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??

Same experience. Finished school in mid eighties. We used to splash some water on or shoulders and hair and get ticked off as being clean. If you weren't wet enough, you were sent back. And yes, the gym knickers and ridiculously short skirt in winter outside playing netball and hockey. Or in my case, trying to avoid the ball. Loathed it all with a passion. I loved the occasional times we were on the apparatus or when the multi gym visited in an artic lorry though.

PE teacher was a total bitch.

We had this and I left high school in 2007. I never once did it though, although I remember in my first year our PE teacher getting us altogether and talking about the importance of hygiene and showering. As the years went on more and more girls just flat out refused and they stopped pushing it so much.

Bloody weird if you ask me. Having shower curtains would have made it marginally better at least.

That turning point in the late 90s coincided with a time when swathes of older teachers were taking early retirement, while they were still able.

If there are any retired PE teachers lurking, I'd really like to know this: why the team-picking-by-the-most-popular/team-captains method? How can an adult regularly stand and watch a group of girls being systematically humiliated by their peers, and think that was in any way appropriate? The same few would be left til last every fucking time and all it would have taken was for the teacher to have done her job and picked the bloody sides herself. And they must have repeated the scenario several times a day with different classes - wtf? Did they think the non-sporty, overweight people would miracuously lose weight or gain some skills as a result of consistently being picked last? I used to be among the last few chosen but was thin so avoided having to shuffle to the end of the line by virtue of being the only girl left rather than having my name called, but would cringe for the last girl. Unbelievable.

We had this too (90s). We had to inform the teacher if we had our period and she would note the register. Bloody awful.

This is horrific.
I went to school in Scotland in the 70s and never ever had to put up with this crap.

Where are these schools?
England ?
State or private ?

I don't know Pick, I left school in 99, but the PE teachers were by no means retirement age. If we refused peri there was sports detention, where you had to go in your break time get changed into PE kit, out, showered, school uniform, PE kit, shower, uniform etc. until the end of break time. Still not as humiliating as the school medical aged 13 when you all had to strip down to your knickers in the corridor supervised by the nurse, the doctor would call you in one by one, examine you to check you were developing and put his hands down your pants and make you cough
We did complain a lot about the showers though, and in our last year, they curtained off two of the showers and the 13 year olds + anyone who had started their period were allowed to use those showers. The rest had to use the open ones.

I'm now wondering when the forced showering stopped at my school. My uncle and two of my aunts attended the same secondary school before me, I wonder if they had to endure it.

OP this thread needs a trigger warning, joking, but only just!!

I was at school in the 70's, i'm 58, and this happened to me too. I can honestly say that it ruined school for me. I was slightly overweight, quite dark, so fairly hairy, and just so self conscious. I absolutely dreaded PE, and am so thankful that my DC didn't have to go through it.

Same here in the late 90s

Showers were cold, freezing hell communal hell holes.

I used to get around it by making sure I was one of the first in the changing room, ripping off my clothes, hiding my underwear under the towel and dashing through the showers getting my legs and arms wet.

Then by the time the teacher came in I was seen as having had my shower and lots of others had barely even got undressed. It had the added advantage of everyone being occupied with their own showers whilst I got dressed.

I used to feel so sorry for one girl. She was picked on mercilessly by the teacher. She never wanted to shower (she was rather overweight and body conscious) so would refuse. But the teacher insisted. So by the time the girl caved, everyone else was almost dressed and she had to do the shower walk of shame by herself.

On the other hand, at my school the popoular girls weren't sporty. In fact, there were only a handful of sporty girls in my year and we were inevitably the ones bullied by the popular girls. The only time we held our own was in PE/games. So despite the shower horror, I enjoyed PE.

Late 90s high school, I can tell you that most boys found our communal showers really f*cking humiliating as well. Teachers gave up enforcing them eventually after the louder (braver) boys started yelling about them being perverts, but we had a female teacher who would just come barging in and insisting on spot checks. Gods, we hated her.

Mine was a Grammar school

Onchao I remember that medical and another, alone in a room/office, aged about 11, hands

Actually, I can I can't write it. I don't even know if it's allowed to without a warning. I remember being terrified and croaking what are you doing and she said I'm check your pulse (I'm surprised it hadn't stopped)

Girls Grammar School.

Mine was a comprehensive. A very well regarded comp too!

Christ. I have to say, even though there are sexual predators everywhere, this seems to have been rather systematic - i.e. a cultural thing. I love Britain, but I've always been perplexed by the way in which children are treated within the culture.

In Spain, during the dictatorship, it used to be that there were "touchy-feely" priests in religious schools (which were the majority). But they tended to prey on children from poor families, as in the film Spotlight (although I don't think it was on that scale here).

In my childhood (and now), if children had been forced to undergo the humiliations and sexual mistreatment described on this thread, parents would have known, and more than one would have gone up to the school to break the teacher's legs.

Mine was a comprehensive in a fairly poor area, 1990s.

It's unbelievable. The thing is it was just the norm, my sister endured it before me and the older kids always told you about it, and the teachers were figures of authority so you did what you were told!

My mum was a teacher at my school (but maths, not PE!). I'm going to ask her when i next speak to her what on earth was going on.

Was there some kind of initiative to ensure kids washed??

Convent school in my case, in NW England. No inappropriateness, forced showers or like humiliation that I recall.

State school, England for me. But there was a noticeable difference in attitude between the older teacher and the younger ones. A change in teacher training, perhaps?

The teachers knew what they were doing,I came from a broken home,no one gave a fuck enough to go in and complain...hated pe,due to forced showers and captains picking the team,hated school due to bullying,sadists a lot were,retired now, I just wish I could remember some of their names,I've blocked it all out..how can it of been legal for them to force us to be naked in front of them????????

Same here! Early 90's. I used to splash water on my shoulders wrap my towel round the rest of me then go and get ticked off the list. Once I'd worked that cheat out I was ok with it, hated it before tho.

All this abuse in sport at the moment....well if kids in teams were forced to parade around naked ,forced to disclose their dates of period,I'd be thinking abuse....maybe people will start coming forward from schools with the same thing...I would see it as abuse if my dd told me now, some of things I've read on this thread...