Jan. 24, 1999
Grand Forks N.D.
Dear classmates and friends,
Sometime next week Emily will start taking a P.E. class at Red River High School. She has been dreading this since the first day of school and apparently she is not alone. Her girl friends who just finished freshman P.E. are so happy to be done that they are throwing a party to celebrate. So far as I can tell the curriculum for P.E. has not changed since we graduated 25 years ago. Only the uniforms are better. Today kids can wear shorts and T-shirts to class. Remember those hideous one-piece white cotton jumpers we had to wear? Also I remember being mortified because when I bought my uniform its size was announced in front of the entire class. I don’t remember our teachers worrying too much about damaging our self-esteem in those days, do you?
I suppose there were some of my classmates who felt the same way about English class as I did about P.E. But I think there is a big difference between being literature-challenged and being a klutz in P.E. If you fail a test in English no one has to know. However if you are the last one to finish running laps in P.E. it is pretty obvious to everybody. But the worst – the absolute worst – were those communal showers. Who can forget the embarrassment of having to get naked in front of everybody and then crowd into a shower together?
I remember at least one P.E. teacher who stood at the locker room door with a clipboard and watched, apparently to make sure we were totally humiliated. Why didn’t she just hold us down and shave our heads while she was at it? I imagine the boys who took P.E. had similar experiences, although I doubt any of them ever got out of running laps by claiming to have really bad cramps. But speaking of locker rooms, there was a really great little movie in the 1980s called "Lucas" starring Corey Haim (remember him?) and a very sweet young Charlie Sheen. (Winona Ryder’s in it too but unless you look closely you may not recognize her.) Corey plays undersized, brainy and bespectacled Lucas. One of the best parts of the movie is the way he handles the vicious put-down he gets from the school bully during a confrontation in the locker room shower. According to Emily, P.E. today is pretty much the same as it was 25 years ago, except the teachers can no longer force anyone to shower afterwards, and according to Emily, none of the girls do. That’s the good news. The bad news is the class is now coed, so in addition to enduring the comments of catty girls about your size, shape and general ineptitude, you also get to be judged by 14-year-old boys who have all the tact of Howard Stern.
I wish her P.E. classes would focus more on lifetime fitness and promote good exercise habits tailored toward the individual. Maybe then she would learn to think about exercise in terms of health and fitness, not as a competition in which she feels like a big loser. It wasn’t until four years ago that I began exercising regularly, a habit I wish I’d begun at least 15 years earlier. I wouldn’t presume to blame my earlier lack of motivation on our P.E. teachers. But I know the only thing high school P.E. ever inspired in me was the desire to get out of there with some shred of dignity intact and the conviction that exercise was something to be avoided at all costs. Today I look back on those P.E. classes with the "whatever does not kill us makes us stronger" attitude. I hope 25 years from now my daughter isn’t thinking the same thing.
Your friend, Paulette