What are your worst PE memories?

[OneUmberJoker]

Breaking my arm playing football

We must have had the same PE teacher. Exact same scenario. Picking on me all the time. Making me run for no reason to "show" the others what we needed to do..threatening to tell the principal if I didn't complete the beep test (I would try but ended up going out of it early on) I always felt sick at the thought of her class
Telling me not to tell my parents when I got upset. She had the strongest, most putent perfume. I now have serious issues with strong smells, so much so that I often get migraines along with nausea. Ugh.

All of it. Every moment of it. Horrific.

I recall a couple of young women I worked with setting up a bank netball team, they were my age, mid 20s. They went on and on about how great it would be and I must join. They simply would not or could not accept that I didn't want to play netball. In the end I had to be quite firm, "I don't like netball, I'm not going to play it again, I hope your team is great".

In primary school having to get changed in front of the boys in the classroom. Being told off when we asked for a private space for girls.
In secondary school, all the stuff others have mentioned. Also the “bleep test” where you’d all have to run from one point to another before the second “bleep” played. If you didn’t make it then you were out. The bleeps got closer together so the slower girls gradually got left behind and couldn’t make it before the next one. Always so scary thinking you’d be the first one out or whether you’d make it to the point before the bleep sounded.
Like others I’m now 38 and have an aversion to group exercise which is entirely down to experiences in PE.

Every swimming lesson.

I didn't want to take my "lucky necklace" off for netball and the second I did I got smashed in the face with the ball. I was fuming 😂

Measuring heartrates. Despite doing gymnastics and trampolining for many many years of my life I was also always a bit overweight smoked at a very young age 😭, we had to count our own heart rate pre and post exercises and I kept making the numbers up as I was embarrassed about what they really were!

Being picked last - frequently. even when I was young I thought it was a brutal system, hope they've sorted that one out these days! I could have done without it, why on earth did they set kids up like this?

Having had one emotionally abusive parent to put me down, and being bullied for my genetically misaligned teeth (along with many other things) from the age of 7, it was hardly any wonder that I was virtually mute (to hide my teeth) and my confidence couldn't be scraped up off the floor. I was used to being picked last for teams, because I was the weird, un-cool and "ugly" girl. I also had horrendous hay-fever, so rushing around on the school field and getting covered in pollen was horrible, as I'd spend the day with a swollen face, bulging and itchy eyes, a scorching and runny nose, and I struggled with breathing sometimes.

Public changing rooms should be outlawed. I got picked on for being "fat" (i.e. of athletic build, and I filled out in the bust department earlier than most girls in my year), and laughed at for my inadequate sanitaryware. This was dictated by my mother, who did not suffer from heavy periods, and I had little knowledge about the difference in- or the means to buy- sanitary towels until I was older. One teacher liked to hold the changing room door wide open, for all of the boys to see us, if we weren't getting changed quickly enough for her liking.

I was fairly good at PE, most likely because of the amount of extracurricular sports classes that I was made to do until I was 16. This, however, did not save me from Miss W. Looking back, I suspect that she was a bully when she was at school.

Miss W clearly favoured the pretty, willowy netball girls (I hated netball, as it was boring, you spent too much time standing around because someone had committed a footwork error, and standing around getting knicker-draft in a ridiculously short gym skirt is not my idea of fun). Everything was a problem or a big deal, and putting her least favourites down was an excellent pastime. She always used to get very annoyed when I beat her sporty favourites… usually on purpose, because I could run quickly when it suited me, and I was always first in swimming races. I also happened to be very good at cricket and rounders, so used her as target practice. She learnt to give me a very wide berth after narrowly escaping being hit in the face. If that ball had hit her, it would have made my entire school career!

One poor girl, whose uniform never smelt very clean, got shoved under the showers. Miss W just smirked, but never said anything to the girls who had pushed her.

I knew girls from my village who were also her least favourites. As far as I know, she still teaches at that school, as does the nice PE teacher who was the complete opposite to Miss W.

Oh I hated PE all through school - I was generally not very sporty and team sports in particular were awful. In 6th form we were taken to a local sports centre instead, and we could choose different activities, like trampolining, badminton and squash. I was still rubbish but it was fun, and I was with friends. I feel sure that if PE was more about getting kids to be active and less about team work more kids would have enjoyed it. I would have loved aerobics for example. No sporty mean girls to piss off that way.

We used to get graded for effort and ability. So you could still get a 1 for effort even if you weren’t good.
decided I would really try in PE all year, still got a D4.

I am also an adult who like exercise but hates sport but didn’t realise this for years because of school PE.

Fucking netball. That is all.

If anyone talked when the teacher was talking etc then he'd say can you go fetch some sand from the long jump sandpit, which was about a mile away from the sports hall.

Sympathies. I joined a Bounce Back to Netball club a while back after falling for the 'it's all fun - join us!' hype. It wasn't fun - it was made up of tall sporty women who took it VERY seriously. It was just like being back at school. One of them actually shouted at me for being in the wrong place on the court and I had great delight in doing what I would never had dared to do at school and shouting 'shut up' right back at her. Cow.

I didn’t have any horrendous horrendous experiences because 1) I was good at swimming (nothing else) and 2) I just couldn’t give a shit about sports. I was an arse of a snobby child (and adult) and thought, even at prep school, that PE was a waste of time, I wasn’t going to make any money out of it, and the sports teachers were the thickest of the thick so, meh.

However…in year 9, a modern foreign languages teacher was the mistress for swimming ie she took the bloody register and sat poolside being a haughty cunt. She just filed her nails and sat her fat lazy arse into a plastic chair. I was new to periods and mine at that time would last about a week. Therefore, two weeks in a row I asked her to be exempted as I had my period. On the second week, she called up to the stands (where I had to sit and watch) from poolside to say, “oh Maurice? Second week on your period? Yeah. You should go see a doctor about that” with a fuck ugly smirk on her face as if she’d just Poirot’d her way into busting me for lying?

Well, Mrs Allen with your fake Louis Vuitton bag. Everyone hated you and your bad hair dyes and your lack of knowledge of how an adolescent girl’s periods might be is shocking. Your smugness is as incorrect as the way you’d totter along in your heels like a pig on stilts. You were awful.

Ironic cheers every time I cleared a hurdle.

I was, am and always will be big of bust.

Them stupid blue mats that were basically harder than the floor 😂

I've skimmed thru the thread, and posters are talking about their experiences 25 or 30 years ago. What do your children, I mean, those still in high school, say about current PE practices.

I should imagine things have changed a lot, yes?

I hope there is an uncomfortable (PE) bench in Hell for these sadistic bastards, many of whom belong on a register. Checking for sanitary towels? Knicker colour? Watching you shower? Allowing boys to see into changing rooms?

I was at school in the 80s and the whole picking teams thing was a unique form of humiliation. I was so uncoordinated, quiet and clumsy even my friends sighed when I was in their team.

Eventually in the 5th year (Y11 in new money) we had mixed PE and I chose basketball. I wasn't too bad and actually got 2 baskets in one lesson. The (male) PE teacher sat us all down for a pep talk and said "if Mummyratbag can score 2 times you can all do it" ... absolute bastard. I gave up after that.

I'm so sorry to the poster whose uncle died at boarding school.

The communal showers.
Even at the time, i thought it was so fucking weird how they made such a big deal about how we all HAD to shower, this was at a middle school, so age 10-13 and this was in the mid 90's. When I went to senior school no one used the showers and we were not made to.

That's because the thread is literally about our worst PE memories.

The popular sporty girls being allowed to pick their own teams!

It hadn’t changed one jot when my kids went through school (they are in their early twenties now). The only thing that was different was that their father and I were there to advocate for them. We ended up withdrawing DS1 from PE because they showed no interest in keeping him physically safe.

I don’t know to this day why I did it but the morning of PE when I was about 6 I drew stripes in pen all over my feet and then had to do PE in bare foot and everyone was laughing at me. That and getting stuck on the monkey bars trying to outdo one of the more athletic kids.

I’d just started at a new school for the summer term. One sunny day the teacher saud we were going outside to play rounders. Everyone was excited and theilled so I joined in with the vibe, having never played or even heard of rounders. Cue me standing clueless holding the bat and having no idea at any point what I should be doing. Lots of incredulous shrieks and an angry ‘Goddess, will you wake up?!’ from the teacher. I was seven. Then barefoot in the gym some little cow pointed and said ‘look at Goddess’ feet!’ (I have sandal toe - gappy big toe). Everyone laughed and I spent the rest of that and every other PE lesson with my toes squeezed together, giving me cramp.

Yes the popular netball playing girls always picking the teams; I was tall and slim and could run a bit so was never quite last. Getting screamed at for rubbish fielding at rounders, including by the teacher who sucked up to the queen bees. Being ignored in netball while the others passed to each other and I ran up and down the wing (that did get to be quite funny 🤣).
We had shower cubicles but one particular teacher would yank the curtain open and always looked you up and down with visible relish. Fucking creep.
My DCs were all in teams of some kind so I don’t think they experianything of that ilk but they do have their own stories of dickhead PE teachers. I must ask them how it was fir the non-sporty kids.
I left school in 1981, btw.

This thread has had me thinking. Why wasn't PE split into ability groups like nearly all the other subjects? If you weren't great at maths then you were set accordingly and the lesson reflected your ability. But if you were shit at games, tough shit. No allowances made. Teachers seemed to think the you just didn't try hard enough.

And to the PP ego asked if things have changed? Not especially. My DC are 19 and 21 and both refused to do PE at secondary school. They weren't expected to have showers like I was (although teachers didn't watch us, they did check our arms and legs were wet)
But the bullying from peers if they weren't fast/good enough was worse than in my day.

My teachers did actually teach us how to play games, although we knew some from primary school. My dc were just expected to know the rules of things they'd never played. Apparently all boys love football. One teacher suggested DS ask his dad. Really good advice for a boy who's dad had recently cut him off.