Now that it’s the first week of September and Labor Day is out of the way, school should be starting. But, of course, school has been rolling along here for almost a month now.
What it’s rolling along without, again, is a PE requirement for every student every day. The state planners talk about it every year, but PE always takes a back seat to other ways to spend education dollars, though it might help with the childhood obesity epidemic.
But to be honest, I would have been happy in a school that didn’t force me to take PE. I have terrible memories of physical education that started when my family moved from Mississippi back to California.
As I began the fourth grade in Pasadena, Calif., after attending school in Mississippi for the first three years, my knowledge of PE was limited to chasing boys all over the playground during recess, either hitting them or kissing them, depending on my mood and their receptivity.
But the California playgrounds were set up for all kinds of specific exercise and team games. At recess you played kickball or tetherball or softball, or you stood in line for your turn on the gymnastics equipment, where you could use the low bars, the monkey bars or the climbing bars. I would have preferred the candy bars, but that wasn’t an option.
The other kids were proficient on each apparatus that seemed to require advanced gymnastic training. As far as I know, my agile classmates all went on to compete in Olympic gymnastic events as soon as they left sixth grade. I, having never seen any of this equipment before, didn’t fare so well on it.
The favored apparatus for the girls was the low bar. After hoisting themselves up onto this metal bar, slinging one leg over and stiffening their handgrip around the bar, they spun head over heels as fast as they could, with their heads skimming only inches from the ground on each downward flip. Like astronauts in training on centrifugal motion machines, these tykes were pulling at least 9 Gs per rotation.
And the worst part? We wore dresses to school in those days, and our panties showed on every flip!
Though I was California born, I was Mississippi raised and taught not to show my panties in public.
So when they called me to “hop on the bar and spin,” I was horrified. And it wasn’t just because my Fruit of the Looms would be flapping in the breeze. I also saw these bars as an excellent opportunity to split my head wide open on the first go-round.
But there was no relief from PE. From junior high to junior college, PE classes became a part of my daily education.
That meant that we had one hour to change into our ugly white gym shorts and blouses, go out to get bashed with a handball, a tennis ball, a softball or a basketball, then shower off the sweat, redress and dash to the next class.
I could do it all but the shower. It was the panties thing again when we changed, plus the wet concrete floor, plus my clothes that often fell off the hooks onto the wet floor. I didn’t have time to dry my hair, so I went to my next class looking like a drowned rat. I only did that once before I decided that the smell of sweat didn’t bother me so I cut out the shower.
There were benefits, I guess, of this daily torture.
I learned all the rules of all the games known to man without having to play on competitive teams to learn them as Mississippi kids do. We were tested on the rules for every sport, and I was great on the tests, if not on the tennis court. I found some sports I liked, like badminton and volleyball if the servers weren’t out for blood that day. I liked archery, despite the string slap I got every time I shot. I liked modern dance.
And I got exercise. Not that I needed it, since I lived over a mile from my junior high and walked back and forth every day for three years. My high school was three miles away, but I only walked that a few times until I got smart and got a boyfriend with a car.
But PE gave me less pleasant things, like strained arm muscles when I fell off the parallel bars. I got run over on the basketball court by the amazonian chicks whose heart was set on being the first female signees to the Lakers. I got permanent monkey fingers from a semester of swimming.
And I got my feelings hurt when it was time to weigh and measure in front of everybody else, a revelation that’s worse than showing your panties.
That’s because I had learned to keep a couple of candy bars in my purse to renew my energy after running sprints.
I guess I would be more positive about a PE program if I could say it made me skinny, but it didn’t. So I hope the officials who are pushing the return of PE to Mississippi schools realize that it may take more than mandatory exercise classes to stem the tide of childhood obesity.
It will more likely take a squad of PE security officers with attack dogs going through every girl’s purse and unloading that supply of candy bars she stashes there to get her through her sprints — or as compensation for getting her head bashed by a spin on the bars.
