quote: A middle school gym teacher let children sit out his class if they paid him $1 a day, collecting perhaps thousands of dollars
Posted by Lyrhawn (Member # 7039) on :
I'd have paid a dollar to get out of gym class. It was horrible, and I got all the exercise I needed in Marching Band.
Posted by neo-dragon (Member # 7168) on :
Why would anyone pay to get out of gym class? You get to run and play fun games. It's like recess for older kids! I wish I could have worked gym into my schedule after grade 9, but I chose to focus on math, science, and english classes.
Posted by Lyrhawn (Member # 7039) on :
It wasn't fun, it was horrible. First of all, I got hit in the face with a fast ball during that fun time, and while wearing braces, so the left inside of my face was torn up for a week and a half or so where I couldn't really eat or talk or do anything.
I failed swimming because during the tread water test I immediately fell under the water and was given an F.
And I hated swimming in general because I had to take my contacts out and was blind the whole time.
Plus I was a fat kid back then. It was horrible
Posted by neo-dragon (Member # 7168) on :
You got to swim in gym?! We didn't even have a pool, and I love swimming. What are you complaining about? The sad thing is that my high school was literally attached to a rec center, and we still never got to use their pool! We got to use the skating rink a few times though.
The fast ball thing was pretty bad though. I can see how that may have been traumatic.
Posted by pH (Member # 1350) on :
We always got out of swimming in gym by telling the coach we were on our periods.
-pH
Posted by cheiros do ender (Member # 8849) on :
Umm....
Posted by Lupus (Member # 6516) on :
I loved Gym. A class in school where you get to play basketball, football, soccer, or whatever other sport people are playing that day. I thought it was great.
Posted by Lyrhawn (Member # 7039) on :
A couple years ago our high school had a renovation to add a modern Olympic sized swimming pool, it's one of the nicest in the county (which is saying something for the second richest county in the nation). Whenever I tell someone where I went to high school, they always say "great pool!"
And I still hate baseball to this day.
Posted by MrSquicky (Member # 1802) on :
I never got to take gym. I was in honors and a varsity letter athlete all four years, so I got a dispensation. I would have liked to have an exercise break in the middle of the day.
[ February 17, 2006, 01:17 AM: Message edited by: MrSquicky ]
Posted by Kitsune (Member # 8290) on :
We can take a sport instead of gym. I'm in the swim team So I never experienced the locker room beatups before!
Posted by Celaeno (Member # 8562) on :
Ugh. I have nightmares from freshman year gym. We had to do a biathlon. I believe it was something like a mile and a half run followed by twenty laps in the olympic-sized pool. I could be mistaken. Regardless, I felt like dying. Yes, yes, I'm from Hawaii, but I'm NOT a strong swimmer. I probably would've paid a dollar to skip that day.
Posted by Leonide (Member # 4157) on :
Gym didn't occur often enough in my high school schedule to do any good. So it was really just another chance for the popular, sporty people to feel superior. The only thing i excelled at was ping pong. I even sucked at shuffle board!
Anyhow, i would have paid. The only class i actually ended up gaining anything from was the weight training class i took senior year.
Posted by Lyrhawn (Member # 7039) on :
Now Weight Training I would have taken. By far and away I would have taken that over any other gym class, but it wasn't offered. Gym equipment was only for sports people.
Posted by advice for robots (Member # 2544) on :
I loved gym class. It was always a welcome break from sitting on my butt the rest of the day. In high school, we had a gym teacher that just gave us a key to the equipment closet and let us do what we wanted. I got pretty good at ping pong.
Posted by jennabean (Member # 8590) on :
Celaeno, I'm guessing you didn't like sychronized swimming then. I still can't believe that was a unit... I loved it though !!! No boys...
Posted by Celaeno (Member # 8562) on :
Didn't the boys do water polo? I'd much prefer to do synchronized swimming than water polo. See, water polo involves swimming and hand-eye coordination. It's a little too intense for me.
And I still can't believe I got to take hula for credit...
Posted by jennabean (Member # 8590) on :
I think everyone had to do water polo. I know we did... with water joggers and everything. It was vicious because I had all those husky haole Kailua girls in my class and they were like AAHHHH!H!!! so scary. I swam away from the ball.
Posted by ricree101 (Member # 7749) on :
I wish that there was a water polo unit where I went to high school. I played it occasionally at the pool I worked at, and thought it was pretty fun.
Overall I liked gym class, despite a few bad experiences (mostly the time I got hit in the face with a baseball bat).
Posted by Carrie (Member # 394) on :
It depended on what the unit in gym class was. Football? Sucked. Softball? Even more so. And don't even get me started on all that running crap...
Swimming? Cool, because I could finally excel at gym class. Floor hockey? Awesome. Golf? Not terrible. Badminton? Totally rocked. Even basketball wasn't too bad, because I decided to set up the regular "Loser Lightning" game around one of the hoops - double elimination Lightning, for the truly awful.
I made some pretty good friends through gym class, really. I didn't have the worst time ever, but I certainly didn't choose to take it when I didn't have to do so.
Posted by pH (Member # 1350) on :
I took a rock climbing class for one of my gym requirements. That ruled.
-pH
Posted by ketchupqueen (Member # 6877) on :
I had asthma, so I kinda got to slide in Jr. HS P.E. class; I could just claim asthma and was allowed to walk instead of running, and didn't have to participate in the really hard stuff that triggered it. At my HS, because of my asthma, I would have been required to take adaptive P.E., and I really didn't want to. I did AFJROTC instead, and really enjoyed it, and got off easy during PT (which was only once a week, on Fridays)-- again, because of my asthma. And if I really didn't want to do something, I claimed I had my period and was allowed to go sit it out or walk the track instead because Sarge didn't want to hear about it. I mean, all the girls in the class claimed to have their periods every week for a month when the Marine recruiter took over PT for a month (it was usually run by whichever student was Flight Leader that month or the TA, who was a senior and could care less if we slacked off), and Sarge let us walk instead because he just didn't want to hear it. We walked the upper field and laughed as we watched the boys sweat. Posted by cheiros do ender (Member # 8849) on :
quote:Originally posted by pH: I took a rock climbing class for one of my gym requirements. That ruled.
-pH
Ha I had a female friend who loved rock climbing. There was a building climbing thingy here and I'd asked to pick the name out of the draw thingy to pick who got to do it, and they said I could. I told her I'd magically pull her name out if she'd go out with me. Then when the day finally came I was lucky enough to pull her name out and I declined the date.
Posted by Celaeno (Member # 8562) on :
Why would you decline?
Posted by Ryuko (Member # 5125) on :
I was both a fat kid and asthmatic and gym really really sucked. I hated every day I had to do that stupid class, and would have definitely paid a dollar to get out. I also didn't get a chance to do a different gym class because of my health problems...
Posted by cheiros do ender (Member # 8849) on :
All throughout highschool, I was very on and off about whether I liked her or not.
Posted by akhockey (Member # 8394) on :
Gym was the best thing ever. Fresh/Soph year I took a PE class, then junior/parts of senior year I took a PE class and a TA for PE class. It was amazing. My teacher would let a friend and I "go to our lockers" sometimes if we had something we needed/wanted to do...
Posted by camus (Member # 8052) on :
Ok, so a lot of you would pay the dollar to skip the class, but if you are a parent, would you approve of your child doing this?
Posted by romanylass (Member # 6306) on :
Gym was torture for me. I'm sure that fact that I was clumsy, wildly unpopular AND that our district did a 6 week unit of square dancing in gym every year affected that. Hell, yeah, I'd have paid. If my kids were forced to square dance or play team sports thay hated, I'd give them the dollar.
Posted by starLisa (Member # 8384) on :
When I was a freshman in high school, we had to go to gym five days a week. It was a nightmare.
When I transferred schools starting sophomore year, we only had to take gym one day a week. Better, but still bad. And to my way of thinking, I'd already had 5 years worth of gym by the new school's standards, right?
I went to gym sophomore year, hating it. Junior year, I just never went. Never at all, actually. And the way this school did grades was, the first day of classes, you were given a stack of computer cards in homeroom. You were supposed to give them to each of your teachers over the course of that first week. I threw the gym one away.
Senior year, I went back to going to gym periodically, because it occurred to me that I could get seriously busted otherwise. And in fact, I sort of did.
I got called into the guidance counselor's office about midway through the year. He told me that since I hadn't taken gym my junior year, I'd have to do summer school in order to graduate. So I did what any normal high school kid would do. I lied through my teeth.
It helped that I'd founded the computer club at school. I explained to the guidance counselor that if I hadn't gone to gym, I would have gotten an F. The fact that it didn't even appear on the transcript was proof that it was a computer glitch. I suggested that he call the gym teacher from the previous year (who was no longer at the school), who would confirm that I'd been coming to gym, and suggested as well that he have the school's computers checked out.
I suppose that if he'd actually called my bluff, things would have gotten pretty bad. Fortunately, he didn't.
Posted by littlemissattitude (Member # 4514) on :
In a second. You bet I would have.
Not so much because I am against physical activity, but because one was belittled if they weren't good at the particular physical activities that were required in gym. And then, one was belittled if one refused to participate in the belittling.
I say this not as someone who was sometimes, but by no means always, the one belittled - I wasn't bad at all in volleyball, softball, and tennis in those days - but as someone who was looked at as not going along to get along when I would not join in the harassment of others.
And then there was the whole issue of having to strip down and shower in front of others. From my point of view, that was a big problem.
Posted by Xavier (Member # 405) on :
I hated gym class a lot of the time. Especially the years when I had a certain gym teacher, who was also the basketball coach.
This was a typical class: Teacher unlocks the supply closets and gets out several basketballs.
He then goes and talks to the female gym teacher or some of his players for the rest of the class.
So he did maybe 45 seconds of actually work each hour. Perhaps 7 minutes of work a day. Even at teacher's salary, he was making several thousand dollars an hour. Not too shabby .
Basketball is the sport I completely suck in, and it made me miserable to have to do it every other day. My junior and senior years I tended to skip about one day a week, and whether the day is a gym day or not factored in quite often. When I did go, I was quite often unprepared for class, and would get crappy grades because of this. I didn't care, because it wasn't factored into your GPA (I hear it is now at my old high school).
Other teachers were better, but it still wasn't anything that I liked doing.
Posted by Artemisia Tridentata (Member # 8746) on :
We didn't have to pay. The gym teachers never left the office and the coffee pot except to take roll. So, you had to dress for roll. But, then you were free until the bell rang. Yea Davis High.
Posted by Belle (Member # 2314) on :
quote:Ok, so a lot of you would pay the dollar to skip the class, but if you are a parent, would you approve of your child doing this?
Of course not! If it's a requirement at the school, then I would have insisted my kids go through the requirement.
Right now my daughter has to dress out for jr. high gym, and she doesn't have a problem with it. My younger kids love their PE classes in elementary school.
Posted by pH (Member # 1350) on :
Freshman year PE was half PE, half sex ed. Well, okay, it was "health class," but all we did was calculate our basal metabolism and have sex ed.
Actually, for one week, we had to record everything we ate and figure out the calories. Our teacher accused this one girl of being anorexic because for a couple of the days, all she had to eat was a few sandwiches. She said nothing about the soap actress whose entire daily meal consisted of one pack of M&Ms and one can of soda.
We only had to do one more PE credit, which is when I did the rock climbing.
A note about our sex-ed: It did emphasize abstinence, but I still managed to leave that class knowing about eighty times more about protection, birth control, the possibility of pregnancy, and various STDs than anyone else I have encountered to date. I am continually appalled by the lack of knowledge that most people have.
-pH
Posted by Stasia (Member # 9122) on :
I totally would have paid to get out of gym, at least the team sports/dance routines anyway. A dollar a day seems a small price to pay to avoid being tormented by the athletic girls for being too small, skinny, and uncoordinated to perform the sport of the week.
The same teacher that never seems to be around when some girl hits you in the face on purpose with a basketball (three times in one day!) will surely notice (and give you an F for the day) if you fail to strip naked and shower in front of 70 people.
/bitter rant about gym class
*would actually pay someone to remove gym class memories from brain*
Posted by Rico (Member # 7533) on :
Gym was actually pretty fun most of the time. The only thing I hated was walking around the rest of the day feeling all sweaty and dirty.
Posted by Valentine014 (Member # 5981) on :
Not only would I have paid to get out of gym class, I would've paid a whole lot more than a $1.
That "on the rag" excuse never worked for any of my gym teachers. You would just get an unexcused absence for the day. If you had more than two of those, you failed the class and had to retake it. I'm sure there were kids that didn't graduate because of my school's policy.
Posted by BandoCommando (Member # 7746) on :
quote:Originally posted by Lyrhawn: ... and I got all the exercise I needed in Marching Band.
You know, some schools actually give P.E. credit for marching band. Some think this is a ridiculous proposition, but they haven't been in bands that I run.
These kids start out the day by running a half mile, doing stretches, push-ups, sit-ups, and jumping jacks. Then they strap on instruments weighing up to 40 pounds and move across the field at high speeds, all the while trying to make it look easy. Don't knock it 'till you've tried it.
Additionally, the students are encouraged to engage in "random acts of conditioning" during times when their section is not being worked with. These acts might include crunches, pilates, push-ups (most people's favorite), and jumping jacks.
A number of years ago, a member of a Drum and Bugle Corps (basically a marching band that has no woodwinds), contacted some folks to help them run an experiment. They hooked up one of their drummers to a heartrate monitor, gave him a breath mask that measured the volume of air he was using, and took a number of other readings. Then this guy went out and performing his 10-minute show with the rest of the band. It turned out that his 10-minute show burned as many calories, processed as much air, and pumped as much blood as 30 minutes of solid rowing.
Marchers also have to exercise high degrees of control over their body to transfer weight quickly, efficiently, and smoothly, without jostling the upper body (and therefore the placement of the instrument on the embouchure).
Okay, so it may not be a sport, but marching band is most certainly an athletic activity.
Posted by Irami Osei-Frimpong (Member # 2229) on :
quote: Gym was actually pretty fun most of the time. The only thing I hated was walking around the rest of the day feeling all sweaty and dirty.
I'll second that.
I'm all about mandatory gym, 5 days a week, through Junior High. In high school, the issue gets more complicated- getting kids used to responsibility, freedom, and discipline with regards to their body doesn't come across in the policy of mandatory gym- but since I played a sport, and I wanted to play a sport, it wasn't an issue for me. I do think that I'm in fine physical health right now because of the mentality and disposition towards my body I picked up playing high school sports.
Posted by Lyrhawn (Member # 7039) on :
Well, it worked out that we'd do marching band during the MB season, and then when the season ended we had to switch over to regular gym class that was already in progress.
But after four years of marching band, that was way more exercise than I ever did at one year of gym.
Amen Bando. Spread the Marching Band Word. Posted by BandoCommando (Member # 7746) on :
/cheers
Posted by romanylass (Member # 6306) on :
quote: A dollar a day seems a small price to pay to avoid being tormented by the athletic girls for being too small, skinny, and uncoordinated to perform the sport of the week.
Yep, yep, yep.
Posted by Elizabeth (Member # 5218) on :
I had a friend in high school who had bad period cramps every day for six years, from seventh grade through senior year. It was a phenomenon.
Posted by mackillian (Member # 586) on :
I would've paid money for more gym classes.
Posted by Elizabeth (Member # 5218) on :
![[Razz]](tongue.gif)
![[Smile]](smile.gif)
So I never experienced the locker room beatups before!
![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)
![[Roll Eyes]](rolleyes.gif)
.