Thread 18 - TalkLair: "That's no moon. It's a space station!"

[RasaSayangEh]

(Previous thread 17)

We've had our heatwave - is this it for the summer? All is lush and green in our LairGarden, flowers are blooming, berries are ripening...

In the TalkLair, all the windows are open, the Pimms is chilled, the MN massive salad is ready to serve. The denizens of the lair are a welcoming bunch, always eager for general chit-chat on all manner of topics. We just won’t mention the gnawed bones of our prey over there in the corner of the cave…

Yes, I just hope that youth is on his side.

I sort of despise, but understand the teacher. So many kids try to pull a fast one to get out of PE, so he's probably cynical about it. A heart attack in someone so young is unlikely, but then again, he's a gym bunny, on the football team.

If he'd been known to be avoidant, it would be more understandable that he'd "encourage" the lad to do it.

There ought to be a physical checklist for kids saying they're unwell that a teacher could use to see if they're faking it. I do feel for the teacher but this could still end in tragedy. At least the teacher was able to do CPR and save the boy's life.

If we were injured or unwell our PE teacher made us do sports-related worksheets or short essays. Dull enough that most people wouldn't fake illness, still educational, safe for those who actually are ill.

That's if injured before the lesson. In-lesson injuries did get a trip to the school nurse, whether we wanted one or not.

On the mend, not his side.

It must be hard for PE teachers to tell the unwell from the sports averse so I do feel for that teacher but if a kid is generally keen then the default should be to believe them when they say they’re sick.

I hated sports at school (still do) but wriggling out of doing them was tricky. I do remember a lovely sunny afternoon spent threading the top rope back through the volleyball net when we’d ‘accidentally’ pulled it out while putting the net up. That was a result but the sort of thing you can only get away with once.

Looking back it's a bit shameful now but I got very good at avoiding sports classes. One time I created a bowl of quite convincing sick that I put next my bed to be seen by a parent and then I had a 'bad knee' for about year after that.

Bad knees were very highly prized at my school as they got you out of sitting on the floor during assembly!

Do children still faint during assemblies? I can remember them going down with a bang quite often when I was a school. Usually girls, but not always.

I don't remember anyone fainting during assembly but we had chairs once at secondary school. Any fainting tended to happen in the play ground.

My major memory of sports at school was of our PE teacher in a track suit, hat, scarf and gloves calling to us on the hockey pitch shivering in our shorts “take your sweaters off girls . It’s not cold!”

My main memory of sports at a Yorkshire girls' grammar school is field hockey. My lovely dad, who played absolutely everything - rugby union, football, cricket and hockey - took one look at the general carnage and, realising that I was hopeless, advised me to play on the left wing (I am right-handed), lag behind and never tackle anyone. I don't think I ever touched the ball after that.

My only sporting success was at a co-ed Dorset school, aged 11, as the only girl in the first- and second-years' 50 metres freestyle - 2 lengths of a 25m pool. My birthday is in late July, so some of the boys were almost two years older. I swam breaststroke and won by about half the distance. All the boys swam what was then called crawl and jumped into the water to push off from the wall for the start, so I asked "Aren't we allowed to dive in?" Of course we were! So I did. But if I hadn't, I would still have won. It's a bit tragic that 60+ years on I still remember that. It was beating all those boys that gave me joy!

Gonners, I'm not surprised that memory still gives you pleasure, it sounds absolutely glorious. Beating all the boys when you're 11 is huge.

Secondary school sport consisted almost entirely of me saying "Miss, I'm on my period" for 5 years and mostly getting away with it.

I came unstuck when I moved to Singapore to study A-levels. It was apparently compulsory to gain a NAPFA national physical fitness certificate to "pass" A-levels and be eligible for university admissions; I say apparently because Google suggests it isn't, but it was our college policy that everyone had to pass.

I can't fully recall the requirements, but there was running, push-ups (or similar), pull-ups (or similar), jumping, stretching, etc. You earned points in each, and then got a bronze/silver/gold award. Those who failed had to do remedial PE after school, which was doubly humiliating because the main walkway to the bus stop went right through the PE training fields and so all 1000+ of your schoolmates could see you being remedially tormented by the PE teachers. I barely scraped a bronze and thankfully thus escaped this horror.

Periods got us out of showers, but not out of lessons. And 'excused showers' was logged in the register, so doing it every week would have been noticed very quickly.

I managed to avoid some showers as for many years my cycle was 21 days long rather than 28.

I really hated exercise of any sort when I was at school but now I really enjoy things like my weights class and Pilates and love walking. It was probably the competitive element that did it - I have a summer birthday so would have been behind when I was very young, and as I hate losing, I probably gave up any hope of winning, so didn’t try. Plus I hated the showers, like all of us.

I don't like losing either, but I think what put me off sports more than that was being compelled to perform in front of people I mostly disliked.

I remember being utterly astonished that people still played sports when I got to university. It really hadn’t occurred to me that anyone would do exercise of any sort voluntarily!

Kids, girls especially, disliking and avoiding sport at school is not a good thing, though, is it? Physical exercise is good for you!

For those who are more of the sofa sports fan persuasion, an all to rare meeting between England and the Aussie Kangaroos rugby league side at Wembley starts shortly, live on the BBC.

Exercise is indeed good for you, which is why PE lessons are compulsory. Unfortunately they're generally also designed to put most people off exercise.

Maybe cos it's tied in with the idea of 'toughening them up', like a low-rent version of Royal Marines training.

I wasn't averse to exercise and was a champion tree climber and scrambler over rocky hillsides. It was the competitive and performative aspects that put me off, plus the discomfort of the stupid outfits we had to wear, running about a muddy field, in chilly weather, with not enough clothes on.

running about a muddy field, in chilly weather, with not enough clothes on

While the games mistress - wrapped in tracksuit, scarf, gloves and hat - forbade tracksuits for us because 'It's not cold'.

Yes, that too!