Today I’m Grateful For Never Having to Take P.E. Again

Academics, shmacademics…

You wanna know where our modern education system falls apart?

The P.E. class.

I mean, you get a tutor if you’re not so good at English or math.

But not so in P.E.

In P.E., you’re on your own. You either get it or you don’t.

If you’re the type no one wants on their team in P.E., standing there just praying for some cooler-than-you-P.E.-teacher’s-pet “team captain” to pick you before there’s no one left but you, or the type who couldn’t climb that damned rope even if Godzilla was chasing you, well, you’re just shit out of luck.

My teenager had to take P.E. one year in middle school—I tried not to force my crappy P.E. memories on her

Even though she was up to six-plus hours of dance classes a week by that time, she still had to take P.E. because of the health class part, which means they talk about you-know-what.

Seeing as how I only had so much energy to adequately pursue the “but she’s already active” argument, we went along with it.

And though the child moaned about having to take a class she didn’t want or need, I didn’t go (much) into my personal horror stories.

Instead, I told her to be ever so grateful for what she had going for her.

After all, she’d been dancing since the age of three, which had prepared her for P.E. way more than a life of bookwormy dorkiness does. Ahem.

“I’m terrible at basketball!” she told me.

The trouble was, my recollections of attempting basketball with neither skill nor coordination nor eyesight nor strength nor the least bit of interest or height enough to get the ball from my hands to a faraway metal ring was all so lacking. It was all so sad.

But I focused on the positive and reminded her that she was coordinated and strong.

And that she looked alright in shorts because she’s not paler than death in the winter.

And that the one-piece gym suit of days gone by is no longer required, but instead she’d be wearing fairly ordinary athletic wear, which has come a long way in its own right.

And that she wasn’t a glasses wearer in the 1970s, a time when no cool person wore glasses, and glasses themselves were big, thick, actually glass, and very heavy.

I pointed out to my child that there are kids who suck at every single sporty thing

Kids like me, built like a cotton ball, flimsy and weak, the one “Coach” always stationed right under the volleyball net so someone could slam the ball into her big dorky glasses.

And god, nothing hurts worse than getting hit in the face when you wear glasses—contact lenses are why I live in these times.

I told her to appreciate that she didn’t have triple-D breasts to wrangle down like some girls do. (Not me—double-A power, yay!)

I told her to be thankful she could wear shorts without starting a fire from her thighs rubbing together.

I pointed out that there are kids who couldn’t catch a ball if Beyoncé promised to be their best friend

That there are kids who look like they’re going to pass out when they sweat (me).

That there are kids who are loners and have no friends to huddle with in their gymn-ly misery.

Or kids who still look like they’re in fourth grade when they get to middle school (me again!), and the last thing they want is to publicly display their physical lack. Or just the opposite, the kids—girls, usually—who are mortified to already have bodies like adults in middle school.

Yup, I kept most of my P.E. misery to myself while I forced my child to endure just that one damned required semester.

I kept it to myself that I was one of the unfortunate kids with my big glasses, pale skin, and thick and utterly unstylish hair that no amount of Dippity-Do and Aquanet could tame for an entire day—hair that P.E. only made worse.

It’s a wonder I never put a hateful curse on the P.E. teacher… and seven generations of his offspring, too.

I was a proven failure at neighborhood sports, too, though once, to everyone’s surprise—including my own, I did catch a softball when I was stashed way outfield where I could do the least harm. It was pure coincidence that the ball landed in the sky where I held my glove to the air.

I kept it to myself that I would have given anything to be coordinated, strong, and confident. Oh, and tan. And even just sort of interested in P.E.

P.E. meant getting hit in the face with a ball or a body part or a field hockey stick, or hunted down in dodgeball by some giant bully boy

The only activities that redeemed P.E. for me were parachute day (please tell me they still do this), and two measly parts of a thing we did in the 70s called the President’s Physical Fitness Test.

Though the running and jumping components of the President’s Physical Fitness test were death traps for me—I mean, I really thought I would die trying to run the 600-yard dash, and the standing broad jump all but crippled me—I could do sit-ups until someone finally told me to stop. (“Crunches” hadn’t been invented yet.)

And I could do this thing they called the “flexed arm hang” (“pull-ups” for girls, but all we did was hang from our hands) pretty much forever, probably because I weighed something like fifty pounds.

Halfway through high school, after my final four-eyed-face-to-ball collision under the volleyball net, I found out that summer school P.E. was where kids like me went

I guess word got out to a certain set of us because summer school P.E. was made up of weirdos, dorks, and stoners. We played Putt-Putt on nice days and went bowling on hot days. Sometimes we played tennis, but that required effort, so mostly we just stood around with our tennis rackets on those days.

In summer school P.E. we took a lot of breaks and laughed a lot. And we drank sodas from the snack bars at the bowling alley and the Putt-Putt course.

We checked in once a week with the coach, who didn’t go bowling or play putt-putt or tennis with us and didn’t even watch us—it was honor system summer school. And it was the life for P.E. rejects like me.

The most athletic I ever got in all my school years was playing clarinet in the band. Go ahead and laugh at me for being a band geek—but just so you know, I was a squad leader, so there.

After high school, when I was in college along came the 80s, which meant Jane Fonda stepped in wearing a high-cut leotard

I tried jogging—because we didn’t ‘run’ in those days, we jogged. And I tried aerobics, meaning I cannot to this day hear a certain Gloria Estefan song without feeling uncoordinated and out of breath. None of this left me feeling better, but hey, at least I tried them.

I finally resorted to walking a lot and to riding my red bike all around my hilly college town.

At around thirty I got brave enough to take a ballet class.

I’d always wanted to take ballet, and I’m here to tell you, starting ballet in your thirties isn’t ideal. But I learned a ton, in spite of a serious lack of confidence plus an overflow of self-consciousness. I tried and tried but never blossomed.

I wished I’d turned into the ballerina I pictured as a little girl, but alas, I did not. Not by a long shot. But I’d finally found a physical activity I liked and learned some important skills to take with me down the road.

What had happened was, I figured out that I had to manage my own “physical fitness”

For decades I was no one’s athletic child. I kept trying things, nevertheless.

So yay for inner determination, because P.E. prepared me for absolutely zero of everything I’ve figured out and accomplished and stuck with in spite of whatever challenges I had.

But my question remains:

Why is there no such thing as a P.E. tutor?

Wouldn’t it be cool if the un-gifted kids were provided a kind and sympathetic P.E. tutor to help ’em out? Someone who believes in every child’s inner athleticism or something?

I mean, you have trouble with your times tables, poof, someone’s there to help you. Trouble in English? Poof, they send you to the Sylvan Learning Center or something.

But why no help for the kid who can’t get the hang of push-ups or dodgeball or running or jumping?

Can no one offer at least offer some strategic techniques to the kid who’s always getting creamed in volleyball?

Why is P.E. a survival of the fittest sort of thing?

So here’s to all the dorky kids out there suffering through P.E.

May your escape come sooner than later and more pleasantly than not, whether in the form of summer school P.E. or something far better.

May you not, like I did, have to be well into your third, fourth, or fifth decade to figure this stuff out for yourself.

And may you channel your miserable P.E. experience into something halfway useful, like maybe you start a band, or take up slam poetry or pole dancing, or you just up and travel the world and find out that P.E. wasn’t crucial to your quality of life after all.

And may you keep in mind that it won’t be long before you’ll never have to take P.E. again.

So thank God and everyone in the heavens and beyond for that.

Oh, and here’s to my daughter surviving that godforsaken ritual known as middle school P.E.

And here’s to me, too. I’m ever so grateful I never have to take P.E. again.

As proof of my dork status, here’s me in my high school band uniform. I was so proud of this picture! Those uniforms were wool and hella hot in a parade. And that hat, called a “shako,” didn’t cool you down any.

To repeat myself, though, being a band geek back then was not in the least bit cool. All the cool kids dropped like flies in freshman year. Only the actual weirdos and the stoners stayed behind.

One last note: how about those late-’70s glasses?

*2026 update: I’m no longer taking ballet, BUT my years of ballet training have paid off in my new type of dance—which I swear to you I never saw coming: pole dancing! Check it out HERE. Maybe I’m not such a dork anymore!

---