Physical education

Thinking about how to rescue things I posted to Twitter given its ongoing implosion, I should capture that one of my most popular tweets was this:

I have bottomless rage at having been forced to spend about a thousand hours of my life in “physical education” classes that did not teach me how to stretch, train, or even lift a heavy box properly but did teach me to hate exercise

It got thousands of ♥︎s and re-tweets, and numerous heartbreaking replies. It was inspired by this thread:

PE teachers can wreck your health. Dr Anne Elliott found that bad experiences in school PE actively deterred people from taking exercise in later life & led to a state of alienation from their own bodies:

A multi-method investigation into physical activity in middle-age through a lifecourse perspective

There was a crew of savvy girls who knew the exact spot where you could break off the cross country course, nip over into the graveyard for a fag, then rejoin the course further along on the other side. One of them — Alison F, God love her — even showed me the proper technique for hiding matches under the bra strap in such a way that they did not rattle & give the game away. Not something I ever had occasion to use but I appreciated the confidence.

Anyway, though catharsis is satisfying, I think the important point of Dr Elliott’s research is that people who suffered corporeal disassociation as a result of school PE can still be helped to enjoy exercise in later life through bespoke training.

Lots of you in the same situation it seems. This is the least isolated I’ve felt all lockdown

[⋯]

Also, this excellent documentary is still up. Don't know if people outside the UK can listen to it but I'm sure there are ways and means

If you want to jump straight to the relevant research by @DrAnneElliott then head to 9 minutes 24 seconds in. (The whole documentary is well worth your time, though)

BBC — PE — A History Of Violence

This comment from LEX <@LexTheQueer> stands out as a perfect encapsulation of the cultural politics.

PE taught me that my boundaries, wants, needs, and experiences around physical activity didn’t matter. My “no” didn’t matter, so I stopped bringing my equipment so I had to sit out.

Many more underlined how cruelty from classmates in PE classes was not just a byproduct of the class as a forum, but implicitly (or even explicitly) encouraged by the adults responsible to the kids in their care, like chandra🐀 <@chandradawn1>:

I developed large breasts in the 9^th grade. It was uncomfortable to run, do pushups, be in front of other kids. Half stared, half called me a whore based on breast size alone. Teachers were willing fail me for not participating, but none were willing to tell my classmates to stfu

People talked about being taught bad practices by cruel methods, like in this from george smiley’s man titties <@holodeckfreud>:

when i was a kid (like ages 5 to 8) i took ballet and gymnastics classes and was told that the stretching was supposed to hurt. i was often in tears by the end of stretching. years later, i complained to my mom that all the stretching we were doing together was making me achey

she explained to me that it was actually dangerous and bad for you to stretch until you were in extreme pain. who knew

for a little explanation: i am unusually inflexible and always have been, same with my mom. i’m like the opposite of double jointed. what’s a light pleasant stretch for most people is excruciating for me. this is why i wasn’t believed by ballet and gymnastics teacher i think

And since we are here, I also want to capture this related Twitter thread from I 💙 Yami Bakuri <@SuikaShoujo>:

Ooooh boy do I have some Thoughts™ on PE classes

I should start off by pointing out that I grew up in Illinois, where you are required by law to be in some sort of PE class every single semester, kindergarten through your final year of high school. I had other, more useful classes I never got to take because I had to be in gym.

In elementary-middle school (my school was small and k-8, so there were only 2 PE teachers, and they worked as a pair) I didn't *love* it, but thanks to the size of my class, the teachers knew me, and were shockingly accommodating in certain cases.

The big reward they used to make us behave was the possibility of a “Game Day,” which in theory meant the class would pick 3 games, then vote on which one to play, but in practice it was just picking between 3 slightly different versions of dodgeball with foam balls.

This may shock people, but I was, uh, not a fan of dodgeball. I was either targeted so I could be laughed at (during some of the worse periods of bullying), or ignored entirely, so I usually just stood in the back and waited for the crowd to thin out.

It got to the point where I would “forget” my PE uniform at home and take the loss in points, because you weren’t allowed to participate in the class if you weren’t dressed for it. Spent a lot of time brainstorming fic ideas like that in 8^th grade, lol.

The main teacher was fairly understanding about my complete lack of athletic ability, and as long as I put in visible effort the majority of the time, there were a few times where I straight up got out of participating despite being dressed. I cried my way out of the mile once.

The absolute worst part was the Presidential Fitness Test, though. They didn't even really prepare us for it between the endless dodgeball games, we were just expected to be able to do an obscene amount of push-ups and run really fast.

I was (and am still not) athletic. At all. In any sense of the word. It didn't matter how much effort I put into those tests, they were physically impossible for me.

But they weren’t judging based on effort. They were judging on results. And guess what! Those results were factored into our final grade for the class! You can’t hold your entire body weight up with bent arms while hanging from a bar for an extended amount of time? Enjoy your F!

Even that wouldn’t be so bad if we didn’t have to do these tests while the entire grade was watching. Because that's what the preteen girl who is consistently teased for her weight needs, is to show off how out of shape she is. Apparently.

And that was just in middle school. High school somehow took every issue I had previously had with PE classes and made them worse.

It also introduced the pacer test, which, while the memes about it are entertaining, deserves a rant thread of its own, because holy shit.

The biggest shift for me between middle school and high school was the fact that I went from a class of 40 to a class of 400. So I was always in PE classes with people I didn't know well, if at all. Which is a problem when you have to pick a partner for everything.

There's something uniquely humiliating about being in a class with an odd number of students, where you are always, without fail, the leftover that either gets pushed into an unwilling group of 3, or paired with the teacher.

“But why didn’t you just coordinate your schedule with your friends so you were in the same class, like everyone else?" Bold of you to assume I had a single friend I was close enough with to make that a possibility.

See also this from Lili Saintcrow <@lilithsaintcrow>:

“Adult-Onset Athleticism” Is a Thing. Here’s Why.

The language of military readiness and the rigor of the curricula the PCYF promoted…are mostly what the council is remembered for, especially by participants traumatized by failing the fitness test…

The article is good, but I think it doesn’t give enough weight to the fact that PE, in American public schools, is a tool for militarization and conformity instead of some mythical “fitness”. And the pouring of money into “competitive sports” is sheer waste tolerated only because it profits certain people/corporations and also serves the same militarization and violently enforced conformity. TL;DR: PE in America’s public school system is meant to be a preparation for militarization and unquestioning obedience when it isn’t a means for private actors to make a profit over the agonized bodies of children.

And one more link: PE was Hell until 35