Shirts vs. SkinsHello once again and welcome to another edition of Flashback Friday. In today's post I'll cover one of the things I hated most about Jr. & Sr. High.
In my last Flashback Friday post I mentioned that in Jr. High we had separate gym classes for boys and girls and we changed for them. The gym lockers were at the back of the stage in the auditorium/gym. Everyone had their own locker and kept it locked. Anyone who didn't lock it was likely to find their gym clothes missing. It was nothing to be changing for gym and have a gym suit or a pair of shorts come flying over the lockers and land on your head. This, in itself, wasn't too horribly emotionally scarring, it was what happened during gym that was.
Having always been a "fat boy", one of my most hated things was going without a shirt. Now my dad used to do it all the time. I think a shirtless guy looks revolting. There are very few guys that can pull off the look and I have never been one of them.
During gym, sides would be chosen for flag football, basketball, soccer, etc. One team would be "Shirts" and the other team would be "Skins". How do you determine which team gets to be "Skins"? I have a theory. In the twisted mind of every gym teacher is the "embarrass" mode. How can you embarrass these kids in front of their peers? In general yelling, and occasional swat can get to a few, but the number one way is to see which side has the most "fat boys" on it. That side is ALWAYS "Skins". Maybe I just have a super sized modest gene to go with my super sized body. Whatever the case, I dreaded gym for this reason.
While we had gym, the girls had health class, and vice-verse. The girls would wear blue pinnies (a strip of fabric with a hole for the head that tied at each side) over their gym suits to differentiate sides (we could see them out the Health room window. They were more interesting than the teacher). When someone (It wasn't me, thank goodness) asked our Gym/Health teacher why the guys couldn't wear the pinnies, instead of "Shirts & Skins" the teacher mocked him and asked him if he also wanted to wear the gym suit too. He was utterly humiliated. Nobody in any of my gym classes ever questioned "Shirts & Skins" ever again.
Was there anything you dreaded about Gym ?
4 comments:
I, also, hated gym. However, I only had to take it in Junior High, so that was a relief.
My next most dreaded thing about school was riding the school bus!
Ugh... I also hate the "Shirts vs Skins" thing.
I hated most everything about gym and we had it 7-12 grades three times a week! Yuck! Mostly I hated having to change in front of everyone. AND I was never very good at any sport, so, yeah, I hated phys. ed. :-)
A little late, just catching up on your blog cause I have been away. But here is a sad story about gym class and how it can humiliate some young people. My mom was a bit chubby and very Christian and modest. She was in high school in the 1940s and gym was required every day, but she hated it so much that she dropped out of school. She was very bright and her favorite classes were in home ec, she wanted to be a home ec teacher. And she said when she took the dropout slip around for her teachers to sign her home ec teacher cried and begged her not to do it. She finally went and got her GED when her 4 kids were grown, but I know if it wasn't for gym she would have been the best home ec teacher ever. She was definitely the best mom ever!
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