There's quite a few things I didn't like about secondary school, but for me the worst was definitely P.E. In fact it was one of my P.E. teachers who diagnosed me as having P.E - itis... And she was right! I'm a little embarrassed to admit this even now but I used to lie about being ill in order to get out of P.E. And, shock horror, even used to write notes pretending they were from my mum!
As the smallest, weediest kid in the class, I often had to suffer a fate worse than death (well for an eleven year old anyway!) - the last to be picked for teams! If I'm honest, I've never been a naturally sporty person anyway and didn't have much enthusiasm or interest in the subject. But that said, I did amaze myself - and everyone else - by doing really well at dance, gym, rounders and hockey. However I still wasn't doing cartwheels when it was time to head to the changing rooms - but I was when P.E. was dropped in favour of revision classes when we were doing our GCSEs. YESSSS!!!!
Did you hate P.E as much as I did? Or perhaps you loved it? And for those of you who couldn't bear the gym/pitch/field, how did you get out of it?
I never minded PE or sport as a schoolkid, if nothing else it got you out of the usual school work sitting in classrooms all day. But then I was fairly “sporty” so it never bothered me anyway. Perhaps the only thing that bothered me was when we played a game of something, like hockey for example, and we would have two teams (obviously) and one team would be “shirts” and the other “skins”, which meant one team had to take their shirts off and play bare chested. I wasn’t exactly fat, or even chubby, but I had a bit of “blubber” around the abdomen as a teenager, and naturally I would end up, more often than not, on the “skins” team.
Strangely enough, much to us boy's irritation, the girls never had to do this.
In my later years of high school, we could do things like play ten-pin bowling and squash and would travel by bus to the local places where these things were, that was a lot of fun. Of course, mostly we would just muck around. There were pinball machines at the local bowling alley and kids just mostly spent their time playing those, after maybe one frame of bowling.