Physical education at school: my dreadful experience

Fortunately, the method of teaching physical education at school has changed as time goes by. I agree that physical exercises or playing sports are very good for health, but I consider that physical education should be a school activity to enjoy and not a subject that you have to do to obtain an excellent mark on your report card.

Now, I’m going to talk about my dreadful experience at school. We had gymnastics twice a week and sports once a week. I don’t know if my gymnastics teacher was a brilliant gymnast or a frustrated athlete. I never saw her doing a handstand or turning a cartwheel. The only activity that she did was setting the beat “one, two, three, one, two, three…” while we were warming up. Those words resounded in my mind repeatedly during the class and even in my nightmares at night. She was very tough and strict and considered that her subject was as important as other subjects such as history, chemistry or maths. During the course, we had three exams and if you failed them, you had to retake them at the end of the course. It was the worst nightmare of a few students, like me.

Each exam included a kind of handstand, a different somersault, an exercise with gymnastic apparatus and sometimes a stretching exercise. I couldn’t believe the variety of handstands and somersaults that she invented! I was very clumsy and incapable of doing handstands during all my years at school; when I finished my homework at home, my parents tried to lift my legs and leaned me against the wall. The results were always awful.

When I saw the plinth or the vaulting horse my legs began to tremble and my forehead to sweat and accidents sometimes happened. Once I knocked the vaulting horse over on her, another time when I tried to do a somersault on the plinth, I knocked its drawers off and they hit her.….  Can you imagine the results? I failed all the exams and my legs were full of bruises, but luckily I never broke any bones.

My best exercise was walking on the horizontal bar. I went up to the horizontal bar in a strange way she taught us and when I was on it, I tried to keep my balance, sprang three times, lifted my right leg, then my left leg and finally jumped onto the exercise mat. And that’s all. On that occasion I passed the exam.

Both my parents were very worried about it because I was an excellent student and every year I received awards. At Christmas, they gave her a present, but it was not enough for her (perhaps she wanted an Iberian ham), so they decided to speak to the headmaster, who said that she knew the problem, but the school had to respect her way of teaching.

One day, she decided that all the students who failed the exams couldn’t play sports and during this time they would continue doing gymnastics. Also, if we were interested in improving our marks, there was an extra hour at lunch time.

I thought about possible solutions to this hideous situation:

1.- I could obtain a doctor’s note about a health problem so that I couldn’t do physical education.  But this wasn’t ethical behaviour.

2.- I could get a doctor’s note about having an asthma attack or an injured leg (my legs were always full of bruises). This wasn’t a solution, because at the end of course you had to retake the exams.

3.-The gymnastics teacher could fall in love with the maths teacher and get married. I dreamt about a marvellous honeymoon…

In the end, my parents decided send me to another school to study my last year of school and continue my university studies there.

At last, I said goodbye to my gymnastics teacher. She continued teaching at school but none of her students has gone to Olympic Games. Nowadays, fortunately, I haven’t got any psychological trauma from all this and enjoy playing different sports. But I still can’t do a handstand.

THE LIFE SAILOR