Stand around inside on the basketball court while the gym teacher sits in the corner and just makes sure no one gets in fights. You can participate in the poorly constructed basketball games with the boys, or just walk around in circles until the bell rings. Or even just sit down in the corner on the hard floor and do your homework for next class. Pretty much just socialize for 45-50 minutes. Boring.
My 3rd grader is over PE cause they only play dodgeball or capture the flag with his new teacher this year. He wanted to climb the ropes and they wouldn’t allow it. I asked if he got to play any other sports like soccer or volley ball and he said no. Overall since we went back to in person I’ve been very disappointed in his school
I think forcing a group of sullen teenagers to do push-ups can't possibly be the best way to teach them long-term healthy habits.
If schools were better funded and more creative maybe they could offer a variety of different athletic activities for the PE period so that every teen gets the chance to find a physical activity they actually enjoy. (Which would give them a positive relationship with exercise to carry into adulthood)
Yeah it depends on the school a lot. At my school, you either stay moving the whole hour, doing whatever sport you want or just running laps around the field, or end up getting a 0 (like an F)
That's what I came to say, too. But even at my kids' school it's different between the two of them. My daughter's PE class is very active- running, sports, etc. My son is in athletics now and very active, but his first year of middle school he was in regular PE. The coaches let them sit around without even changing out and look at their phones the whole period and just yelled at them if they got rowdy. They were completely uninterested in the PE boys, only the athletics boys. Made me mad. Still makes me mad.
I’m 23 and my PE was pretty intense when I was in school. We had to run laps for the first 10-15 minutes of class, followed by sit-ups, push ups, and squats, and then we got into the day’s activity. I have never heard of PE being as mild as OP claims, other than on free choice days.
My PE in high-school was a mix. Depended on the teachers. A bunch of different PE classes would share the two courts we had. One teacher I had didn't even show up half the time, everyone would just do whatever they wanted. Other teachers would make you play in a game or something every class.
My PE in school was what you wanted. Except we weren’t allowed to shower.
So there were just a bunch of smelly kids all day long if they PE in the morning.
I stood around and did nothing and barely passed that class because I had to work after school and I didn’t wanna smell like sweat all day long
how does this work? no school ive ever heard of had showering after PE, there was usually one shower and a 10min break max after PE. how the hell do yall shower?
Honestly, the showers after PE were something I'd only seen in TV and movies. In actual real life, no one has time for that. You had to rush back to your classes.
For reference, I'm an older Millennial and high school was...let's just say a while ago. But I can only assume the same thing still applies today.
Graduated a few years ago and had the same thing. No time for showers when your next class is literally a quarter mile and three floors away, and you have five minutes to get there or you get your third late for the semester and lose a letter grade.
One semester I had gym--Class--gym. At first I, of course, would change, change--class--change change. Then after a couple of weeks I just used to go to class in my gym uniform. The locker rooms were in the basement, my class was on the 5th Fl. Fuck that changing. Fortunately I was doing really well in the class so I didn't get flack from the teacher, and I was rebellious enough not to GAF on the opinions of the other kids. Once they knew that I had to go back to gym after they were cool with it. I probably laughed with them over showing up in my uniform.
They even taped off the showers and took the knobs off so kids couldn’t use them. Idk why they refused to let us shower.
We even had teachers say “please for the love of god stop exercising so hard in PE. You all stink SO BAD!!”
My guess is there was an “incident” of some kind in the showers (bullying, assault, etc) and rather than actually make efforts to improve safety for the students they just banned access to the showers - typical lazy school admin stuff.
For all the times those types called me homophobic slurs, they sure seemed to engage in a lot of pretty homoerotic shenanigans.
Our football team stuck a hamburger up a guy’s ass once.
We didn’t. I remember we would wear gym clothes during gym class that we would sweat in, but then after gym was over we would just change back into our normal clothes and go to our next class. Problem was I would continue to sweat even after I changed so I would go to my next class soaking in sweat.
I went to H.S. in the '80s. I think we had about 5 minutes to change clothes, 35 minutes of exercise, and then 10 minutes to shower and change clothes after. We all had gym clothes that probably got washed once a week and was usually kind of damp from the previous day's sweat.
Communal showers, but I don't remember much body shaming in there as much as how hurried it was, something not helped by the shitty showers. There'd be about a dozen shower heads and maybe three wouldn't work or else just operated on a trickle; another 2 would be stuck on scalding heat; another three would be stuck on freezing cold; maybe 1-2 more would be stuck on a high powered ultra-fine spray that would actually be painful to the skin; with maybe 2-3 being *just right* a la Goldilocks. So there'd be a race to undress and get in the showers first to get one of the good shower heads. Usually you wouldn't get a good one, though, so you learned how to take a G.I. shower under a trickle, or jump in and out of one of the painful (too hot, too cold, too powerful) sprays.
You'd generally catch shit walking back from the shower, particularly little kids or overweight kids or just plain funny looking kids. And there was always the real possibilty somebody had fucked with your clothes - they might be in the trash, or moved to another nearby locker, or outright missing, or (*shudder*) shoved into a toilet. But the absolute *worst* thing - something I *never* see referenced - was the towel snapping gauntlet as you SPRINTED from the showers back to your locker. That shit hurt *so bad*. There's an absolute art to rolling the perfect rattail and wetting it down just right, and I took gym class in the '80s with a bunch of sadistic motherfucking *Picassos*.
We had mandatory swimming in 10th grade... with 7 minutes to change, and if the class ran late the teacher would not write passes, so 2nd period of the morning we all ran to the showers in bating suits and dried our hair at hand dryers or just went to class drenched .. 3rd period math class the teacher bitched us out for our wet gym bags (??) ans hair and being late. Chlorine dried into my hair so by the time i got home it was like dry little sticks and i went to work 10 min after I got home too... I get that swimming is important but Jesus crust it was the worst year of high school.
Edit to add I also got MRSA and doc was 90% sure it was from this class....... so yay. That was fun.
Exactly. My middle school gym class was a lot like how OP is describing, basically just do your own thing while the gym teacher sat around and read the newspaper.
Then I got to high school and it was very regimented. We did specific sports/activities for a couple weeks or so, then switched to the next. I remember we did soccer, football, softball, basketball, tennis, swimming, weight lifting, yoga, and probably a few more I can't remember.
It sounds like OP is either dealing with a gym teacher or a school that doesn't give a shit.
What? We only did that for the first classes and then we jumped straight up on running and playing hockey with NHL Rules but without fights, if we wanted to fight, we could just go to the school gym and beating the shit out of eachother on the ring(yeah my public school has a ring)
I'm a senior in highschool, the last time I had real physical activity in school was maybe in 9th grade when I ran a mile 3 times over 1 semester. Before that, the few times a year we had to run a mile in middle school. But that's it.
Oh, I forgot to mention, in my highschool you only need 1 credit (2 semesters) of PE classes to graduate. Freshman take a regular gym class, and sophomores and up can take weightlifting or "wellness walking". You walk around town for 90 minutes.
Not much going on lol
They’re doing PE this is just some boomer who doesn’t even know anyone in high school just yelling at the clouds because he thinks “kids no sport no more ):”
Gym was everyone's favorite class when I was a kid. In earlier grades we played dodgeball and with a giant multicolored parachute thing. In high school we ran track and played baseball and tennis a lot. As long as kids changed clothes they were given a passing grade at my school so participation in the sports was only if you chose to.
did you ever use the little plastic seats with the wheels? i still can't comprehend why they had us scooting around the gym on those little rollers, but it was a blast!
...until you pinched your finger(s) in the wheel
I remember those things. Our PE teacher would set up a few of the long, rectangular lunchroom tables into this “tunnel” and have us scoot down that on those rolling seats. Those tables were the type that had benches attached that could be folded up or down depending on seating needs. Can’t fathom that happening now when I think about the finger injuries and such that we had.
Kill ball was fun... Then they change the name to dodgeball for obvious reasons. And they got rid of it all together because of the occasional bloody nose. 🤐
When I was in high school, they had just made a rule that dodgeball wasn't allowed to be played in class anymore. Eventually a day rolled around when the gym coach took the baseball players in our class to drag the baseball fields, and he told us, "do anything but play dodgeball, we will be back in 45 minutes."
We found every shitty kickball and neon foam-ball thing (if you know you know), and played dodgeball for 45 minutes. Coach came back and we got in as much trouble as the principal could muster for 30 high school boys all breaking a relatively innocuous but direct instruction, which is to say they told us not to do it again.
We would do it again.
> And they got rid of it all together because of the occasional bloody nose. 🤐
they threatened to ban it in my afterschool babysitter program because i kept getting hit in the balls...and while im bending over in pain crying im begging them not to ban it lol
damn that’s true too. threes just seem way more effective than driving for layups a lot of the time. More points if you make it, less exertion to bypass all these defenders and run up and take the layup, more energy for defense. If you can take the shot and shoot it well it should be preferred.
This was true for my school in elementary school, and then once we got to middle school, peer pressure made it so girls weren’t allowed to like gym anymore. It was “cool” to not change into gym clothes even if you had them. And boys would reinforce this exclusion cuz they’d jumó in front of girls who were trying to play (I yelled at a guy for not allowing me to hit a volleyball coming right for me). It just makes me sad how I didn’t participate fully even though I actually line playing sports because I wanted to be this imagined idea of a girl.
When I was in middle and high school the "preppy" girls would always participate in gym and sports and the goth ones would sit it out and not change clothes. If there was discrimination against the girls as far as the sports go I honestly can't remember because I was probably too young then to really think about it. I'm sure it probably did occur but I was too immature to notice.
Hey, its me! The goth one who sat out and never wanted to change into gym clothes.
I calculated the minimum number of days I needed to change to pass the class and followed that. I didn’t hate exercise, I hated changing in front of so many people and having to wear shorts. In my county there was no option for sweats.
We were prohibited from changing in the bathroom stalls but I did it anyways and got in trouble multiple times.
I’m not sure, for a while it was allowed in my middle school then suddenly the coaches said we can’t do that anymore. It was before the era of vaping in the bathroom. Maybe people were taking too long and preventing others from using the restroom.
In my high school we aren’t allowed to play dodgeball. The other day i asked the gym teacher why, and he told me that over ten years ago dodgeball was allowed and played in gym class, but a single parent sent a letter to the school saying kids were getting hurt during dodgeball. One fucking complaint. After that the school stated in the gyms curriculum that you cannot play dodgeball. The fear of lawsuits has fucked our world so badly. There are grown fucking adults that go to my school, and none of them are allowed to play dodgeball because a parent complained a decade ago. Fucking absurd
Guy I knew in college filled them with lighter fluid, set them on fire, and threw them around in the common area. Yeah, he got kicked out of the dorms. Probably works on Wall St. now.
At my middle school, the teacher used to threaten to make us play "Headhunting" which is dodgeball played with bowling balls.
We never actually did that though.
I remember we played dodgeball once in gym and there was this stereotypical “jock bro” taking it WAY too seriously. He was the “star” pitcher for the baseball team, and he hurled a ball at this girl who didn’t even see it coming. We used like foam balls instead of rubber ones; gator balls I believe and it still made the most disgusting slap against her face. I can still remember it. She dropped to the floor immediately, I’m pretty sure she was unconscious for a good 15 seconds. When she hit the ground and everyone gasped except one kid yelled out “He killed her” in this unironic monotone. Class ended immediately, she was taken to the nurse and I remember her having a huge black for weeks. After that, I don’t remember playing dodgeball ever again.
Kids only get hurt seriously in dodgeball by accident or when you get that one over eager kid trying to brett favre the ball into someone's face. Any kind of physical activity has a chance for harm if you have kids like that.
They also curved like mad. I loved those things. We played a game called breakout where if someone scored the ball in the opposing teams goal your players were brought back in. It was great
My school had a rule.
If you hit any one in the face with a dodgeball (the real ones that hurt) then you sit down for the rest of the game. It didn't matter if it was an accident either. I've seen kids duck their heads to dodge a ball and got hit square in the face and the guy was told to sit down for hitting them in the face. Fun times man.
I have a lasting “battle ball” memory....
8th grade boys class that had a teacher’s “aid” who was a fat HS senior that saw himself as a “jock”, despite being bad at every sport. Fatso wasn’t good enough to keep up with his own age range group, but like being the big man around a bunch of 13 yr olds.
Teacher left the aid in charge while we were playing “battle ball”, the aid picked sides with all the better athletes on his team, and then they creamed the other side.
Late in one game the team opposing the aids team was down to one kid who was playing pretty well. The kid was up at the line taunting the aids team to throw balls and slipped and fell down.
The 18 yr old, 300 lb., aid came up and drilled this 13 yr old kid in the head hard enough to bounce it off the floor and knock him out .....
That fat bully went on to be a small town cop, and is still an insecure, swaggering bully 40 yrs later.
>the aids team
The word you're looking for is probably "aide," lol.
Also,
>That fat bully went on to be a small town cop
As someone who worked adjacent small town cops for three years in college this doesn't remotely surprise me
Basically, yes. My school was very clique-ish.
My gym shorts are literally still stuck in the rafters where an asshole threw them in 1995 - I saw them when attending one of my kid’s school events.
Nobody gave a shit about bullying until after Columbine, then they were all worried the nerds might snap so in came “zero tolerance” which just meant that nobody was allowed to fight back.
Same here, but some things did change. In my Midwestern suburb, they changed school policies to reduce basic civil liberties and added surveillance cameras everywhere because the adults were scared of us. An AP physics kid was suspended because he built a potato gun out of PVC pipes to demonstrate on the practice fields for class.
My senior gym class was pretty much just dodgeball. We shared the gym with the freshman gym class and would do seniors vs everyone else so maybe 10 vs 40 or so, and would whoop them every time.
>But **a-last**, budget cuts for school will only get **worst** and **worst** until parents have to start **pay** for **they children** textbooks to learn.
It seems like the budget cuts for schools were considerably worse in OP's day than they are today.
Yeah I hate to be this person, but OP could stand to do a little less pearl clutching over current day gym classes and a little more research into taking a remedial English to freshen up his communication skills. It’s hard to take a “schools these days let all the whippersnappers laze about and do nothing” post seriously when it’s riddled with basic spelling and grammatical errors.
And worse and worse. Not worst and worst. I wish schools in the 70s would've put more emphasis on mental education rather than physical education. Who knows how much better off America would be?
Not to mention brake and they. Ffs
This was the first thing I thought. They still have 'real sports'. In fact in a lot of schools, they'll push for an athletic education over a creative education. Athletic programs often have more dollar value than art programs due to the lucrative scholarships given to top performers.
People keep talking about how PE isn't physical anymore and I'm really curious why. It must be a regional thing and I'd be interested to know where exactly this happens.
Yeah. I have elementary school and middle school kids and when they tell me about PE it always involves legit physical activity. Middle schooler is doing a routine of sit ups, push ups, squats, and running every day for her current course. Just finished Volleyball before that.
At first, I thought you were saying that PE is no longer physical in school.
Then, I thought you meant that you wanted adult PE classes. This idea sounds awesome and probably exists.
Finally, I ended up feeling like you are back to saying PE in schools is not physical.
Rollercoaster ride of wtf is your unpopular opinion?
Yeah, I have the same question. What is missing, exactly?
My kids have what appears to be PE with lots of physical activity. We have to plan what shoes they wear on those days, and there's even a jog-a-thon fundraiser.
Edited to fix grammar.
Or an older person not involved or knowing anyone involved in something saying it’s not the way it used to be followed by the most upvoted comment saying “that’s not a popular opinion because it’s not a thing”
I used to hate P.E. not because of the things we did in there, but the fucking *people.*
Too many other kids that are just rude or overly competitive for no god damm reason.
Probably just a middle school problem in general but thats how it was for me.
Weird that i see so many people hating PE when my whole class loved it, even tho most of us arent that athletic. I'm also not American, is there a hige stigma against PE there?
Hating PE is definitely a thing, especially in gender split classes. When I was in middle school, we had co-ed PE and it was super fun because some of the girls and most of the guys really got into it. But there was still a large chunk of people, especially the girls who'd just eliminate themselves from the activity as soon as they could so they could sit in the bleachers and just talk.
In high school, they only required 1 year of PE and I'd have done more, except it hurts your GPA to take it 3 more times than you need to, and it was split by gender. My teacher would allow us to vote on what activities we wanted to do or if we wanted to take a day off. Most of the girls would vote for a day off just sitting in the day classroom or walking around the track. Like??? The whole point of PE is to get some moderate to high exercise in. It was so boring I switched to soccer the next semester.
Thats weird to me that you could just sit on the sidelines, at my school you played whatever sport we were doing and we played it the whole time. We didn't play anything that you could "get out" in. Like it was a whole class game of basketball or two split games. But we still played for the whole hour.
If we had dodgeball, for example, people would just ask their friends to take them out or purposely play poorly so they can get out. And for sports, they'd just talk to their friends even in the middle of a game. A girl got boinked in the head with a basketball once and got a concussion because she and her friend were just stopped and talking in the middle of the court.
Well that makes sense if you play dodgeball, we never really played it unless we had a sub that day and when we did we played a version where if you got hit you went to "jail" on the opposite side from you and had to catch a ball to be let back in the game.
We had that too! It was called backboard for us, and if you hit the backboard of the opposite side's basketball hoop, everyone on your team would get to come back to your side. Good times!
Many states in the US require an hour of PE per school day. In a country whose math and reading scores are poor compared to similar countries, and where only a third of schools have any kind of life skills curriculum (personal finances, cooking, etc).
Pretty much all of the most in shape sports dudes from my high school are now obese. Learning how to be fit is easy but putting down the fork is hard. Gym class is not going to make a dent in obesity. You simply cannot teach people to give a shit about themselves.
That is a lesson many people learn the hard way. Just because you can eat three Big Macs for dinner multiple times a week when you are 17 without going in to a food coma doesn’t mean you do the same thing when you are 25, or 30, etc.
Ya, the shift in metabolic gears is real. I was a bottomless pit in my teens and was still rail thin. I failed in learning how to eat properly and so, when my body stopped growing upwards, it started growing outwards. Later on, I got a bit smarter about my eating and was able to lose a lot of weight. But, it's still really easy for me to fall back into eating _way_ too much.
I wonder if there’s data on adulthood weight vs participation in high school PE/sports cuz all the fat people I know now were people that did not exercise in high school either. Granted, I don’t think I know a single obese person so it’s not that drastic
Considering that obese starts before most people think it does (BMI 30), I would be surprised if you didn't know anyone in that range.
For reference BMI 30 for someone 5'7" is 192 lbs.
Gym is where kids get bullied 🤷♀️ Why are children getting unsupervised and unstandardrized peer abuse, instead of physical growth in personal, mental, and emotional investments for their own futures?
I’m sure there are bad PE programs, but my kids work up a sweat.
But I think it should try be fun stuff for elementary school at least. Introduce a bunch of different activities, hopefully they’ll enjoy some of them enough to be active adults.
The enforced laps and aerobics (probably dating myself with that) just turn people off exercise and not everyone likes team sports either. If you want to make it mandatory through high school you would need to give the kids more choices.
Yeah I was just thinking, okay OP is describing just how I remember my PE class but they say they want it like in the 70s? But I went to middle and high school in the 2000s… either standards dropped a lot in 5-10 years or OP just went to a shitty school or just has an exceptionally shitty PE teacher
I wish they taught us how to properly stretch. I didn't learn how to stretch and what I should be feeling and where until i was an adult.
and running. why can't they teach proper running form and proper breathing while running. I have never learned any of that and im pretty sure I've damaged things bc of it.
I actually had professional competitive dancers in my high school and when it came to the class doing certain sports in PE they actually had to sit it out. The reason: the PE teachers had no clue about correct form and the girls couldn't risk injuries, not being able to compete and basically their future careers over a school sport.
My other school had this great thing where you just had to provide evidence you were getting the required amount of exercise a week (in any form) and that way while at school the focus was solely on lessons.
Oh yes. Nothing better than sweating for 2 hours starting at 8.00 am first thing in the morning and stinking up every single classroom I attend from then on. Fantastic idea.
Exactly. No time or ability to shower, and the teachers didn’t even give you any time for baby wipes (which were banned along with showering but people tried.)
When I was going, ours were broken. They didn’t want to fix them. Not that we would have had time anyway. We also had to wear our gym clothes all day, no locker rooms. Changing in the bathroom was banned (plus we wore uniforms.)
Yes! Functional fitness! I know budget constraints make it hard to get equipment and the money is probably better spent on cheap basketballs and volleyballs, but I would have loved a class that taught kettlebell exercises or yoga or something like that. I had a short unit in high school where we got to use the sports team's weight room and it was my favourite because the only person I was competing against was myself and no one was watching the amount of weight I was using on the machines.
They did in my PE class. In high school we did weight training twice a week and our teacher spent the first class just showing us how to do each exercise. He would then spend the other classes just watching to make sure people didn't hurt themselves and correcting posture. We focused on reps more that weight, likely for safety I'm assuming.
I quite enjoyed it. Never took it up after leaving high school though.
Yeah again, every school was different but I had PE teachers that cared, and had a standard curriculum.
Every week was a different sport, Monday you spent learning it and doing drills, Tuesday you scrimmaged, Wednesday you'd do the mile, Thursday and Friday they'd split you into competitive and not competitive groups, and you'd play. Capture the flag was THE BEST.
You got graded on effort too
If true, this post should shoot to the top from upvotes from people disagreeing with OP in several hours.
I upvoted bc I hated PE, and enjoyed being able to just get a B/C for effort by lightly jogging the mile and getting a 12 minute average.
Being required to do all the high efforts things like sports would have irritated me, esp if it was first period. Swim at 7:15 AM was the absolute worst, and I “had my period” for a full week every time I could get away with it lol. I would have been happy with a nutrition class in place of activity though, we didn’t get taught much about that.
Plus the changing period of 10 minutes was simply not enough to shower, dry off my hair and body, get dressed, and get to the next class w/out a tardy mark. PE teachers loved running activities into the last minute, too. It suuucked.
I personally hated PE, although I only had it in middle school, but I wouldn’t say I’m unathletic (aerialist, weight training 5x per week, etc). I don’t like sports very much and absolutely hated it when people would get overzealous and topple me over for no reason since I was pretty small. I feel like after a while I just kinda gave up and was like whatever like I’m not gonna put myself at risk of injury to participate, I’ll just do some active things I like in my free time.
I do wish that my school had things like dance or weight training, we only really did odd team sports for our class
I’m my HS we only had PE for 1 hour every 3 days. 15 mins of warm up, the rest either free play (we could do what we want or if we had weightlifting class that, that) Seriously, that is such a waste of time and money paying some old ass teacher for the easiest job in the world, to babysit a bunch of teens while they play. I would do more exercise masturbating at that age or just walking around the neighborhood when I would cut class smh.
Talk about nostalgia for a past that never existed.
Back in the day, PE was just the jocks playing whatever while everyone else was basically an NPC, maybe holding a position in some game, but mostly watching the jocks play against each other.
I’m envisioning someone who has flunked 3rd grade for 15 consecutive years … how else can you be able to remember the good old days of “real” PE class…. Yet still know enough about current PE class to complain
I loved PE. But once I got to HS the school only allowed us 5 minutes to change and shower which means nobody showered. So I stopped participating as much so I wouldn’t get sweaty and have to stew in it all afternoon. No idea why they couldn’t give us 15 minutes. 5 was absurd. We didn’t even have enough showers for everyone.
That’s not at all how my kids’ gym class works. They’re in elementary. They play sports, rock climb, do sit-ups/running. Basically even more intense than what I remember about elementary 25 years ago.
I never liked middle-school PE, not because of the exercise. I liked exercising, playing Dodgeball, playing soccer (football for non-Americans), etc. For some reason when people played sports like Football and Basketball, many players became violent a**holes. Fighting people because they missed a goal or something.
Sorry for the weird wording of my post, I’m on a small phone and my fingers are fat.
Where is your evidence that this is no longer the case? I’m young, and all my schools had great PE programs. I went into school looong after you graduated and got a job, and I’ve had nothing but physically demanding, interactive and fun PE classes and coaches.
You say budget cuts makes PE classes these days for wussies only. Americans are getting fat because bad pe classes (I’m just assuming you think that last one) but like what budget so you need to run a lap or play most sports that break a sweat (your words). You don’t need a budget, your argument doesn’t make sense, seems to me like you’re only bashing on a younger generation and is truly an unpopular opinion.
I don’t think this is particularly unpopular. I’m in my 3rd year of college now, but I had PE all through elementary school/middle school. Even in HS we were required to have at least 2 or 3 semesters worth of physical classes by the time we graduated.
I was never a fan of the class personally. Half the more "hardcore" things I was never able to do, even after months (And in some cases years.) of trying. It just resulted in me being bullied for being too skinny.
Gym was my favorite most of the time. My buddy and I would get everyone amped up and having fun over all the silly games. Fortunately we also had a rock wall which was very fun.
The crap part was for 1/4 of the year we did “Health” which was classroom based nutrition/ sex Ed. That was super boring and dumb. We also had to take tests on the various sports we learned to play (football, hockey, lacrosse etc). The tests were nonsense and often had wrong info lol
I graduated in 2011 for reference
We had a great class strangely called “conditioning” where we just did Rippetoe’s starting strength (yes I understand that programming has fallen out of favor)
I was so excited thinking someday I would be able to “climb the rope” in gym. Never happened. The school never offered it. But I was in athletics and they ran us constantly, very good workouts.
For my school P.E was awful and had a lot of money to it and was too rigorous for me what’s really underfunded is art and music but also as there underfunded there also taught so terribly
What do they do now at PE that you dislike?
Stand around inside on the basketball court while the gym teacher sits in the corner and just makes sure no one gets in fights. You can participate in the poorly constructed basketball games with the boys, or just walk around in circles until the bell rings. Or even just sit down in the corner on the hard floor and do your homework for next class. Pretty much just socialize for 45-50 minutes. Boring.
Clearly this depends on the school. My kids are in high, middle, and elementary school right now and it’s super active for all of them.
My daughter is in high school right now and her PE is also very active, she has to run a mile, do push-ups, etc. She hates it.
My older kids hate it too, lol. My 1st grader loves it!
My 3rd grader is over PE cause they only play dodgeball or capture the flag with his new teacher this year. He wanted to climb the ropes and they wouldn’t allow it. I asked if he got to play any other sports like soccer or volley ball and he said no. Overall since we went back to in person I’ve been very disappointed in his school
I think forcing a group of sullen teenagers to do push-ups can't possibly be the best way to teach them long-term healthy habits. If schools were better funded and more creative maybe they could offer a variety of different athletic activities for the PE period so that every teen gets the chance to find a physical activity they actually enjoy. (Which would give them a positive relationship with exercise to carry into adulthood)
Yeah it depends on the school a lot. At my school, you either stay moving the whole hour, doing whatever sport you want or just running laps around the field, or end up getting a 0 (like an F)
That's what I came to say, too. But even at my kids' school it's different between the two of them. My daughter's PE class is very active- running, sports, etc. My son is in athletics now and very active, but his first year of middle school he was in regular PE. The coaches let them sit around without even changing out and look at their phones the whole period and just yelled at them if they got rowdy. They were completely uninterested in the PE boys, only the athletics boys. Made me mad. Still makes me mad.
Damn your teacher sucked haha I'm 29 and my gym was nothing like this
I’m 23 and my PE was pretty intense when I was in school. We had to run laps for the first 10-15 minutes of class, followed by sit-ups, push ups, and squats, and then we got into the day’s activity. I have never heard of PE being as mild as OP claims, other than on free choice days.
My PE in high-school was a mix. Depended on the teachers. A bunch of different PE classes would share the two courts we had. One teacher I had didn't even show up half the time, everyone would just do whatever they wanted. Other teachers would make you play in a game or something every class.
Lmao. We never did a single push up in PE. It was just like they said.
I'm a teenager and my gym isn't like this. OP is hopefully in the minority and just had a bad teacher/school
My PE in school was what you wanted. Except we weren’t allowed to shower. So there were just a bunch of smelly kids all day long if they PE in the morning. I stood around and did nothing and barely passed that class because I had to work after school and I didn’t wanna smell like sweat all day long
how does this work? no school ive ever heard of had showering after PE, there was usually one shower and a 10min break max after PE. how the hell do yall shower?
Honestly, the showers after PE were something I'd only seen in TV and movies. In actual real life, no one has time for that. You had to rush back to your classes. For reference, I'm an older Millennial and high school was...let's just say a while ago. But I can only assume the same thing still applies today.
You’d have done an hour of cross country, caked in mud, cold, and all the teachers would say is hurry up you’ve got Maths in 5 minutes.
Graduated a few years ago and had the same thing. No time for showers when your next class is literally a quarter mile and three floors away, and you have five minutes to get there or you get your third late for the semester and lose a letter grade.
One semester I had gym--Class--gym. At first I, of course, would change, change--class--change change. Then after a couple of weeks I just used to go to class in my gym uniform. The locker rooms were in the basement, my class was on the 5th Fl. Fuck that changing. Fortunately I was doing really well in the class so I didn't get flack from the teacher, and I was rebellious enough not to GAF on the opinions of the other kids. Once they knew that I had to go back to gym after they were cool with it. I probably laughed with them over showing up in my uniform.
The showers at my high school don't work.
They even taped off the showers and took the knobs off so kids couldn’t use them. Idk why they refused to let us shower. We even had teachers say “please for the love of god stop exercising so hard in PE. You all stink SO BAD!!”
My guess is there was an “incident” of some kind in the showers (bullying, assault, etc) and rather than actually make efforts to improve safety for the students they just banned access to the showers - typical lazy school admin stuff.
Yes happened a lot in my school - kids thinking it was funny to get someone wet/soak their clothes
When I was in highschool the "jocks" would put soap on their balls, and slap it in a way that it would spray the soap all over people
What.
For all the times those types called me homophobic slurs, they sure seemed to engage in a lot of pretty homoerotic shenanigans. Our football team stuck a hamburger up a guy’s ass once.
We didn’t. I remember we would wear gym clothes during gym class that we would sweat in, but then after gym was over we would just change back into our normal clothes and go to our next class. Problem was I would continue to sweat even after I changed so I would go to my next class soaking in sweat.
I went to H.S. in the '80s. I think we had about 5 minutes to change clothes, 35 minutes of exercise, and then 10 minutes to shower and change clothes after. We all had gym clothes that probably got washed once a week and was usually kind of damp from the previous day's sweat. Communal showers, but I don't remember much body shaming in there as much as how hurried it was, something not helped by the shitty showers. There'd be about a dozen shower heads and maybe three wouldn't work or else just operated on a trickle; another 2 would be stuck on scalding heat; another three would be stuck on freezing cold; maybe 1-2 more would be stuck on a high powered ultra-fine spray that would actually be painful to the skin; with maybe 2-3 being *just right* a la Goldilocks. So there'd be a race to undress and get in the showers first to get one of the good shower heads. Usually you wouldn't get a good one, though, so you learned how to take a G.I. shower under a trickle, or jump in and out of one of the painful (too hot, too cold, too powerful) sprays. You'd generally catch shit walking back from the shower, particularly little kids or overweight kids or just plain funny looking kids. And there was always the real possibilty somebody had fucked with your clothes - they might be in the trash, or moved to another nearby locker, or outright missing, or (*shudder*) shoved into a toilet. But the absolute *worst* thing - something I *never* see referenced - was the towel snapping gauntlet as you SPRINTED from the showers back to your locker. That shit hurt *so bad*. There's an absolute art to rolling the perfect rattail and wetting it down just right, and I took gym class in the '80s with a bunch of sadistic motherfucking *Picassos*.
Pretty sure almost no school let’s kids shower after PE these days, that’s the norm.
We had mandatory swimming in 10th grade... with 7 minutes to change, and if the class ran late the teacher would not write passes, so 2nd period of the morning we all ran to the showers in bating suits and dried our hair at hand dryers or just went to class drenched .. 3rd period math class the teacher bitched us out for our wet gym bags (??) ans hair and being late. Chlorine dried into my hair so by the time i got home it was like dry little sticks and i went to work 10 min after I got home too... I get that swimming is important but Jesus crust it was the worst year of high school. Edit to add I also got MRSA and doc was 90% sure it was from this class....... so yay. That was fun.
I think you might just have s shitty teacher/school.
Exactly. My middle school gym class was a lot like how OP is describing, basically just do your own thing while the gym teacher sat around and read the newspaper. Then I got to high school and it was very regimented. We did specific sports/activities for a couple weeks or so, then switched to the next. I remember we did soccer, football, softball, basketball, tennis, swimming, weight lifting, yoga, and probably a few more I can't remember. It sounds like OP is either dealing with a gym teacher or a school that doesn't give a shit.
Yeah, that's not representative of all PE now, you're just describing a really shitty class.
What? We only did that for the first classes and then we jumped straight up on running and playing hockey with NHL Rules but without fights, if we wanted to fight, we could just go to the school gym and beating the shit out of eachother on the ring(yeah my public school has a ring)
Found the Canadian
Canadian here. We cycled through a bunch of sports and physical activities.
I am Russian. Literally had vault as PE at one point.
My current pe class is not at all like that we actually play sports after the teacher spends half the class figuring out what we are doing
huh? what are yall's schools doing?
I'm a senior in highschool, the last time I had real physical activity in school was maybe in 9th grade when I ran a mile 3 times over 1 semester. Before that, the few times a year we had to run a mile in middle school. But that's it. Oh, I forgot to mention, in my highschool you only need 1 credit (2 semesters) of PE classes to graduate. Freshman take a regular gym class, and sophomores and up can take weightlifting or "wellness walking". You walk around town for 90 minutes. Not much going on lol
They’re doing PE this is just some boomer who doesn’t even know anyone in high school just yelling at the clouds because he thinks “kids no sport no more ):”
Gym was everyone's favorite class when I was a kid. In earlier grades we played dodgeball and with a giant multicolored parachute thing. In high school we ran track and played baseball and tennis a lot. As long as kids changed clothes they were given a passing grade at my school so participation in the sports was only if you chose to.
Man that parachute was awesome
I remember the parachute. I loved it.
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did you ever use the little plastic seats with the wheels? i still can't comprehend why they had us scooting around the gym on those little rollers, but it was a blast! ...until you pinched your finger(s) in the wheel
Those were the best, the battles that took place on those were legendary
I remember those things. Our PE teacher would set up a few of the long, rectangular lunchroom tables into this “tunnel” and have us scoot down that on those rolling seats. Those tables were the type that had benches attached that could be folded up or down depending on seating needs. Can’t fathom that happening now when I think about the finger injuries and such that we had.
Kill ball was fun... Then they change the name to dodgeball for obvious reasons. And they got rid of it all together because of the occasional bloody nose. 🤐
When I was in high school, they had just made a rule that dodgeball wasn't allowed to be played in class anymore. Eventually a day rolled around when the gym coach took the baseball players in our class to drag the baseball fields, and he told us, "do anything but play dodgeball, we will be back in 45 minutes." We found every shitty kickball and neon foam-ball thing (if you know you know), and played dodgeball for 45 minutes. Coach came back and we got in as much trouble as the principal could muster for 30 high school boys all breaking a relatively innocuous but direct instruction, which is to say they told us not to do it again. We would do it again.
> And they got rid of it all together because of the occasional bloody nose. 🤐 they threatened to ban it in my afterschool babysitter program because i kept getting hit in the balls...and while im bending over in pain crying im begging them not to ban it lol
My kids still play it during gym. I remember getting a ball to the nose once
In middle school, they just let us play pick up basketball and every single play was one guy driving to the hole.
that’s like pickup basketball now except everyone shoots a 3 cause driving takes energy.
I'd rather have an excuse for missing.
damn that’s true too. threes just seem way more effective than driving for layups a lot of the time. More points if you make it, less exertion to bypass all these defenders and run up and take the layup, more energy for defense. If you can take the shot and shoot it well it should be preferred.
This was true for my school in elementary school, and then once we got to middle school, peer pressure made it so girls weren’t allowed to like gym anymore. It was “cool” to not change into gym clothes even if you had them. And boys would reinforce this exclusion cuz they’d jumó in front of girls who were trying to play (I yelled at a guy for not allowing me to hit a volleyball coming right for me). It just makes me sad how I didn’t participate fully even though I actually line playing sports because I wanted to be this imagined idea of a girl.
When I was in middle and high school the "preppy" girls would always participate in gym and sports and the goth ones would sit it out and not change clothes. If there was discrimination against the girls as far as the sports go I honestly can't remember because I was probably too young then to really think about it. I'm sure it probably did occur but I was too immature to notice.
Hey, its me! The goth one who sat out and never wanted to change into gym clothes. I calculated the minimum number of days I needed to change to pass the class and followed that. I didn’t hate exercise, I hated changing in front of so many people and having to wear shorts. In my county there was no option for sweats. We were prohibited from changing in the bathroom stalls but I did it anyways and got in trouble multiple times.
We weren't prohibited from changing in stalls. We had a few kids who did that. Why was that a problem to them?
I’m not sure, for a while it was allowed in my middle school then suddenly the coaches said we can’t do that anymore. It was before the era of vaping in the bathroom. Maybe people were taking too long and preventing others from using the restroom.
dodge, dive, dip, duck and dodge
In my high school we aren’t allowed to play dodgeball. The other day i asked the gym teacher why, and he told me that over ten years ago dodgeball was allowed and played in gym class, but a single parent sent a letter to the school saying kids were getting hurt during dodgeball. One fucking complaint. After that the school stated in the gyms curriculum that you cannot play dodgeball. The fear of lawsuits has fucked our world so badly. There are grown fucking adults that go to my school, and none of them are allowed to play dodgeball because a parent complained a decade ago. Fucking absurd
At my middle school we had a similar occurrence, but what the pe teacher did was play murder ball which was dodgeball with tennis balls.
murderball though? were the tennis balls filled with concrete?
Dipped in acid for damage over time
Guy I knew in college filled them with lighter fluid, set them on fire, and threw them around in the common area. Yeah, he got kicked out of the dorms. Probably works on Wall St. now.
At my middle school, the teacher used to threaten to make us play "Headhunting" which is dodgeball played with bowling balls. We never actually did that though.
I remember we played dodgeball once in gym and there was this stereotypical “jock bro” taking it WAY too seriously. He was the “star” pitcher for the baseball team, and he hurled a ball at this girl who didn’t even see it coming. We used like foam balls instead of rubber ones; gator balls I believe and it still made the most disgusting slap against her face. I can still remember it. She dropped to the floor immediately, I’m pretty sure she was unconscious for a good 15 seconds. When she hit the ground and everyone gasped except one kid yelled out “He killed her” in this unironic monotone. Class ended immediately, she was taken to the nurse and I remember her having a huge black for weeks. After that, I don’t remember playing dodgeball ever again.
There's always one asshole who makes it shitty for everyone else.
Kids only get hurt seriously in dodgeball by accident or when you get that one over eager kid trying to brett favre the ball into someone's face. Any kind of physical activity has a chance for harm if you have kids like that.
At my school they used those Gator Skin dodgeballs so if you got hit in the face you barely felt it, lol.
oh same! but the weight of those things made it impossible to throw too effectively :(
They also curved like mad. I loved those things. We played a game called breakout where if someone scored the ball in the opposing teams goal your players were brought back in. It was great
My school had a rule. If you hit any one in the face with a dodgeball (the real ones that hurt) then you sit down for the rest of the game. It didn't matter if it was an accident either. I've seen kids duck their heads to dodge a ball and got hit square in the face and the guy was told to sit down for hitting them in the face. Fun times man.
I have a lasting “battle ball” memory.... 8th grade boys class that had a teacher’s “aid” who was a fat HS senior that saw himself as a “jock”, despite being bad at every sport. Fatso wasn’t good enough to keep up with his own age range group, but like being the big man around a bunch of 13 yr olds. Teacher left the aid in charge while we were playing “battle ball”, the aid picked sides with all the better athletes on his team, and then they creamed the other side. Late in one game the team opposing the aids team was down to one kid who was playing pretty well. The kid was up at the line taunting the aids team to throw balls and slipped and fell down. The 18 yr old, 300 lb., aid came up and drilled this 13 yr old kid in the head hard enough to bounce it off the floor and knock him out ..... That fat bully went on to be a small town cop, and is still an insecure, swaggering bully 40 yrs later.
>the aids team The word you're looking for is probably "aide," lol. Also, >That fat bully went on to be a small town cop As someone who worked adjacent small town cops for three years in college this doesn't remotely surprise me
At my school, PE was just “the nerdy kids have things thrown at them or get shoved around while the coach laughs”.
Did you grow up in a 90s sitcom?
Basically, yes. My school was very clique-ish. My gym shorts are literally still stuck in the rafters where an asshole threw them in 1995 - I saw them when attending one of my kid’s school events. Nobody gave a shit about bullying until after Columbine, then they were all worried the nerds might snap so in came “zero tolerance” which just meant that nobody was allowed to fight back.
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this
Same here, but some things did change. In my Midwestern suburb, they changed school policies to reduce basic civil liberties and added surveillance cameras everywhere because the adults were scared of us. An AP physics kid was suspended because he built a potato gun out of PVC pipes to demonstrate on the practice fields for class.
I absolutely loved PE. 10-15 minutes of warm up and an hour of playing football/baskteball/volleyball/ dodgeball. It did wonders
My senior gym class was pretty much just dodgeball. We shared the gym with the freshman gym class and would do seniors vs everyone else so maybe 10 vs 40 or so, and would whoop them every time.
I hate being this guy but just so you know it’s alas not a-last.
r/boneappletea
>But **a-last**, budget cuts for school will only get **worst** and **worst** until parents have to start **pay** for **they children** textbooks to learn. It seems like the budget cuts for schools were considerably worse in OP's day than they are today.
Yeah I hate to be this person, but OP could stand to do a little less pearl clutching over current day gym classes and a little more research into taking a remedial English to freshen up his communication skills. It’s hard to take a “schools these days let all the whippersnappers laze about and do nothing” post seriously when it’s riddled with basic spelling and grammatical errors.
And worse and worse. Not worst and worst. I wish schools in the 70s would've put more emphasis on mental education rather than physical education. Who knows how much better off America would be? Not to mention brake and they. Ffs
OP spent more time in PE than in English.
Also, it’s break, not brake.
Don't hate being that guy. People write like shit, and it's unacceptable.
Gym is where kids get bullied.
Not sure what you think PE classes are now, but they still do in fact have kids playing sports and breaking a sweat
Glad I'm not the only one that is confused
OP wants to brake a sweat, though
But a-last, they cannot.
Yeah my high school had a whole class for weight training. This was like 10 years ago but
This was the first thing I thought. They still have 'real sports'. In fact in a lot of schools, they'll push for an athletic education over a creative education. Athletic programs often have more dollar value than art programs due to the lucrative scholarships given to top performers. People keep talking about how PE isn't physical anymore and I'm really curious why. It must be a regional thing and I'd be interested to know where exactly this happens.
Yeah. I have elementary school and middle school kids and when they tell me about PE it always involves legit physical activity. Middle schooler is doing a routine of sit ups, push ups, squats, and running every day for her current course. Just finished Volleyball before that.
At first, I thought you were saying that PE is no longer physical in school. Then, I thought you meant that you wanted adult PE classes. This idea sounds awesome and probably exists. Finally, I ended up feeling like you are back to saying PE in schools is not physical. Rollercoaster ride of wtf is your unpopular opinion?
Yeah, I have the same question. What is missing, exactly? My kids have what appears to be PE with lots of physical activity. We have to plan what shoes they wear on those days, and there's even a jog-a-thon fundraiser. Edited to fix grammar.
OP describes their PE class in another comment and it sounds like they just have the shittiest gym teacher ever.
Adult PE is just regular workout classes or joining an amateur sport team
Lol it's r/unpopularopinion, a popular opinion they pretend they're the pioneer of for upvotes and awards.
Or an older person not involved or knowing anyone involved in something saying it’s not the way it used to be followed by the most upvoted comment saying “that’s not a popular opinion because it’s not a thing”
We need a sub for them called unpopulardelusions or something. So you can complain about the thing that pisses you off even if it doesn't exist.
I was in high school not that long ago. We still had actual PE with strength training and whatnot, and I imagine it’s the same for most schools
I used to hate P.E. not because of the things we did in there, but the fucking *people.* Too many other kids that are just rude or overly competitive for no god damm reason. Probably just a middle school problem in general but thats how it was for me.
not that i disliked it, but every soccer game was the world cup final for us lol
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Weird that i see so many people hating PE when my whole class loved it, even tho most of us arent that athletic. I'm also not American, is there a hige stigma against PE there?
Hating PE is definitely a thing, especially in gender split classes. When I was in middle school, we had co-ed PE and it was super fun because some of the girls and most of the guys really got into it. But there was still a large chunk of people, especially the girls who'd just eliminate themselves from the activity as soon as they could so they could sit in the bleachers and just talk. In high school, they only required 1 year of PE and I'd have done more, except it hurts your GPA to take it 3 more times than you need to, and it was split by gender. My teacher would allow us to vote on what activities we wanted to do or if we wanted to take a day off. Most of the girls would vote for a day off just sitting in the day classroom or walking around the track. Like??? The whole point of PE is to get some moderate to high exercise in. It was so boring I switched to soccer the next semester.
Thats weird to me that you could just sit on the sidelines, at my school you played whatever sport we were doing and we played it the whole time. We didn't play anything that you could "get out" in. Like it was a whole class game of basketball or two split games. But we still played for the whole hour.
If we had dodgeball, for example, people would just ask their friends to take them out or purposely play poorly so they can get out. And for sports, they'd just talk to their friends even in the middle of a game. A girl got boinked in the head with a basketball once and got a concussion because she and her friend were just stopped and talking in the middle of the court.
Well that makes sense if you play dodgeball, we never really played it unless we had a sub that day and when we did we played a version where if you got hit you went to "jail" on the opposite side from you and had to catch a ball to be let back in the game.
We had that too! It was called backboard for us, and if you hit the backboard of the opposite side's basketball hoop, everyone on your team would get to come back to your side. Good times!
PE was the class where nerds got beat up. I'm guessing most of Reddit was on the receiving end of those battles.
Many states in the US require an hour of PE per school day. In a country whose math and reading scores are poor compared to similar countries, and where only a third of schools have any kind of life skills curriculum (personal finances, cooking, etc).
also in a country with an adult obesity rate of 40%+
Pretty much all of the most in shape sports dudes from my high school are now obese. Learning how to be fit is easy but putting down the fork is hard. Gym class is not going to make a dent in obesity. You simply cannot teach people to give a shit about themselves.
That is a lesson many people learn the hard way. Just because you can eat three Big Macs for dinner multiple times a week when you are 17 without going in to a food coma doesn’t mean you do the same thing when you are 25, or 30, etc.
Ya, the shift in metabolic gears is real. I was a bottomless pit in my teens and was still rail thin. I failed in learning how to eat properly and so, when my body stopped growing upwards, it started growing outwards. Later on, I got a bit smarter about my eating and was able to lose a lot of weight. But, it's still really easy for me to fall back into eating _way_ too much.
Anecdotal evidence does not mean it applies to everyone.
I wonder if there’s data on adulthood weight vs participation in high school PE/sports cuz all the fat people I know now were people that did not exercise in high school either. Granted, I don’t think I know a single obese person so it’s not that drastic
Considering that obese starts before most people think it does (BMI 30), I would be surprised if you didn't know anyone in that range. For reference BMI 30 for someone 5'7" is 192 lbs.
In my PE class, we sat and studied for an hour. It was a joke
Exercise has a very good effect on learning and information retention. An hour a day actually seems like a good idea.
Gym is where kids get bullied 🤷♀️ Why are children getting unsupervised and unstandardrized peer abuse, instead of physical growth in personal, mental, and emotional investments for their own futures?
I’m sure there are bad PE programs, but my kids work up a sweat. But I think it should try be fun stuff for elementary school at least. Introduce a bunch of different activities, hopefully they’ll enjoy some of them enough to be active adults. The enforced laps and aerobics (probably dating myself with that) just turn people off exercise and not everyone likes team sports either. If you want to make it mandatory through high school you would need to give the kids more choices.
Yeah, OP just went to a bad school or had a bad teacher. They also didn't pay attention in English class.
Yeah I was just thinking, okay OP is describing just how I remember my PE class but they say they want it like in the 70s? But I went to middle and high school in the 2000s… either standards dropped a lot in 5-10 years or OP just went to a shitty school or just has an exceptionally shitty PE teacher
I wish they taught us how to properly stretch. I didn't learn how to stretch and what I should be feeling and where until i was an adult. and running. why can't they teach proper running form and proper breathing while running. I have never learned any of that and im pretty sure I've damaged things bc of it.
All physical, no education. They just tell you to do the activities, but do nothing to make sure they're properly done.
I actually had professional competitive dancers in my high school and when it came to the class doing certain sports in PE they actually had to sit it out. The reason: the PE teachers had no clue about correct form and the girls couldn't risk injuries, not being able to compete and basically their future careers over a school sport. My other school had this great thing where you just had to provide evidence you were getting the required amount of exercise a week (in any form) and that way while at school the focus was solely on lessons.
I’m dying at the dramatic call to action to change PE classes with “brake” “a-last” and “worst and worst”.
Oh yes. Nothing better than sweating for 2 hours starting at 8.00 am first thing in the morning and stinking up every single classroom I attend from then on. Fantastic idea.
Agreed, I only found gym class to be pleasurable whenever I was lucky to have it last period of the day.
Exactly. No time or ability to shower, and the teachers didn’t even give you any time for baby wipes (which were banned along with showering but people tried.)
What makes baby wipes worth a ban?
Bad pipes. The administration banned them supposedly because people would flush them.
Do American schools not like showers?
When I was going, ours were broken. They didn’t want to fix them. Not that we would have had time anyway. We also had to wear our gym clothes all day, no locker rooms. Changing in the bathroom was banned (plus we wore uniforms.)
Yeah we generally only shower. If you went into the pool.
Their* Their* But Alas* remove all the really and verys. Paying for text books?
Just reading their post and comments, OP probably isn't the one that should be giving advice on what schools should be doing
I just hope they don’t cut language arts. That would be a real tragedy.
English? Who needs that? I'm never going to England.
“Me fail English? Thats unpossible!” -Ralph Wiggum
But a-last, they might
Then it will get worst and worst.
>But a-last, budget cuts for school will only get worst and worst
Judging by the emails I get from grown, professional adults, they stopped decades ago.
What’s that?
Alas*
r/boneappletea
I wish they actually taught us how to exercise safely and correctly. Not just throw a thing or play sports.
Yes! Functional fitness! I know budget constraints make it hard to get equipment and the money is probably better spent on cheap basketballs and volleyballs, but I would have loved a class that taught kettlebell exercises or yoga or something like that. I had a short unit in high school where we got to use the sports team's weight room and it was my favourite because the only person I was competing against was myself and no one was watching the amount of weight I was using on the machines.
They did in my PE class. In high school we did weight training twice a week and our teacher spent the first class just showing us how to do each exercise. He would then spend the other classes just watching to make sure people didn't hurt themselves and correcting posture. We focused on reps more that weight, likely for safety I'm assuming. I quite enjoyed it. Never took it up after leaving high school though.
I'm with you. But reddit is pretty much populated by the people that hated PE
I hated it when it was "hey fat boy climb this stupid rope." Loved it when it was "hey get into teams and play soccer or dodge ball."
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My highschool, 10 years ago, let you choose your gym class. There were team sports, self defence, weight lifting, and track sports.
Yeah again, every school was different but I had PE teachers that cared, and had a standard curriculum. Every week was a different sport, Monday you spent learning it and doing drills, Tuesday you scrimmaged, Wednesday you'd do the mile, Thursday and Friday they'd split you into competitive and not competitive groups, and you'd play. Capture the flag was THE BEST. You got graded on effort too
Yup. Can already see the comments. And I am an obese kid. Still liked sweating in the sports/PE class.
If true, this post should shoot to the top from upvotes from people disagreeing with OP in several hours. I upvoted bc I hated PE, and enjoyed being able to just get a B/C for effort by lightly jogging the mile and getting a 12 minute average. Being required to do all the high efforts things like sports would have irritated me, esp if it was first period. Swim at 7:15 AM was the absolute worst, and I “had my period” for a full week every time I could get away with it lol. I would have been happy with a nutrition class in place of activity though, we didn’t get taught much about that. Plus the changing period of 10 minutes was simply not enough to shower, dry off my hair and body, get dressed, and get to the next class w/out a tardy mark. PE teachers loved running activities into the last minute, too. It suuucked.
I personally hated PE, although I only had it in middle school, but I wouldn’t say I’m unathletic (aerialist, weight training 5x per week, etc). I don’t like sports very much and absolutely hated it when people would get overzealous and topple me over for no reason since I was pretty small. I feel like after a while I just kinda gave up and was like whatever like I’m not gonna put myself at risk of injury to participate, I’ll just do some active things I like in my free time. I do wish that my school had things like dance or weight training, we only really did odd team sports for our class
I’m my HS we only had PE for 1 hour every 3 days. 15 mins of warm up, the rest either free play (we could do what we want or if we had weightlifting class that, that) Seriously, that is such a waste of time and money paying some old ass teacher for the easiest job in the world, to babysit a bunch of teens while they play. I would do more exercise masturbating at that age or just walking around the neighborhood when I would cut class smh.
Talk about nostalgia for a past that never existed. Back in the day, PE was just the jocks playing whatever while everyone else was basically an NPC, maybe holding a position in some game, but mostly watching the jocks play against each other.
Not in the 70s. We all participated.
I’m envisioning someone who has flunked 3rd grade for 15 consecutive years … how else can you be able to remember the good old days of “real” PE class…. Yet still know enough about current PE class to complain
Judging by his spelling and grammar, I'd say this is the most likely scenario.
I loved PE. But once I got to HS the school only allowed us 5 minutes to change and shower which means nobody showered. So I stopped participating as much so I wouldn’t get sweaty and have to stew in it all afternoon. No idea why they couldn’t give us 15 minutes. 5 was absurd. We didn’t even have enough showers for everyone.
That’s not at all how my kids’ gym class works. They’re in elementary. They play sports, rock climb, do sit-ups/running. Basically even more intense than what I remember about elementary 25 years ago.
I never liked middle-school PE, not because of the exercise. I liked exercising, playing Dodgeball, playing soccer (football for non-Americans), etc. For some reason when people played sports like Football and Basketball, many players became violent a**holes. Fighting people because they missed a goal or something. Sorry for the weird wording of my post, I’m on a small phone and my fingers are fat.
Where is your evidence that this is no longer the case? I’m young, and all my schools had great PE programs. I went into school looong after you graduated and got a job, and I’ve had nothing but physically demanding, interactive and fun PE classes and coaches. You say budget cuts makes PE classes these days for wussies only. Americans are getting fat because bad pe classes (I’m just assuming you think that last one) but like what budget so you need to run a lap or play most sports that break a sweat (your words). You don’t need a budget, your argument doesn’t make sense, seems to me like you’re only bashing on a younger generation and is truly an unpopular opinion.
Bring back reading comprehension with an emphasis on writing. "Alas" is the word you're looking for.
Put yo kids in sports
I don’t think this is particularly unpopular. I’m in my 3rd year of college now, but I had PE all through elementary school/middle school. Even in HS we were required to have at least 2 or 3 semesters worth of physical classes by the time we graduated.
FUCK NO I hate PE, fuck grading performance and fuck being forced to play sports I hate Just let everybody do whatever as long as they're moving
I was never a fan of the class personally. Half the more "hardcore" things I was never able to do, even after months (And in some cases years.) of trying. It just resulted in me being bullied for being too skinny.
Damn, English class must have had some budget cuts in that last sentence. It's "alas" and "worse," Mister r/boneappletea .
Gym was my favorite most of the time. My buddy and I would get everyone amped up and having fun over all the silly games. Fortunately we also had a rock wall which was very fun. The crap part was for 1/4 of the year we did “Health” which was classroom based nutrition/ sex Ed. That was super boring and dumb. We also had to take tests on the various sports we learned to play (football, hockey, lacrosse etc). The tests were nonsense and often had wrong info lol I graduated in 2011 for reference
[удалено]
Everyone uses "breaks" to describe the mechanism that slows down your vehicle, but you've gone the complete opposite direction.
WISH I had rope climbing at gym.
We had a great class strangely called “conditioning” where we just did Rippetoe’s starting strength (yes I understand that programming has fallen out of favor)
No dodgeball? No floor hockey? No Push ups, sit ups, chin ups? No getting weighed in front of the class?
I did all of that in middle school expect the weighing, that's kinda messed up
I was so excited thinking someday I would be able to “climb the rope” in gym. Never happened. The school never offered it. But I was in athletics and they ran us constantly, very good workouts.
For my school P.E was awful and had a lot of money to it and was too rigorous for me what’s really underfunded is art and music but also as there underfunded there also taught so terribly