the older i get the weirder it is that not a single p.e. teacher in my entire school career was able to recognize the difference between “a child who doesn’t get enough exercise” and “a child with serious health problems impeding their ability to exercise in this particular way”
you know what else is weird? we had to do that fitness test every year but like… we never actually… learned how to do the things they tested us on…
like, now that i am an adult i have learned how to build up my strength so i can do pushups, but that seems like something they could have taught us? in school? in the class where they tested our ability to pushups? they never taught us how to work our way up to actually doing a chin-up, or whatever. even if i had just been “out-of-shape” (as a CHILD), nothing they did would have solved that problem. i did not learn how to exercise in a functional way until i was out of school and teaching myself, so i’m not sure what those p.e. classes were even intended to accomplish, really.
people are adding a lot of horror stories to this post that are really similar to mine (exercise-induced asthma, running the mile every friday, coughing nonstop for hours afterward and never actually getting any faster or building up any endurance, fainting at least once and not even getting sent to the nurse) but
to add something to the “really obvious shit any idiot could have told me” list
they taught us that the average walking speed should be 3mph, and i consistently tried on treadmills to walk at 3mph, and that always seemed really fucking fast to me and i never understood why
i’m 5′2″
i was in my twenties before i realized that i cannot go that fast because i have short fucking legs
why did grown-ass adults with eyes try to teach my short ass that i should be able to walk an easy mile in 20 minutes
It’s like they say.
If you can’t do, teach.
If you can’t teach, be a gym teacher.
It never occurred to me until reading this notes the utter ridiculousness that PE teachers held all kids to the same benchmark standards for like number of pushups and sit ups, time of mile, etc. even though everyone is at a different level athletically and has different body types and heights
Can we all agree that PE was a traumatic experience for non-athletic kids? It dented my self confidence for a decade and it probably played an integral role in my developing an eating disorder that nearly killed me two years in a row –too busy comparing myself to the CHILDREN who had been taught to be athletic to consider myself worthy of anything else than starving myself to death.
My mum had a similar experience in 8th grade when her PE teacher asked her to demonstrate how to do hurdles, then asked another athletic girl to demonstrate after her –only to say “see class: do it the way Tammy did it. NOT how Cheryl (my mum) did it.”
It wasn’t until I got a fiercely feminist fitness teacher in grade 10 did I realize I was actually capable of LEARNING this shit. Fuck elementary PE.
I hated P.E. the entire time I was in school, and it didn’t occur to me until well into adulthood that if I’d have been taught properly or not pressured the way kids are pressured, I might have actually enjoyed sports. Cause like, I’d love to build muscles, or play volleyball, or tennis, or what fucking ever, but gym class ruined it for me.
Anyone looking to learn what PE class totally failed to teach, Anatrik’s videos on strength workouts are very good:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dF1DOWzf20&t=3s
He’s also worked with a friend to create this great strength routine:
https://www.reddit.com/r/bodyweightfitness/wiki/kb/recommended_routine
What I love about Anatrik’s stuff is that all of his exercises not only describe proper technique very clearly, but come with suggested progressions – if you’re not strong enough for an exercise, there are several levels of easier exercises designed specifically to build up your strength over time until you can do it.
