PE - did it promote a life long love of sport or was it ritual torture?

[LuckyMum96]

Just that really, for me it was mixed - too much PE was focussed on the school teams though and not enough on general exercise and activity

Torture.

Cross country was always in winter. Wearing shorts in two foot of snow is not something anyone enjoys.

Torture and a life long dislike of group sports

Hated it in primary(sadistic bully bloke of a PE teacher) , loathed it beyond all things in secondary (ritual humiliation).

I was Coronavirus-years-old when I finally found exercising fun (in my 50s), and 3 months later all outlets for my activity shut down.

I blame PE for believing sport was horrific and I was useless. God knows they pounded that into me.

Absolute torture. Picking teams should never have been allowed. As a pp said a few pages back, it didn't really occur to me that it was anything connected with health or fitness.

As an adult I've been doing yoga for many years and I've learned far more about my body from that than from anything else. I also like long walks in the countryside.

Interestingly, in my 20s I used to go out clubbing nearly every weekend. I could dance for hours and never drank alcohol, but I don't think it even occurred to me that it counted as exercise. I was actually a lot more fit and healthy during that time of my life than any other.

My Dad's favourite joke was:

Those who can, do
Those who can't, teach.
Those who can't teach, teach PE.

Yes to no teaching - it seemed that you were either good at sports to start with or you were crap and stayed that way. There was no advice about how to improve. I took up running in my mid 20s after a few Youtube videos and found I actually liked it.

Torture.
My abiding memory of it was feeling cold to the bone. Why oh fucking why are PE kits so skimpy??? Why no trousers or jackets allowed? It's just stupid. Short skirts to play contact sports on gravel/tarmac/AstroTurf? Fucking WHAT? Why? It does not make you sporty to rip the skin off your legs.
I still hate most exercise.

Ritual torture and constant embarrassment. Couldn’t wait for it all to be over.

The communal showers after PE were an awful experience in themselves. Did other people have to queue up to endure the one person at one end with your towel and then they pass it to another person at the opposite end whilst you dodge the water to try and not get wet? So utterly pointless and soul destroying when you are a teenager with body confidence issues.

Totally apathetic to it. I only hated it in cold weather, and luckily my school also didn't have mandatory showers, but it did little to inspire a life long love of sport or encourage a healthy habit of exercise.

I think 'torture' is a bit much, but I didn't enjoy PE, and while I didn't dread it as such, I certainly never looked forward to it .. apart from when I was able to take badminton when I was 16, as I actually enjoyed that.

But things like athletics I always dreaded. I was super unfit as a teen, and dreaded being told it was the 1,500 today, as I just knew I wouldn't make it round the track that number of times.

Definitely ritual torture.

Torture. It didn't help that both my sisters were very sporty at school, so the teacher wouldn't accept that I was rubbish at it. She just kept yelling "your sister was better than you", "why can't you be more like your siblings, you're letting them down", and my favourite, " you should be better than that, how will you make the school team , like your sisters, if you can't be bothered to try!!!" I didn't give a fat rat's crack about sport or P.E then, and I don't now.

Hated the teachers, hated Athletic.

I did enjoy Netball, Tennis, Badminton, and Swimming.. but the teachers decided because i was short/overweight/academic and loathed running, that i was useless and constantly made my life hell and gave me shit reports, no matter how much effort i put in.

I mentally checked out of lessons and put zero effort in.

I hated it. I was a bigger teen (not really fat, but not stick thin like most of the others!) and we had uniform shorts that were quite short so I constantly felt exposed, especially on my period. I was actually pretty active outside of school where i could wear leggings or joggers. I set the record for my village assault course 😁 for example but I was so busy feeling self conscious that I just didn't do very well at pe.

I can still remember the utter misery of Cross country running though - deep snow, teachers all bundled up in coats and scarves and we had to trudge round freezing because it was far too icy to run!

Kit seems to be a recurring theme - to me there is no reason why leggings can't be used for most sports - much more comfortable and warmer!!! As for bare feet... not sure - I see how it's easier for some activities but it makes many people uncomfortable

Put me of exercise for years.

If I had done some sort of aerobics or yoga I'd have loved it.

But netball in the freezing cold?
And country dancing? What the fuck was that all about in the 1980s?

Torture - hated it and our school didn't care about effort, you were either good at it or not. Nearvthe beginning of year 11 I worked out how many PE lessons I'd have to endure and made a countdown chart, it was probably the best thing about finishing school!

And country dancing? What the fuck was that all about in the 1980s? actually that was the one thing I liked (in the 60s).

The kit was a big part of the problem. Gym pants! Especially embarrassing when wearing a massive leaky sanitary towel. Leggings weren't invented then but those stretchy ski pants were. They would have been horribly old fashioned (flares were in fashion) but would have provided more warmth and coverage.

Torture and humiliation. Running around the town in red knickers doing cross country. It didn’t make me want to exercise and I really didn’t enjoy. My dd who loves sport is put off PE at school as for girls it’s hockey, ball skills and some netball. I’d rather they focussed on cultivating a love of keeping fit.

Torture, mostly, I actually liked netball and hockey but when they grouped us with the boys for volley ball or with the bitches in the higher PE set it was absolutely vile. My mum complained about bullying behaviour during PE but the bitches were naturally the teacher's favourites and nothing changed. Yup still think of them as horrid all these years later.

Ah now, I rather liked country dancing, I was good at that.

A lifelong love of graphology, big attention to detail forging those notes from my Mother.

I can’t say it was torture, but I loathed it. Our PE teachers were sadists and it seemed that the only girls who really liked it were the hefty ones with red cheeks and flolloping bosoms in inadequate bras, who always had BO.

Torture. I absolutely hated it and it really spoiled my 4 years at middle school in the late 1970s. I was uncoordinated and slightly overweight, which of course drew the ridicule from the arsehole PE teachers who fawned over the sporty and athletic kids. And they really were arseholes. There was no encouragement to try harder, just ridicule and mocking.

Added to that I was one of the first in my year group to hit puberty so I felt a bit like a zoo exhibit having to strip off and shower in front of everyone. It was utterly miserable. Being stared at because you've started to develop breasts and pubes and being laughed at was just fucking awful.

Imagine my joy when I got to high school - a bog standard comprehensive that used to be a Grammar School - and was given the option to drop PE to study for Latin O Level instead! As you can imagine the Latin O Level class was mainly comprised of girls like me. Thirty odd years later I am grateful to have one more O Level than I thought I could get and having been spared that torture for another three years.

Many years later I was working for DWP as a benefit fraud investigator - I left that job in 1995 btw. I now work in a totally different field.

An anonymous report comes in about my former PE teacher, the cruellest of all of them, who was claiming sickness benefit for a debilitating condition which meant she had limited mobility but was somehow managing to teach aerobics classes. We found that she was indeed doing that. My boss went out to visit her to put our evidence to her. She admitted it based on the evidence we had. Then my boss drops the bomb that I remember her from school. The former PE teacher asks my boss to apologise to me on her behalf for being an absolute bitch and asks her not to tell me what has become of her. Which of course she does.

I thought I would feel some sort of joy, or satisfaction or something that the woman who had made 4 years of my life miserable was now utterly miserable herself. But I didn't. I just felt really sorry for her. A single parent on sickness benefits with 2 kids and suffering from a nasty medical condition and trying to do as much work as she could before her condition prevented it.

I can't forget that she made my life, and those of many of my middle school colleagues, utterly miserable for 4 years but I can forgive and hope that she has learned from it and is doing well. I'm 53 and I'm too old to hold a grudge.

I hated it and once successfully skipped an entire term of hockey by arranging for my piano lessons to "inconveniently" be placed in the middle of double PE on a Thursday morning