Ask anybody their earliest memory of what the word “exercise”
means. Nine times out of ten, they’re
flashing back to the school gym. I know
I certainly do. And what do people
remember about school gym?
Frustration. I never learned to do a cartwheel. I just couldn’t do it. To a grade-school little girl, this was
actually a serious failing. My gym
teacher actually kept me in at recess for over a month to try to teach me cartwheels. Seriously.
(Incidentally, I never learned to do a cartwheel. Surprisingly, this failure hasn’t
significantly impacted my life in any way whatsoever.)
Discomfort. Did those horrible one-piece gym outfits inflicted on schoolgirls in the late '60s and '70s ever fit anyone?
I was tall for my age, and for a girl, I had quarterback shoulders. I went through gym class with a perpetual
wedgie.
Drudgery. Really, did anybody look forward to doing
jumping jacks, situps and pushups in gym class?
Even the sporty types?
Rejection and humiliation. I was the bookish geeky girl with the coke
bottle glasses who was invariably chosen last for every team, and the other
kids made fun of everything I did – or couldn’t do.
Physical pain. Between grade school and middle school, I
broke five pairs of glasses (this was the 1960s, when glasses as strong as mine
cost about $200 a pair and took almost a month to get another pair made), had
at least a dozen severely sprained ankles, four or five bloody noses, knocked
most of my front teeth loose and split my lip (same incident), three or four
black eyes, and one probable concussion. I couldn’t
even begin to count the bruises and scrapes and pulled muscles. And all this from a physically cautious,
geeky little girl who took no crazy
risks and did the absolute minimum possible in gym.
Doomed to failure. Why is it that if students have trouble in
math or reading, they can take remedial classes or get special help, they’re
not expected to compete against gifted students, but in gym class poor clumsy
nonathletic kids are expected to keep up with, and compete against, gifted
athletes? Why isn’t there a remedial gym
class for the athletically challenged, where kids can perform at their own
level of ability?
I recently watched Morgan Spurlock’s “Super Size Me,” and in
it he bemoaned how some schools had gym classes only one day a week, and some
not at all. My first thought was, “God,
I wish that had been my school!” I’m sure that’s not the message Mr. Spurlock
wanted the audience to get, but I have the feeling that maybe I’m not as unique
as all that. Really, if the above are the
kind of feelings that a child comes to associate with exercise, is it any
wonder that people grow up trying to avoid it?
And because my earliest experiences with deliberate physical exercise
were so negative, I consequently did my very best to avoid exercise thereafter.
As matters stood, I was over 40 years old when I first
realized I could enjoy deliberate
physical exercise. For me, the key was
solitude – the diametric opposite of those horrible school gym classes. I’m a deeply introverted exerciser. I don't do aerobics classes. I don't do personal trainers or exercise buddies. Put on my iPod and use weight machines or get
on my elliptical, and I can happily sweat and retreat into my own little world. I get a definite “buzz” from it. I sure wish I’d realized all this several
decades ago!
I can only imagine how different my life would have been if
my early experiences with the word “exercise” had been positive. How would it have changed the way I thought
of physical activity if my gym teacher hadn’t rolled her eyes at me when I
failed to perform a cartwheel, or if the other kids hadn’t laughed at me when a
dodgeball hit me in the face and shattered my glasses, thus effectively
blinding me for weeks? How would it have
changed my self-esteem and my perception of my body if I’d been allowed to
perform and succeed at my own level
of ability instead of being forced to compete, and doomed to fail, against the
phys ed equivalent of Mensa students? Might I not have developed healthy and regular exercise habits if I'd been allowed to find, and practice, forms of exercise I enjoyed, or at least didn't mind, instead of what I thought of as daily physical and psychological torture?
I’m going to cap this rant off with a truly pathetic
confession. The one food I’ve never been
able to eat is beans. They make me
hurl. Seriously. Beans = hurl.
Period.
Well, my worst school nightmare was that horrible hellish
day known as “school olympics” – a whole afternoon of schoolwide competitive
games. Well, in fourth grade, I got up
at 3 a.m. and tiptoed into the kitchen and scooped out a tiny spoonful of
leftover baked beans, which I took back to my bedroom and mashed up to make
them unrecognizable. Later that morning,
I went from breakfast to my bedroom and ate the beans, walked out into the hall
and threw up everywhere. That got me out
of school and “school olympics.” To be
brutally honest, if I’d had the wherewithal, I’d have gladly picked up a gun
and shot myself in the foot if it would have gotten me out of a year’s worth of
gym class.
What a difference we could make for our kids by making
exercise a positive experience, instead of a twelve-year course in humiliation
and body dysmorphia. Is it a tragedy
that there isn’t more phys ed in school?
I don’t know. Lack of exercise is
a bad thing – I totally agree. I’m just
not sure that doing permanent damage to a child’s self-esteem in the name of “health”
is any healthier.
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