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??

Reading this thread has made me so glad that my school was pretty incompetent when it came to PE. We had a new school hall and sports hall built during my time there so we often sat in a normal classroom and had accepted bunk off time.

Gym knickers were beyond awful though. I still hate physical activity and I think that stems from them.

We had communal showers when I started middle school (year 4) in around 96. I only remember having to do it once, strip off then walk through a U shape rubble with shower heads dribbling out tepid water and the teacher at the end checking you were suitably wet.

Pointless aswel as humiliating since a bit of like warm water over your head is hardly going to get you clean!!

Ugh, yes, I'd blocked this experience from my memory. Early 90s, shower room with not a curtain in sight. Thank goodness my DDs will never have to do this.

The showers still existed during my 90s school days, but weren't in regular use. A group of girls asked to use them and showered in cossies.

My mother was at the same school in the 70s and communal showering was compulsory. They were the row of shower heads that all had to parade through.

The block was demolished and rebuilt in the late 90s. It was a community leisure centre outside school hours and had cubicles installed. I got one year of use out of that block.

This has also reminded me of a school trip where we had to strip wash in pairs in front of a teacher. Literally just in a room with a washing up bowl and flannel each. Oh and the technical drawing teacher who used to ping bra straps. Makes you think.

We had the conveyer belt of showers which we had to walk through and that would have been 1995/96

We had gym knickers, fortunately with games skirts.
I started my first period halfway through a gymnastics lesson Somewhat mortifying timing!

I was oblivious that showering at school could be a problem for people when I was younger. We needed a shower after sports so had a shower and went on with our day. I still do the same when I go to the gym. I don't prance around naked but I'm not overly worried about a bit of nakedness.

I find it odd that teachers would check students had showered by insisting they were butt naked. That does seem a bit weird. You would think it would be ok to wrap a towel around you.

Horrible memories being brought back.

We had to go through naked and our towels kept in the changing room. Our PE teachers used to run their fingers down our spines to check we were wet enough - and if not we got sent back.

One woman would call out things too like 'need to lose that chunk purple' (a phrase that still haunts me and led to bullying with other girls sticking dog food labels on my back - as the food was called chunk)

We also had to shout period and if it was not a date that fit we would get a detention and they would make us shower.
I still think this is one of the issues that caused me body issues and mental health problems in later life. As a teacher now I cannot believe that anyone would do that to a child.

Moomin lots of things make you think. All these awful football stories coming out now, but I wonder if there were many girls in the 70s and 80s that got through without some sort of sexual attack. We put up with all sorts of groping, fumbling etc in school, first jobs (bar work), Guides. I never said a word to my parents about any of it, although I remember things from primary school onwards that make me cold inside yet.

Yep. Year 7 to 9 (age 11-14) we'd all hunch over and run through while the teacher watched. This was 1996 to 1999.

Yup. We had the communal showers in high school in the late 70s - early 80s. Awful.

Strangely I don't remember there being any soap! Bit of a pointless shower.

Our school had a pool - again just a communal changing room.

I, and most of the other girls, were incredibly body conscious and learnt how to dress and undress beneath a towel.

Our PE teachers used to run their fingers down our spines to check we were wet enough

this made my stomach turn over!

Oh yes, we had to have communal nekkid showers through middle and high schools (1980s), with the teacher screeching at you to go back in if you weren't sufficiently wet. I honestly don't know what hygeinic purpose this served - everyone scuttled through as quickly as possible, and there was no actual washing with soap or shower gel. Totally humiliating waste of time.

i went to high school 2001-2006 and whilst there were showers nobody ever used them to shower. The popular girls used them to change in, in private instead of the big communal room, same with the 2 toilet cubicles (which were grim and never had loo roll, and never any soap). Not to mention we weren't let out of the lesson to change back til 3 minutes before the bell, so we honestly didn't have time, especially as there were about 45 of us and only 8 cubicles.

I remember this only too well (1981-86) at a girls grammar school. Weekly knicker checks to make sure we all wore regulation colour and type, communal showers with teachers watching and period register. I loved sport but absolutely detested PE Lessons. I didn't have body issues before but I sure as hell have done since. Thang god it doesn't happen now

I remember having to do communal showering after PE at middle school. It would have been the mid 90s.

There was a long row of showers along one wall of the changing room with a wall low enough for us to see over directly opposite so there was a way in to the actual showers at either end. We had to leave our towels at the "out" end, go round and walk through the showers (naked), wash ourselves as we went then pick our towels up where a teacher would be waiting to make sure we'd actually been in.

I'm not sure what was worse, that or the small private school where getting changed after PE was usually interrupted by the headmaster "accidentally" walking in on us. We opted to change in our second floor classroom instead (as there was a lockable door) so he appeared outside the windows on the fire escape. We shut the curtains and the next day they'd been taken down. It was bloody awful.

I know Jen this thread has churned me up! Horrible memories

I also remember knicker shorts. If you never had them, basically they were knickers, made of thick stretchy material, but only covering the same as a pair of Bridget Jones knickers. Totally inappropriate to make girls and women going through puberty run around in public in pairs of knickers. I never got why there wasn't at least a gym skirt. The boys had long shorts practically down to their knees. It was an utterly unforgiving outfit.

Showers, the same, in fact, I wondered if one person on this thread went to the same school as me. One large shower curtain, lifted up so everyone could see everything, inspections to see if you were damp/wet enough to have showered, lots of shouting. I wonder why I associate sport with extreme dislike?!

Ive neverof theae shower stories before but my brother had to swim naked at his school in the early 1980s. I remember him complaining about it at the time

We had the horrendous knicker shorts but only until I was a second year, then we could wear cycling shirts.

No showers were necessary, thank god.

Just humiliation through sport instead I. E. Not picked first for netball, cross country running in the snow, 100 metre sprint with 38dd's etc. Usual English schoolgirl stuff.

There was the primary school week long trip to the jam butty camp (prestatyn) though, where the shower was just the one trough, and no curtain. The 2 female teachers tried to protect out modesty best they could from the queue waiting by holding towels up across the gap to get in, but you could still see the 5 other people in the shower with you. Went in year 5 and again in 6. At least in year 6 they had added a shower curtain, but still had 6 of you in there together with no separation. That was in 1999 and 2000.

Mid 90's BTW.

Some of you must have been at school with me. I am going to write a name: Webb. Anyone?

Early to mid 80s comp.
Communal shower. A joy for those already bullied for breathing, the shy and the self conscious. In our first year we were joined by our PE teachers. Which gave us an insight into our futures that none of us wanted to see and did nothing to encourage us that a life of physical exercise would leave us looking lithe and healthy.
I have deleted my rant about PE from the duffer's perspective. Suffice to say I loathed it. I can still feel the humiliation and dread.