I'm not going to lie and say it didn't hurt that I was picked last, because it did. I don't know why my gym teachers would make us go through that crap when they could've just divided up the teams themselves. It would've been so much easier, and better for the kids who no one wanted. Gym teachers are sadists, though, I guess. My gym teacher for 6-8 grade was a man, and this was also the time in my life when I would get cramps from my period so badly that I could barely walk, let alone stand around a basketball court and watch my classmates ignore me while they played. I only went to school because I was in line for valedictorian and didn't want to miss a thing. So one day I asked him if I could sit out, because it hurt so badly. I even told him why I was in pain, which is the last resort for any 12-14 year old girl to say to their male teacher. He refused, and I spent the whole class doubled over on the basketball court in pain, wishing menstrual cramps on him for all his life. I swear, if guys had a period for just one day, there would never be another PMS joke again. EVER!
I guess this is just a lesson to any future or current gym teachers out there: choose teams yourself to spare the unathletic, and allow sitting out for monthly pains.
I guess I can take solace in the fact that I was always picked first for spelldowns and Brain Quest.
My mom bought me a set of Brain Quest cards, 4th grade ones I think, and we'd do them on long car rides.
So were you guys the unwanted unathletic children or the stronger ones that shunned the kids who couldn't catch a ball to save their lives?
34 comments:
Unathletic to the max. I was the queen of the scream 'n duck when a ball came flying in my direction. Even my best friend hated being partnered with me during gym most of the time because of this.
You know, we were the smart kids. If a large hard object came speeding towards my face, I'd duck, too. And I did!
Fortunately, I don't remember my P.E. teachers using that method of choosing teams all that often (I think they mostly tended to do the numbering thing). I was sort of in the middle when it came to sports and the effort I put in depended on what we were doing. I couldn't really be bothered with creative dance, but I fucking hated hockey, which the girls always had to do at some point in the year.
Considering I can trip on a smooth surface, definitely unathletic. In middle school I was hit in the head more times than anyone else in my class. (Mostly because some jerk boy would launch the ball halfway across the gym to hit me. At least most apologized.)
I never sat out, and that at least would give me kudos from some of the girls. There was one girl who had mild asthma and she had a Drs note to sit out if she felt an attack coming on. She sat out every day, and told me that she could have participated, she just didn't want to.
I was so happy to be done with gym my freshman year.
Picked last. Kids would also shout things like "Aim for Clementine!" when at bat (or whatever) because they'd like, automatically score a point (or whatever).
We did the Brain Quest cards on long car rides, too.
To add insult to serious injury, I suffered through a summer gym class between 9th and 10th grades so I'd be able to take the electives I wanted. At the time, the school required two years of gym.
A week after I finished the summer gym term, the school changed their policy. Students no longer had to take gym for two years.
Story of my life.
Yeah, my gym teacher was an asshole too. My mom got sick of me whining and called the school and had me switched to another teacher, who was female. I started getting “A”s in gym after that. Ironically, that asshole gym teacher some union activist and is now the head of the education union in my state. What a fuckjob (my spell-check wants to change this to cuckoo, heh). I got suspended for 3 days because I called him that to his face (fuckjob, not cuckoo). I also had problems with severe cramps when I was younger until my doctor put me on birth control pills). If some ass would have done that to me, I totally would have made a scene so he would not have WANTED me there. Or I would have faked injuring myself to go to the nurse.
Our classes were always broken up into teams that the teachers chose. I think it somehow went by last name. I am neither athletic nor athletically challenged. I was more interested in being a clown and making trouble, so those who wanted good grades tended to shy away from being on my team and those who wanted a good time would flock to be on my team.
I love procrastinating! I am improving my procrastination skills as we speak.
Gym sucked so MUCH!! I hated it! I remember feeling so awkward and miserable...no-one wanted me on their team because I sucked at everything. If you screwed up, everybody on your team would give you this evillll look. In middle school, I had male gym teachers and they were such assholes. I think I'm gonna stop now...this is bringing back shitty memories :p
I was a chubby kid throughout grade school, and not the solid kind who was great at contact sports, just the "rather be reading than running around" kind. That was tolerable though, compared to 9th grade when I had the most evil gym teacher known to man. Did your school have those physical fitness tests that were basically worthless, though superathletes actually liked? I think they got certificates; haha, I wouldn't know. Anyway, gym teacher tried to use those results to fail the weak kids. Like he actually gave me an F! Just for sucking! Luckily I was also on my way towards valedictorian so my advisor called him out on his evil shenanigans, and he was forced to grade the kids by participation alone. Still got a C though.... lame.
So I'm wondering, do smart athletic superstars actually exist, or is it really one or the other?
I was kind of in the middle. Not super-athletic, but not terrible. I was strong enough that kids wanted me as the anchor on their team if we had to do tug-of-war. I was decent enough at kickball, basketball (until the ball broke my finger in 9th grade), and preferred to be the goalie in hockey and soccer.
So I wasn't picked last, but definitely not first.
I wasn't a fan of gym class because of the uniforms because I was the fat kid, and I hated the Presidential Fitness Tests (except for the Sit-and-Reach because I could beat everybody in that and I actually set the school record), but it wasn't horrible.
I should also mention that I did gymnastics off and on from second grade to senior year of high school, so that probably had something to do with my half-assed athletic prowess.
Not only was I the last kid picked-- but the person who got stuck with me on her team would piss and moan about it for the rest of the class.
Good times.
I went to a school full of asshole athletes, ugh. Luckily, I got through the one required year of gym when I was a freshman. The teacher was this old redneck who didn't bathe as often as he should, and one of my trashy classmates with daddy issues (mean, but true) would wear shorts with her buttcheeks hanging out and flirt with him.
However, my grades didn't suffer because the teacher was actually pretty nice and gave A's for effort, and let some of us non-sportsies take walks once in a while instead of playing dodgeball or whatever.
The weird thing is, I wasn't uncoordinated. I took dance from age four to eighteen, and have studied on and off since then (I'm now in my twenties). I also just took up yoga, and I love to walk. I just hated playing sports, and the hero worship that my high school was so fond of.
Then again, I've heard a lot of my classmates got fat because they didn't exercise after high school, whereas I (while not skinny) am actually not bad-looking. So the valedictorian wins! Yay!
(Sorry to be so long-winded, I guess I just had a lot to say about gym class. :)
I'm glad to know I'm not the only one who HATED gym! I was also terrified of the ball. Whenever we played soccer or something, I'd basically stay rooted in one spot, kind of like a tree. It was prob. the best thing I could do for my team. LOL We were allowed a certain number of unprepareds per semester, so every once in awhile, I'd "forget" my gym clothes and sit out. The only time I ever liked gym was when there'd be a sub, and they would just take out the basketballs and let us play. I'd take a ball and go over to a hoop and shoot by myself. That way it didn't matter if I sucked. I kind of miss that sometimes, believe it or not.
Freaks and Geeks episode "The Diary" has a totally awesome subplot addressing this very problem: Bill (the geekiest kid ever) resents always getting picked last and, in frustration, makes prank calls to the gym teacher, leading to a geek-coach showdown. It's a great episode because it really clearly shows the frustration of the unathletic kid: Bill knows he'll never be a big winner in sports or super athletic, but he just wants to be captain for, like, one day of gym.
Oh man, I was so all about sports and gym class and was a pretty diesel athlete back in my heyday, AND I used to have the Brain Quest cards too. Does that make me a total anomaly freakazoid? I can't help it... I love sports AND oodles of trivia!
Heh, how's that for irony? Back in the horrors of junior high, you're shunned for gym class and now I'm the outsider for being a gym class hero of sorts.
I was uber athletic... but still, I didn't give a fug. I didn't want to play stupid sports cause my cha-chas were huge and I felt super uncomfortable doing any type of athletic activity. But I LOVED brain quest! Also, even the mention of anything remotely female cramp related and my gym teacher went into a "LALALAICANTHEARYOU" tangent. It was awesome.
On a side note- did you feel the earthquake this morning?
My high school gym class wasn't so bad. I went to a private school so I only needed gym for one year, and the classes weren't co-ed. We also got to wear what we wanted, within reason, and since no one knew me because I went there instead of the public high school like all of my grade school classmates, I had a fair chance at not getting picked last. Actually I don't really remember if the teacher picked teams or we did. The teacher loved me, though, because she had had my athletic cousins, which she thought were my older sisters.
But 6-8 grade was another story. Our gym uniforms were the worst. The shirt was a regular blue cotton t shirt, but not the soft kind, it was the kind that barely would stretch. Our shorts were blue polyester, and since I, unlike the other girls in my grade, had gained weight with puberty and I'm short, mine were down to my knees. Oh yeah, and after the first washing the shorts and shirt would be different color blues because the shirt faded in the wash and the shorts didn't. Oh, and did I forget to mention that my leg hair has always been super dark and you can see little black spots an hour after I've shaved (and this is now that I have a good razor, not the crappy disposables I had then)? Yeah, def got mad fun of for that, too.
I do remember the Presidential fitness tests, but I always rocked them because I had been in dance since I was 6, so I could do more stomach crunches than any of the boys. Our teacher also didn't grade us on those. In fact, gym class, computer class, music, and library (don't ask) came on a different report card and didn't count for shit.
And haha, I was totally thinking of the Freaks and Geeks episode the whole time! I just got the DVDs off of Netflix a month ago or so and watched the show for the first time, loved it. Bill is so my ho and I wish he could've prank called my gym teacher.
And to whoever broke their finger in gym class (Yahoo mail wasn't working last night so I woke up to 13 comments), the one time I got passed the basketball in 7th grade, it landed on my left middle finger and chipped part of the bone off. It's now crooked and double-jointed, but the best part was getting out of gym class for three months, because we had to move my last dr appt for it and I couldn't go back until I had that appt. I sat on the picnic tables outside and read Forever. It was amazing.
Who had to play the horror that is flag football? If you got a flag that didn't come out easily, you got a nice big red mark across your stomach from the belt. Honestly, whoever made up gym class totally liked to be beaten with whips and chains at night.
Earthquake? Would I feel it in Illinois? I know there was a small one here a few years ago. I don't have classes Friday, so I usually sleep in today. Unfortunately, we're watching my brother's dog (half black lab, half husky) for the weekend, and I got woken up by my cat meowing at her.
And I sympathize with you, since I was the lucky girl in junior high that went through puberty first, and the first one for about a year to need a bra. That was also the year my teacher made us square dance in the classroom, and I was so afraid one of the boys would have to touch my back and they would feel my bra. I got made fun of for enough, guys: I was short, had gained weight, wasn't exactly attractive back then, sucked at sports, and had long wild curly hair (I was the only girl with curly hair in my class, too, everyone else had the straight silky perfect hair, while I look like a Brillo pad in the morning). I didn't need another thing discovered.
Huh, I just checked the Chicago Tribune's website, and I guess the earthquake was felt all over in Illinois. I sleep in my basement because we haven't gotten the satellite box for my room fixed yet (and my room doesn't have Tivo anyway) so maybe that's why I didn't feel it.
One other thing i just remembered: If you took a language at my high school (not required, but recommended if you were going to college) there was a chance that you would learn folk dancing. Everyone in my spanish class wanted to dance b/c then they didn't have to actually LEARN the language (what a concept). I hated dancing because I always tripped and got partnered with some jerk who would use the time to to humiliate me as much as possible. Mainly so he wouldn't be teased by his friends for dancing with me.
Man I hated high school.
Those gym uniforms sounded horrid. I'm glad that I could pick out my own gym outfit at least.
Flag football, yes. Crappy. I almost got my gym pants tore off playing flag football.
Even worse was Ultimate Frisbee, which was where you played Frisbee with football rules. Ultra crappy.
I live in MN and I felt no earthquake. But I was asleep.
Oh, and dancing was a required unit in all 3 required semesters of High School gym. I got thrown across the room while do-si-do-ing once.
In Middle School we were faced with the horrors of Co-ed swimmming. I was glad for the trade, considering it was much easier to be molested by a dirty-minded preteen boy while half naked in a pool.
I'm so glad we didn't have a pool in my grade school or high school. I can't even imagine the horrors of putting my puberty-widened body into a swimsuit.
Was anyone else forced to play dodgeball?
Every Friday, a different kid got to pick the game, and nine times out ten, the kid picked dodgeball.
It was like I was from a different planet.
We had a different form of dodgeball called Eliminations, where you not only had to throw balls at everyone, but there was a bowling pin on each side and you had to knock down the opposing team's pin. It wasn't so bad, because we had soft nerf-like balls instead of the hard rubber gym balls and the other team was more concerned with knocking down the pin than knocking down you (the game ended once a pin was knocked down, whether or not all the people were out). I still remember getting whacked in the face, though.
OMG, snappleaddict, we so played that game too, only we called it Ducks in the Pond!
Yay for private high schools with only one year of required gym! (I attended one as well. When my sister went there a few years later, they started offering yoga as a P.E. requirement, so she got to take a semester of that and only one semester of regular P.E. Lucky.)
I hated gym and exercise for years until I figured out I could sit very easily in lotus position.
And to all the superathletes of high school, I say SCREW Y'ALL MY BODY MIGHT NOT BE ATHLETIC OR FAST BUT IT'S FLEXIBLE AS HELL.
OMG I haven't thought of Brain Quest cards for at least ten years.
Oh, man... I was the only one to strike out in "No Strike Out Softball" my Sophomore year. The other kids were counting aloud as I swung, and around swing 23 I was all "For the love of God, may I please sit down?!? Please?!" And after that I sat out every time softball was played. Oh, and the mentally retarded girl always got picked before me, because she could serve a volleyball, and I couldn't.
So, yeah, hated gym class.
Oh, the horrors of gym class.
Let's see, do I start with the fact that A) I am insanely uncoordinated? Or B) freakishly accident prone? Ooh I know-- C) the pathological shyness that led me to simultaneously want to be completely ignored, and yet made me feel totally excluded when I actually got that wish. I suppose it's a good thing that wasn't often. (See points A and B.)
So point (A) led to those memorable incidents when I hurt myself running or walking to the place where we were supposed to start. (B) led to injuries like: Being hit in the head with:
footballs, basketballs, soccer balls, tennis balls, volleyballs, golf balls (on two separate occasions), and any form of bat, racket, or stick. Or things like
getting hit in the chest so hard with a soccer ball that it snapped the underwire in my bra, stabbing me in the side and leaving a scar I still have 14 years later. (I was also that poor girl who was looking for industrial strength bras by age 13. Fun! Which is also the reason I haven't worn a bathing suit in public since 1994-- I was scarred for life during our swimming unit which really sucked since I spent practically my entire life in the pool during summer vacation and I was really looking forward to being good at something non-geeky for a change.)
Yeah, people groaned loudly when I was assigned to their team. Thank god my school district never let kids pick their own teams. We were a bunch of hyper competitive overachievers, so even established friendships probably wouldn't have saved the nonathletic ones, never mind geeky me.
And it wasn't even that I totally sucked at everything, it's that it was so absurdly random what I managed to be decent at: the one time of year that people actually wanted me on their team was as goalie for our annual months of hockey (in 4 years, I gave up 3 goals), and I can assure you that no one was more shocked than I was to discover that I had some savant like gift for archery. But that really doesn't help when most of the activities are based around the ability to catch things.
Although I think the kicker is the teacher who tried to fail me in 7th grade after I had missed over 3 months of school due to multiple hospitalizations. Because having just over half the blood volume a normal person should have doesn't affect your ability to play kickball at all.
Er, sorry about that. Clearly I have some Issues about this topic.
I think we all do. I'm 23 and still bitter about 6-8 grade gym class.
I like the fact that no one here is good at sport. Good to know I'm not alone! I really don't understand dodgeball - how is getting hit in the head with a ball fun? Usually I hid behind people, which unfortunately meant I was the last on one my team. So I had to stand there while my entire team depended on a girl who couldn't throw the ball over the line.
Ah, memories.
Overall, gym class was okay for me. I had my last gym class of my high school career a month and a half ago, and I was thrilled when that was over. xD It wasn't that I hated gym, but I enjoyed other classes more. I could handle dodgeball, baseball, kickball, and other sports that didn't require a lot of running, like soccer or basketball. I was one of the least athletic kids in the class, but I was nice, made an attempt, and tried, to an extent.
And Brain Quest cards? LOVED those. But my madre gave them away, and they're on my list of things I must buy to remind me of my childhood sometime in the next few years. Preferably before I'm shipped off to college. o.O
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