to think stripping naked to shower after PE at school was horrific? **title edited by MNHQ**

[Flowersinyourhair]

Recent conversations with my daughter about PE at school (she loves it, I hated it) have got me thinking about why I disliked it so much.

I was reminded of the hideous shower experience. After PE, the girls would be obliged to have a naked shower, all in together. We would then have to go to the teacher, totally starkers and dripping wet, and bit ticked off on a register to say we'd had a shower.

I can't to this day understand why it mattered so much. It's a safeguarding nightmare really and I'm so glad it doesn't work like that anymore.

AIBU to think it's no reason I hated PE and to ask whether my school was particularly weird??

I was at school 81 - 86 and we had these showers. They were horrible. I was very body conscious and hated them, as did most of the girls in my class. The teacher would sit outside and check we were wet enough when we came out. I wasn't very sporty and hated cross country and hockey but loved gymnastics and didn't mind netball but the bitchy female PE teachers put me off everything and I hate sport now.

We had shower curtains but the bullying sorts would think nothing of whipping those aside so you were revealed to everyone.
After week one, I took to TigerBread's approach, and then sprayed on lots of deodorant.

Same here - late 90s/ early 00s.

I always hated how cold it was too. The shower room was just cavernous and uninviting - it added another layer of horror to the experience. I genuinely think that I found a way to pull a 'PE sickie' about 90% of lessons though. Weird because as an adult, I love exercise.

1989-1994
Large room with shower heads all around, no privacy.

PE teacher who used to watch EVERY WEEK.

I knew someone would come along to defend teachers.

I can't believe some of the stories on here - it's shocking! I went to an all girls' secondary school and we did have showers after hockey etc but we did have cubicles with somewhat ineffectual curtains and certainly nobody checked we were wet!

I was at secondary school in the 80s by the way.

Yes, same here.
Late 80's.
Large communal shower room.
You had to present yourself to the teacher, naked and wet, and would then be given a school towel that was stained and threadbare and the size of a tea towel.
No private towels allowed. Period 'records' kept.
The bullying was horrendous.

Mouseinahole: Any more old DDGS pupils here?

DGGS that should be.

If the D is Dartford, then yes! But I'm happy to say that they had dispensed with the 'shower tunic' and enforced showers by the 80's.

I found school PE awful, even without the ritual shower humiliation, which I thankfully never went through. Regulation green knickers, "picking teams", freezing my tits off on a frozen hockey field. It did put me off sport for an awfully long time, and off team sports for life - even now the stuff I do is stuff not done at school, like Yoga.

As I got into 5th/6th form I started to hide in the library. Nobody ever seemed to notice or say anything. I just thought jeez, I'm an adult now, I can't believe I have to still do this

Yes I remember hating it in the late 60's and 70's. The teacher used to put in the register if we said we were having a period so that we couldn't keep using it as an excuse. Totally ruined my experience of secondary school PE

Btw - can anyone say if this still goes on today? If so, it's an important question to ask when my DD is choosing secondary school.

Our showers never worked while i was at the school or were turned off. I'm so glad as they were non cubicle ones. Most of the PE teachers at my school were perfectly pleasant people.

I've never come across it :) i do think on the whole children get a better deal at school nowadays.

We didn't have to have showers at my school, which was an all-girls comprehensive. There were shower facilities, but they were disused.

One year, they announced that they were going to implement a compulsory showering policy. I was about 14 at this point, so it would have been 1990. We were told to bring in towels and soap and whatever for our next hockey lesson. We were all horrified at the thought of showering communally, not just in front of each other but in front of our teacher (the showers were just open off the changing room, no separating doors), so much so that some girls were close to tears and a couple of people had brought swimwear to shower in (!) and then when it came to it, we all just said 'You know what? No way. Not doing this.' Our teacher got a bit red-faced and huffy and did a lot of shouting, and 30 teenage girls just stood there like 'Seriously. No.' And we were never asked to shower again.

Weirdly, I don't remember anyone stinking. I don't think anyone put enough effort into PE to work up much of a sweat, in all honesty.

The same PE teacher who tried unsuccessfully to get us to shower also used to call me 'spastic' every week for three years because I was clumsy.

It didn't seem to cause any problems waiting til we were home to have a wash.

We had this at our school in the 80's. I hated it.

When some children complained, they were told 'Do you have three boobs? Because unless you do, get naked and get in the shower now!'

The gym knickers thing has reminded me of an incident when I was at school and we were about 14. We had to wear horrible baggy grey sports knickers over our actual knickers underneath our gym skirts, and most of the girls didn't bother. One day we had a guest hockey teaching appearance by the Proctor, and as we all lined up ready to start dribbling, Miss Stalin the PE teacher barked out:

"I hope you've all remembered your grey knickers. The Proctor doesn't want to stand there and look at a row of schoolgirls' knickers."

"I bet he does," one girl called back, and we all collapsed laughing.

She got detention every night for a fortnight, but I still think it was totally worth it.

Elanrode - mostly I think they do. I don't envy our kids the pressures of social media or the internet though. My DNs are already very conscious about how they look, whether they are fat (there's more fat on a racing snake!) etc from what they see online :(

We did that too - I absolutely hated it and felt so embarrassed ... I remember it by all walking through a section where there were about 5 showers all going at once ... bit like a sheep dip pen

It was the same at my school. We all had to go into the PE teacher's office one at a time to show her we were wet all over. We all hated it, but were probably too naive to raise it as a serious concern. If my children came home and said a teacher was inspecting the pupils' naked bodies, I'd go postal!

PE was just a series of humiliations to me. It's no wonder I had no interest in taking up sports for fun.

What is it about PE teachers and showers? Was it a mandatory part of their training to force kids to have communal showers.
I went to a boys school and it was the same - but when our PE teacher shouted at us to get in the showers I just ignored him and went unshowered until I got home!

My mother tells me they used to do the naked mass shower thing too in the 1960s. They all used to run through as fast as possible just to have a few drops of water on them. Hideous as they were girls going through puberty.

It does make me wonder about the impact it had on our generation of women. We all knew it was wrong (and we also knew our teacher got a kick out of it), yet clearly we thought that we had no choice but to put up with it. What an awful life lesson for young girls.

It was also common knowledge at our school that there were other predatory teachers - yet again we all knew and openly spoke (or even joked) about it, but I don't ever remember telling my parents or another adult. It just felt like the norm.

Actually I do remember a time when a friend saw something hugely inappropriate (even by our standards) and she was simply told that she had misunderstood what she had seen....