'Really try and flatten me boy': How I learned to hate PE at school
Stephen Jardine is surprised by how many people say they weren’t put off exercise for life by PE but suspects he knows the reason why
It seemed too good to be true. The gym teacher we despised was giving me the chance to extract revenge on behalf of every child in the school. It was the first day of rugby coaching and he was attempting to illustrate some obscure point about the physics of the game using me as ballast. Sir was kneeling in the middle of the pitch and my job was to run at him full pelt.
“Really try and flatten me boy” was the instruction and I didn’t need to be told twice. I hurtled at him, he grabbed my legs and flipped me straight up in the air. As I landed in a crumpled heap, the other boys weakly cheered, just happy it wasn’t them and I decided to spend the rest of my schools sports career on the football pitch.
“Is that all?” was my thought this week when a poll by Age UK revealed three-in-ten middle-aged adults say PE memories from school put them off exercise for life. From being picked last for teams to freezing cross-country runs in hail and drizzle, instead of planting the seeds of a lifetime love of sport, physical education in schools seems to have had the opposite effect.
Much of that was down to the teachers. A few had been through National Service and seemed to use army torture techniques as the basis for everything. Others were just not very bright and had ended up teaching PE because the concept of a spherical Earth proved too much for them getting anywhere near the geography classroom.
However I was lucky. I was spared the sadists who taught my friends. Men who would aim a medicine ball at your head just to see what it sounded like. Or the oddballs who spent too much time offering arm-wrestling tests of strength or hanging about the showers.
Things are different now. Physical education forms part of Health and Wellbeing within Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence with a focus on developing physical competence, cognitive skills and personal attributes. In other words, someone has actually put some thought into it.
Back in the day it was simply a hotch-potch of whatever the teachers fancied doing and the school had equipment for. So the PE timetable veered all over the place between basketball, football, rugby and athletics where the worst injuries happened as the dim kids tried to jump the hurdles the wrong way.
At no stage was there any suggestion that a lifetime love of exercise was being inculcated. Cross-country running was just a chance to beat people up when you were out of sight behind the trees at the end of the field and the small queue to throw a javelin was only in the hope that a gust of wind would lead to the PE teacher being impaled.
But worst of all came on a cold afternoon every November when we arrived on the basketball court to find a rickety table, a record player and a bunch of terrified looking girls. What followed was the annual education in the strange ways of Scottish country dancing.
Based on all of the above, I’m amazed seven out of ten DIDN’T say PE had put them off exercise for life. What were they doing? Probably smoking behind the sports shed.
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