Note: Today’s post is courtesy of a prompt from “642 Things to Write About“. Today’s prompt is: “Your worst experience in gym class.”
Well this is an easy one…ANY experience in gym class was a bad one for me.
Okay, okay, I might be exaggerating just a little bit, but the fact of the matter is that gym class was a horrible experience for me for many, many years. It wasn’t so bad back in the first years of elementary school when we were just running around doing tumbling, or making obstacle courses, or marveling over the fact that not one of us could climb those damn ropes. But as we began to get older and started doing more actual sports and the like, gym became nothing more than torture to me. I’ve never been the athletic type in the least, so I was the kind of kid who got picked last for teams and hid in the corner to avoid ever having to touch the ball. I was actually pretty good at things like gymnastics and basic exercise (situps, pushups, speed runs, etc), but those were the kinds of things that we rarely did in gym at my schools. Mostly we played an ungodly amount of basketball, interspersed by the occasional game of baseball, tap-football, or floor hockey, all of which I was absolutely miserable at.
So if you want me to pick one particular experience? It would probably be in the 9th grade, mid-semester, when our report cards came out and I found out that I was dangerously close to failing gym. Failing gym. I was making 90’s in every single other class, but I was failing gym. I nearly had a heart attack. The thing is, the reason I was getting such poor marks was a refusal to participate (I often came up with excuses to sit out, and even when I was playing I was obviously doing my best to avoid having to actually do anything), but at the time I felt like it was an injustice, like my gym teacher was purposely torturing me for being artistic instead of athletic. In the end I pulled up my shorts and forced myself to participate in order to bring my grade up, but at the time I felt like everyone in the world was against me for daring to not enjoy sports. I think every artistic kid feels like that at one point or another, don’t you?
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