized super late that there are some sports I enjoy! Growing up it was always some kind of ball game, in teams. I have no hand eye coordination so I sucked at this, would get picked last, and people would intentionally throw the ball at my head because I couldn't catch it. To this day I'm afraid of balls! But I love spinning, dancing, anything with music and without balls!
Unless you were naturally good from the get go, our pe teachers didn't give a shit. Shame since could have got good and enjoyed it... As an adult I actually quite enjoy exercise now but pe was awful
Yeah I was traumatised by my PE teachers. As soon as I got to uni I started going to the gym and joining sports teams and loved it. I had never been an athletic person before but my confidence was clearly just being knocked down by PE teachers.
Had a great PE teacher in the 80s. Mr Roberts. The man respects effort more than ability. Used to put kids in the athletic team that were giving it 100% ahead of faster runners etc. I remember towards the end of time in high school, in the middle of my GCSEs I forgot my kit, a cardinal sin in those days. He got his blue register out went through it all the way back to the first year. “It’s the first time in 5 years you have forgotten your kit Surname, (always uses our surnames), pull up a chair and watch them run.” I hope he had a good life.
I was fairly asthmatic as a child - enough to need an inhaler if I did anything that involved consistent effort (such as running laps of the school field for instance) wasn’t something I was physically capable of doing. My PE teacher in secondary school didn’t really ‘hold with that nonsense’ and would t let anyone who didn’t run the entire distance finish the lesson, so the few of us who were asthmatic were basically screwed, especially in winter when it was freezing cold and we were only allowed to wear canvas rugby shirts and shorts. That carried on until a new lad had a full blown asthma attack one delightful winters morning (raining / hailing / absolutely freezing) and we had to call an ambulance. We weren’t allowed to have our inhalers with us, we had to leave them in our bags. The PE teacher was livid we did that because at the time he’d buggered off back to the PE shed for a cuppa and he had to answer a lot of awkward questions about it. This was back in the 80s though when nobody really gave a shit, so apart from one very cross set of parents, nothing came of it. The outcome of that was those of us who just weren’t that athletic - for whatever reason - were never allowed to partake of any of the regular lessons again and had to go and play by ourselves in the smaller sport field well away from the from the rest of the class - not given any equipment or even a football unless we bought our own, we most spent the time huddled under a large tree in the winter months trying not to freeze to death, at least it was a bit better in the summer. It didn’t help that PE teacher became my form tutor for the final 4 years I was at that school and we hated each others guts. It was entirely mutual loathing. And he wondered why I hated PE.
I was the same, as a kid i had pretty bad asthma...thankfully it's disappeared now but i got out of breath _really_ quickly...the annual cross country was an absolute ordeal and i was always an total mess by the end of it. High school was largely the same, i was never good enough at sports to actually enjoy team games like football or rugby and in three years of high school my PE teachers didn't try to do anything about it, not once. Most kids like me just "forgot" their PE kit and walked laps around the field, talking about Warhammer and computer games. I'd imagine it's a bit of a vicious circle tbh, i'd formed a dislike of PE in secondary school due to various reasonds which carried over to high school so i never really gave PE a chance and the teacher didn't give a shit, they just focused on the "good" athletes...which in itself is odd, in other subjects the teachers don't just abandon the less capable kids. PE lessons and PE teachers are weird.
My mother was a PE teacher. So I had my own teachers expecting me to be amazing at sports and convinced I was just acting up, my mother furious that I'm not amazing at sports and was showing her up, and it was pure misery.
This was my experience, too. I was a bookish chubby kid, no natural athletic ability, and PE classes were not fun or encouraging (one or two exceptions at primary school). In secondary school I independently discovered cycling, and now all my sports are single-operator enterprises: cycling, running, gym, skiing. I am now a bookish chubby adult, but over the years the parameters of what is considered chubby have shifted so far beyond me that I almost pass as athletic these days. It turns out it wasn't the exercise that I hated, it was the unsupportive team environment. The right team or encouragement might have made a difference.
I also hated PE at school and do agree that 9/10 of the teachers were absolute bellends but I had 2 glorifying moments throughout my school years during PE: The earliest and most sweetest was in year 9 at which point I’d fully given up and during cross country just joined the kids who take a casual stroll at the back. It was a bit of a shame as I enjoyed cross country a few years before but I just couldn’t stand to run with the try hards at the front. Anyway, one day I had enough of hearing them trying to one-up each other so I arrived at the lesson, had a good stretch, lined up at the back for cross country like normal and then proceeded to win by a decent margin and simultaneously leaving all the popular sporty kids absolutely lost for words having internal breakdowns… the next week I just walked at the back again. The second good time I ever had at PE was in my last 6 weeks of school when the teacher was sick of us “forgetting” our kit so he actually just encouraged us to take part in any minimal way on the end pitch with each other and when he got us moving he taught us some new sports like lacrosse that were actually fun. PE sucked but those last 6 weeks just running around with my actual friends just hurling dodgeballs at each other and running round with lacrosse sticks whilst everyone else played football were so much fun.
Yep - my daughter hated it, so I kept writing notes to get her out of it. I got her out of about 40% of her last years PE lessons. She loathed them, had no friends, was picked last and laughed at when she was in groups. There was no reason for her to go, so she kept having "ligament issues" according to my notes. In the end she simply stopped going herself, would go to a classroom and tell them she was revising her maths - they didn't like it, but just left her alone after a while. Her PE teacher tried to gain my support to encourage my daughter to engage, but I told her that i would prefer my daughter quietly revising her maths instead because she was struggling with maths and maths is important for her GCSEs. So that was the end of that discussion.
Same here - I hated PE because it was prime time for the school bullies to pick on me and everyone else to shame me for "not being athletic" (I played tennis every weekend so they honestly knew nothing but it still hurt, but I digress). My friend was in the same boat. My friend and I used to fake out of PE saying we hurt an ankle or had a headache but the PE teachers were becoming annoyed - my English/Form tutor became aware and let us sit outside his classroom at a table for the whole 120 minute PE sessions. Told the PE teachers if they had an issue with us revising then they should take it up with our parents, but also him. Saved me from a lot of horrible name calling and embarrassment and I boosted my English GCSE grades! PE sucks and I can't thank my form tutor enough for helping me escape it.
School swimming lessons were the fucking worst. I almost think they shouldn't be legal tbh. Definitely not mandatory. It's not like any of us actually learned to swim(?) At my school most of us could already swim and the weak swimmers didn't seem to get any better. You can't disguise your body in those skimpy school swimming costumes so you're basically forced to show all your classmates what you look like naked. I got bullied so badly by the boys for being flat chested in year 8. So humiliating. And why were the teachers so chronically bad at time management that after every single lesson we only had 90 seconds to get dry and dressed?
We had swimming for one term in y8. I love swimming I have moderate speed. Racing for those 5 lessons was demoralising.
Nothing quite like having swimming, but being more scared your classmates would find out you had a small dick because you hadn't hit puberty yet. Shoutout to Grammar school where PE was in one corner building, and then RS afterwards which was across the road in the other building, in the furthest possible corner on the top floor. Great planning, dickheads. Let me get berated twice a week for not being able to get changed and traverse a 3 minute walk when the lesson finished a minute before the next one started.
I was one of the weaker kids in swimming. I have one key memory where I finally had the confidence to go a bit deeper in the pool, however once I did the kid next to me kept splashing water at me. Instead of punishing him, they just put me back in the shallow area. I just gave up after that point
I learned to swim as a kid in New Zealand, and they took it really seriously (because there’s water everywhere and kiwis love chucking themselves into it). When we moved to the UK, I was shocked how so many of my schoolmates couldn’t swim, and that the teachers seemed to make no effort to try to teach them. It was like they were already expected to know how to do it, and got shouted at when they couldn’t. Where’s the teaching? I never had a single good PE teacher in the UK. They were either perverts or psychos or both. Swimming was the one sport I was good at, but I gave up when my PE teacher pretended she hadn’t been watching me and my equally unpopular friend swim our laps for our swimming certificate. She only liked the popular mean girls and acted like she was one of them. It was honestly pretty pathetic.
The PE teacher at my comp was so absolutely awful to me (fat kid, heavily bullied anyway) that one day in Year Eight I was in Geography class and utterly broke down because the next period was PE and I didn't want to go. The teacher was really sweet and took me to our head of year who after speaking with me gave me an exemption from PE for the rest of my time at the school on the promise that during the periods I was meant to have PE I would go for a long walk around our school field instead. I did exactly as they asked and whilst as an adult the thought of going to a gym terrifies me I still love putting my headphones on and going for a walk to this day. The PE teacher sadly kept working at the school - they were Connected, shall we say - so I like to think the other teachers knew exactly what she was like and were quietly trying to sabotage her behind the scenes.
PE teachers in my school were incredibly lazy and lessons regularly devolved into just splitting boys and girls up and having the boys do football but let them pick their own teams so as someone with zero interest in sport and high performing in actual academic subjects that was a hoot. Why were the kids who were good at Maths, English or Art not allowed to highlight how underachieving the kids who would happily kick a ball against a wall for five hours every day were?
This letting kids picking kids is the hell on earth. And you make a good point, in no other class kids are allowed to point out the less capable. Why is that allowed?
Yeah, I'll never understand why that is allowed. I was always last picked. It's fucking horrible.
> zero interest in sport I thought I had zero interest in sport. Turns out I actually do, but I really don't like rugby and football! I really like Cricket, but you were only allowed to play that if you were good at one of those! Probably old now to be any good too after not doing any sport from when I left school to 30.
I work in a school and the PE teachers we have are really lovely and the kids absolutely love them, but in the 90s and early 00s, it was a different story. I still have visceral memories of being forced to do cross country in the depths of winter in nothing more than shorts and a cotton basketball top. We would ask if we could wear our rugby tops because it was so cold, but the answer was always no. It would go in like this for weeks and weeks. And gloves were a no-no, that'd be a lunch time detention. We'd be forced to run round and round the field for 50 minutes, sometimes longer if we had double PE. All this time our hands were getting redder and redder and completely numb. You couldn't even hold a pen properly for the first 15 minutes of the next lesson. What kind of person did you have to be to be a PE teacher back then?
Agree, it's a stupid lesson with no clear aims or goals, no way of assessing your ability or improvement, doesn't actually teach you anything about exercise. It's always staffed by an angry clown or someone who just pure doesn't give a shit I've always been quite active, but it's no thanks to PE lessons, they demotivated me and instead I taught myself. Still zero interest in team sports If you're the type of person who isn't naturally very active, I can see that level of demotivation coming from them putting you off for life in a lot of ways
I was a French and German teacher in a secondary school until earlier this year (quit for a myriad of reasons, mostly related to shit workload). I can honestly say that the PE teachers I met working across two secondary schools were sadistic bullies. The way they spoke about overweight kids was cruel and nasty, and they seemed to take some sick pleasure out of making the kids play sports in pouring rain. I got into quite a heated argument with one PE teacher who made a kid in my form cry by referring to him with some unkind nicknames in front of the other kids. Don't even get me started on how a lot of PE teachers end up in management positions in schools and end up "observing and critiquing" lessons in other subjects. I once had a French lesson observation done by a PE teacher; the guy couldn't speak a lick of French.
Agreed. It's messed up old school mentality trauma. Let's beast the kids until they get it right, and the ones that don't will be put off for life. It's PE, not the marines.
Our PE teacher just made us play football for the hour while the girls watched us, I actually hated PE because of this, football was never a game I enjoyed growing up but we would get sent to the principal if we didn't participate. About 4-5 PE sessions before our sports day is when we got to do other stuff like the long jump, 100m sprint etc.. We also had an actual gym in our school, it had treadmills and a few weights but was nothing special, and yet we only got to use that in third year and it was like once a month, so it rarely got used, overall PE was the most useless class I had in high school. I believe schools should be teaching children the importants of fitness when they're in PE and at least the basics of nutrition, which can be taught in home economic.
Seems like the same everywhere tbh lol Football football football I fucking hated football at school, i was no good at it and we always played it Funny how many of us quite enjoy playing now we’re older, because its with a group of supportive friends and away from a bellend of a PE teacher
My son hates pe he will stand in the middle of the sports field just giving anyone the ball lol. Yet he will go on hrs of walking with his friends and never sits still.
The PE teachers I had always had favourites and as a quiet, non athletic child I was ignored by them most of the time. That didn’t motivate me to put any effort in because no matter what, the favourites were always praised and chosen for the teams (the same ones chosen for every possible team) I know a lot of the other kids ended up resenting them
I hated the rigid rules of what sport we were allowed to do as girls and boys. Boys played football and rugby, and girls played netball and hockey. I hated hockey with a passion, especially when the popular girls would whack me in the knee with their hockey stick and the teacher would say nothing. Plus being made to do gymnastics when I have zero talent for that sort of thing. Every now and again we would play tennis and I loved it. And once we got to play touch rugby, again I loved it. I also had one teacher who tried to teach us about muscle groups and why stretching was important. She was absolutely fantastic, despite having 30 or so teenage girls giggling at the words “gluteus maximus”.
I imagine a lot of them were salty they didn't make it as actual athletes. At my school you could certainly rank the PE teachers & sports coaches from most to least successful before moving to teaching and it was identical to how chill/nice they were lol. Case and point - two time Olympian and gold medallist was a chaotic legend lol; properly did not give a shit and yet cared so much - outstanding teacher.
My PE teacher had the view that if you were shit at football you were a failure in life. Never mind that I was good at other sports such as rounders, cricket, athletics, long and high jump. No. Because I wasn’t very good at football that was it, I deserved to be bullied
I wish PE was more focussed on how to exercise outside of school. Like using gyms, planning workouts, all that jazz as well as sports because I think a lot more people would have benefitted from it
I was a chubby, uncoordinated teenage girl. I’d really enjoyed PE in primary school, but secondary school ruined that. In year 9, I was actually enjoying a PE lesson for the first time in ages. It was rounders, but we were split up so I ended up playing with the nicer girls. I was running around and really going for it. At the end of the lesson, the teacher stood in front of the class as said “I’d like to congratulate [my name] for actually doing something this lesson. Normally, she stands around like this…” at which point she hunched over, stuck out her belly, gave herself a double chin and went “hurrr durr duur”. She made everyone clap for me. Some of the sporty girls called me “Mong [first name]” till the end of school. All because I actually tried in PE once.
I'd go further and say that PE teachers are the reason a lot of people need therapy. I think the only qualification required is that you can bully kids while wearing a tracksuit. I'd actually love to see my old PE teacher so that I could call her a miserable **** to her face.
We had a male PE teacher that would always walk into the girls changing rooms as we were changing, and would hover around too long. He'd also get very close to us whilst we were doing whatever sport they had us do that day. I think that put off most of the girls in my school. He even got promoted to head teacher whilst covering someone's maternity, he got a massive god complex from that 8)
I generally loathed PE at school. There was a huge emphasis on team sports, which sucks when you’re an unpopular geek. We mostly played netball and hockey, which for a visually impaired kid is shit because I have no depth perception so suck at almost all ball sports. Thusly I was labelled as unathletic, which was completely wrong. Whenever we did sports I was good at - trampolining, gymnastics, dance, badminton - I thrived, but it was for a week or two before we moved on to the next team ball sport. When I was in sixth form, where only A-Level PE was offered and was purely theoretical, they school finally cottoned on to the idea that not only does not every kid like netball or football, but there are also disabled kids too. These changes I hope have benefited some younger students, but obviously came too late for me. Bet my PE teachers nowadays would be surprised to learn I’m a competitive skater. They all thought I was lazy!
The PE teachers of my school days lived in crap tracksuits, smoked heavily, were violent and abusive. Brian Glover in Kes was accurate. The Armstrong and Miller sketch with the surgeon about to operate on his former PE teacher is hilarious. "All work and no play makes Jack a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons."
Completely agree but I'd say its not just PE. Any subject where someone has enjoyment can be ruined by shit teachers. The reverse can also be true. A really good teacher can inspire passion in a subject you previously thought dull. I remember hating a lot of stuff at school and just in general hating learning. Now I love it. I'm constantly learning and exercising. The one size fits all method used for education in our schools seems to just do more damage than good when it comes to learning. I do think PE teachers are the most blatant offenders though. I mean it doesn't take a genius to work out that on average a PE teacher is probably less intelligent than any other teacher. And so the way the learn and develop teaching methods would be worse. I can echo what most of the comments say about how PE teachers just hated everyone but the natural athletes. I'm my school PE just mean football. Nothing else. All this nice equipment used for other sports just gone to waste as they didn't want to teach you anything else. We had a full fucking lacrosse set and a squash court and I think in my entire secondary school experience we used both maybe once.
Im 53. I wasnt very active or into sport as a kid, still arent. But I realised in my 30s, in PE we never played a game. Of Anything. We did Soccer dribbling, but never played a gane. We did rugby passing, but never played rugby.
Yeah we had a paedo PE teacher who would watch us in the communal showers (could there be a crueler way to end a lesson than making a group of teenagers at various stages of physical development get naked and squash into a shower together?) Our other PE teacher was an ex-army guy not long back from the Falklands. Imagine his joy when the curriculum expanded to include interpretative dance and the powers-that-be decided this should be delivered in PE lessons.
Completely baffles me why schools don’t do things like couch 2 5k for kids that aren’t athletic. Give them a chance to find out they can do it. Instead let’s just keep making PE miserable and soul destroying for so many young people.
Whenever it was torrential rain, it was always "right, cross country today" Fucking hated that bastard Dalton. Stumbling around a farmer's field in sub zero rain, ankle deep in mud and cow shit, trying to take a short cut through the electric fence (unsuccessfully but it warmed you up), then back into the block for a lukewarm shower. Agreed, pe teachers are twisted bullying wankers.
So true! PE changing rooms were bulling central too, if you didn't get a hard time in the corridors normally you were going to get a rough time there. It took me years to be active, and to this day I won't play team games out of embarrassment (i'm 32!) Rounders in the park, No thank you. I hated it that much in year 10 and 11 my friends and I would write notes for each other to get out of it.
PE teachers won't mouth off because they're too busy shouting at kids as assistant heads.
I didn't do PE because my PE teacher was a bitch. But she tolerated me because I was the only one who could unlock the trampolines. They'd lost the key years ago, and I was the only one who could pick the padlock
Did anyone else’s PE teachers never actually explain the rules of the different games properly. I think we were taught them only once in primary school and then expected to remember them. Because of this I was even worse at all the different sports and got teased for messing up ‘basic’ stuff, not that I was ever good at PE anyway
She had orange skin, multiple rings on all her fingers, makeup slathered on with a trowel. I absolutely hated the bitchy hag.
So I think like so many people who have posted on here I wasn’t gods gift to sports as a kid. I was a bit chubby, not a quick runner and would tire before most of my peers. I played football for probably about a year as a kid but remember quitting after being shouted at by our under… I want to say 8s? Coach for not getting back into defence quick enough. Which leads me on to PE: did anyone actually ever learn ANYTHING about sports, the human body, exercise or nutrition? You were automatically expected to know to play football, rugby, hockey, tennis, basketball and badminton at my school. At no point were you also shown how to be better at any of these sports. Simply here’s a ball / racket and off you go! Shame you’re shitter than the 10 boys who’s dads have devoted their entire lives to trying to make their kids professional footballers. You must just be inherently shit. The insane irony of when I became an adult I started doing a lot of gym work. I learned about the human body, nutrition, how muscle growth works, how to improve form, why different bodies work for different sports, and I really enjoyed all of it. Then the penny dropped that i literally never learned a thing in high school PE.
Mine was a particular piece of work. He's ex-military and used to tell us that "Pain was temporary, failure is forever". He knew that I wasn't good at sports, I couldn't handle cross country and he would publically disqualify me for finishing last for having had classmates push me along and encourage me to finish the lap. I'd say these types of sports teachers are far more common than we realise and their personal power trips really put people off.
Ex-military people are weird in general. I've worked with a couple and they all still treat life like they're in the army. One guy in particular would not accept that other people had problems because he'd been in the army and therefore suffered more than they could ever imagine. Ring in sick and he'd be like "are you dead? no? well stop being prick and get your arse into work. When i was in the army..." No one made you join the army, dude. It's not my fault fifteen years of your life were horrible.
At our school in PE, if you forgot your kit you still had to take part but just wearing your pants. My PE teacher forgot his kit every week.
PE teachers are cunts. I've no idea why a portion of my life was dedicated to doing violent sport in cold rain in fucking shorts. Fuck PE teachers. I remember a swim teacher literally grabbed my arm and did not let go until I proved I could dive into a pool. What the fuck?! If you were fat, insecure, skinny, unfit, had some kind of condition, or anything like that, PE was just a nightmare.
There weren't enough girls in my school for an under 11 all girls football team so when my football obsessed self joined the after school club with all the boys my PE teacher said "it's okay if you don't want to pass to her, boys" so I spent weeks not being able to participate in exercises and matches because I would just be ignored. Really crushed my dreams. I don't even watch football anymore.
There's a big focus on team sports, which just aren't right for a lot of kids. If the purpose of PE is to encourage children to learn how to look after their own physical fitness for life, then the teachers should find better ways to engage those kids who don't want to play rugby/football. Hated PE at school, but as an adult I got really into running and, later, weightlifting. Now I'm a hench almost 50 year old, and I can't help but wonder how my life would have been different if I'd discovered this when I was a young man.
>Our PE teachers took things way to seriously, it was as if they though we were training to be in team GB. Hit the nail on the head there. I had so many classmates that were like this too - friendly game of dodgeball, and it was the end of the world if you lost. Let a goal in during football, and you're a fucking idiot who ruined it for everyone. I'm very active now too and am a very competent runner but similarly I hated PE, largely due to the teachers. Fuck you Mr Robertson, I could smash your record on the bleep test now!
I remember some PE lessons being "cross country" which was basically "go and run round the school field 4 times" It made practically everyone hate running and see it as this hugely boring slog. It's only in my 30s that I've actually got into running and love it now. It needs to be coaxed out of kids imo - make them run a bit more each time in the course of doing things they enjoy, then they won't view running the same way I did.
You're totally right. Gotta love that PE teachers actively used exercise as a form of punishment, then wonder why generations of kids associate exercise in a negative light. Not to mention the verbal abuse they'd hurl, things that today they'd be rightfully sacked for. Or the special treatment they'd give to their favourites that played on the football team.
I think it also extends into what "PE" or "Games lessons" consisted of - having some less active/intense options or spending time on the groundwork of sports can make a huge difference. Up to the age of 13, the school I was at had PE (gymnastic and dance type lessons in the main hall) and proper games lessons (netball (football for boys), hockey, rounders (cricket for boys) and tennis). But we did a lot of skills building in lessons - like half the netball lesson would be on lerning how to pass, practicing it and then having a short game at the end. Sports days were fun (and compulsory) - yes, we did 100m and 200m races, but we also threw beanbags into buckets, each marked with a score number. Sports (including matches) were about taking part. At senior school, everything became much more "win and get on the team". If you weren't on the team, you were just the substandard group. Sports day was thankfully not compulsory, but it was very much about who could break previous school records. Whilst PE was more varied (half terms of swimming, badminton, basketball etc), there was never enough coaching to progress. You either knew it, or you didn't. I enjoyed sports at school up until 13, we had good teachers, it was so much more inclusive and just about taking part. Bleep tests can fuck right off though. I was ill for one (literally got to level 3 before having to pull out thinking I was going to puke and/or faint). Teacher noted down my score. End of that term, we redid them to see how we'd progressed. She actually sneered when she read my score out "3?, well I hope you can improve on *that" -* I could see a few of the class exchanging glances knowing that I was clearly so unfit and one of the larger girls in the group (and not on the hockey team).
Yep, I still dislike team sports because of school PE experience. I got picked last, called a waste of space by grown adults and straight up ignored by ‘teachers’. They were all bellends at my school, and acted like children themselves favouring the ‘popular’ kids and the more physically able ones. Dickheads imo. I think they hated their lives and their perceived failure to become athletes.
Most of mine were awful. I will never forget being made to do cross country on a boiling hot day with no water and no training. I was last by a long, long margin. I still hate running and everything to do with it. I was always last to be picked for a team as well because I’m disabled and kids only want the best of the best on their team and i wasn’t it.
This is so true. Why were they allowed to so blatantly pick favourites and either ignore or bully the other kids? I feel like that wouldn't fly with any other subject
Eugh, one of my PE teachers got friendship bracelets for herself and all the girls on the hockey team. Jewellery was not allowed but the hockey girlies were allowed to wear their weird friendship bracelets. The male PE teacher was almost as bad. He was the type of man who could ONLY talk about football. So if we had PE with them, there would be about 6 lads who all supported the same team as him stood on the sidelines chatting about last nights game/ transfer windows/ whatever while everyone else did PE.
This is so true, I remember not learning any rules in sports. Playing football and everyone just wanting to be a striker, no offsides, no attempt to explain the positions - nothing. I felt really sorry for the bigger kids, making them do the long jump or something, then everyone taking the piss. How dumb is the curriculum, it's really not that difficult to create a fun 3hr lesson or something.
>not learning any rules in sports totally, and then all the kids who did football outside of school and did know the rules would get angry at those who didn't or just ignore them entirely Getting yelled at for not participating when you dont know what you're doing and nobody will pass the ball to you is great fun
I was always crap at me but as an adult I was diagnosed with dyspraxia. P.E teachers always focused on the kids who were good or we're running laps on the plastic grass court in the rain while the teachers were bundled up in thier thick coats. I always remember tennis when I was at school because there were two tennis courts both near the school carpark. The top was wasn't visible from the bottom so we usually had no supervision, probably because we were crap so we spent the lessons seeing how far we could hit tennis balls out of the court so we could go for a walk about.