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Gym Class Retrospective Posting Date: Feb 15 2009 10:59PM I started my scholastic career in horn-rimmed glasses and horizontally striped shirts. In grade two, I got new specs and some velour shirts with half zippers. I was beginning to mature. It wasn\'t until grade three, however that I began to realize my full potential. In grade three, I became a man.
That was the year I first set foot in gym class.
In grade three gym, nobody broke a sweat. We didn\'t learn about perspiration until grade five. Nobody changed clothes. We wore plaid pants, jeans, velour shirts or whatever we happened to have on our backs and buttocks. The only rule was that street shoes were not permitted into the gymnasium under any circumstances. Of course, I didn’t know what street shoes were. To me, there were running shoes and tennis shoes and not much else. The kids who did know about street shoes had to take them off and go hula-hooping in bare feet. The rest of us could track the movements of the shoeless by looking for damp feet outlines in the dust of the gym floor.
In those days, gym class was uncomplicated by gender segregation. Boys competed with girls on a level playing field that challenged our ability at Nerf soccer, garbage ball, five-base baseball and deck tennis (whatever that was). Somehow, each one of these sports managed to demand the manipulation of large foam and plastic implements ill-designed for their athletic purpose. Floor hockey sticks were the size of a small sofa and the weight of a small marshmallow. Baseball bats looked like giant, grungy Q-tips. Score was never kept and no one ever smelled bad after class.
Grade four saw the innovative introduction of soccer-baseball and foam frisbee. We pursued the ideals of higher fitness through the obstacle course, flexed arm hang and shuttle run. Every once in a while, one of the more serious athletes among us would perspire. We all had the feeling that we were on the verge of a major breakthrough, but that was still two years away.
As I prepared for the first day of sixth grade gym, I knew my life would never be the same. First of all, our teacher had ordered each and every one of us to purchase deodorant for immediate application upon the completion of gym class. The second big change was changing. For the first time ever, we were required to change into clothes designed specifically to endure and facilitate physical activity.
We were introduced then to change rooms. Thus, boys and girls were forever separated by the burgeoning differences in our anatomies. Life would never be the same. For the first time, it was something special to catch a glimpse of the cute girls in small shorts. Sweating and athletics became secondary. Showing off, looking good and looking around became the primary gym activities until tragedy struck in grade seven.
Just when we boys were developing a little bit of game – catching unnoticed glimpses of girls’ bottoms or pretending to stumble into all the early-developing co-eds – the bureaucracy robbed us of our motivation. The girls were taken away. They got their own gym class. When the girls had gym, the boys had “health” and vice versa. As we learned about nutrition and the reproductive system, we knew that there were actual examples of the latter in the gym in skimpy clothing and we were stuck in an odd-smelling classroom with a teacher in a track suit.
With no girls to unite the boys, the loose fraternity of pubescent young men shattered. Our class broke in two and suddenly, there were Jocks and Non-Jocks who preyed upon each other with a dispassionate cruelty that would make the animals of the jungle blush.
As I look back now, I realize the full scope of the tragedy that is gym class. Left to their own devices, young children will gather in classrooms, playgrounds and gymnasia to play and interact so freely that they ignore the boundaries of economy, race, religion and gender. Gym class teaches them all too soon what it means to be grown up.
Of course, it also teaches them how to apply deodorant. So it\'s not all bad.
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