The most humiliating episodes of my childhood have two common denominators: me and a gym.
Humiliating episode No. 1: Third grade gym class. My teacher is Elsie Williams, a grey-haired curmudgeon whose only apparent qualification for being a gym teacher is that she owns a blue track suit. Today’s lesson requires us to sit in a circle and throw a kickball at each other. Mrs. Williams starts the game by throwing the ball at my head. Then she barks at me, “Are you uncoordinated?” It does not occur to me that she is either a sadist, or projecting. After all, who deliberately throws a ball at someone’s head, other than a sadist or someone who is uncoordinated? But I am only eight years old and philosophical questions elude me. Also, everyone is laughing. I am uncoordinated, humiliated, and on the road to developing a debilitating insecurity about my athletic ability (or, more accurately, my lack thereof).
Humiliating episode No. 2: Seventh grade gym class. I am excited about junior high school gym. Specifically, I am excited at the prospect of having to wear a gym suit, and to changing into it in a locker room. Uniforms appeal to me. I live down the street from a Catholic girls’ high school and every day the students parade past my house in their matching plaid skirts and navy blazers, and since I am Jewish and my father is a rabbi I will never have that opportunity. The gym suit is the closest thing I will have to the Catholic girls and their outfits, my chance to dress like everyone in my class.
It is a sign of my ability to compartmentalize that I have not connected the concept of donning a uniform in a locker room with the misery of participating in gym class.
My enthusiasm begins to flag when I am confronted with the gym suit: a one-piece, mustard-colored garment with a striped top and a solid-colored bottom constructed of threadbare polyester that lost its shape during the Korean War. Other people’s gym suits seem much more shapely. Also, the atmosphere in the locker room is very Lord of the Flies. I am sitting at the edge of a bench one day, adjusting my sneaker laces, when I am cornered by Liz* and Madelyn, two eighth grade girls who come from the wealthiest families in my upscale neighborhood, where I live in a house owned by the temple, because the temple doesn’t pay Dad enough for us to afford a house here (or, likely, anywhere). Privilege has been kind to Liz and Madelyn, but it has not made them kind to the likes of me.
“Are you retarded?” they ask. When I look at them blankly, trying to process why someone would ask such a question, they laugh.
Humiliating episode No. 3: Eighth grade gym class. For the first time, I have a male teacher, Coach Norm Stamboli. His many adolescent admirers call him “Stormin’ Norman.” He’s a macho, macho man, but surprisingly, he’s nicer than Mrs. Williams ever was. Still, I stay out of his way. I have learned it is best not to draw attention to myself, which is why, the day that I come to class late after having my pupils dilated at the ophthalmologist, I don't tell him that I should probably stay inside because I literally cannot focus on anything, especially anything outside, where it is high noon on a very sunny spring day. Instead, wanting to prove that I’m not going to take advantage of an easy excuse to avoid a class I hate and at which I will never perform to an acceptable standard, I change into my gymsuit and join my classmates in the middle of a softball game.
“Play outfield,” Coach tells me, and I dutifully trot to the far end of the tarmac that the Utica Public School District has deemed an appropriate playing surface for physical education.
The outfield faces south. That means I am looking directly into the sun. To be more accurate, I am facing the sun. In truth, I am not looking at anything, because it is too painful to open my eyes. And so I completely miss the ball that is sailing toward me. I am unaware that a ball is anywhere near me, until the yelling commences. Coach’s voice cuts through the din. I open my eyes just enough to let in the bare minimum of light. I squint in what I presume is Coach’s direction.
“Are you blind?” Stormin’ Norman barks at me.
“Um, well, yes,” I say, more sheepish than humiliated. “I guess I am. I had my pupils dilated at the ophthalmologist this morning and I can’t see anything.”
Coach’s demeanor changes entirely; his anger deflates like air from a tire that just ran over a strip of nails. “Why didn’t you say something?” he asks, taking me gently by the arm and leading me into the blessed dimness of the school.
I wasn’t so terrible at softball. I could hit the ball more often than not. Sometimes I whiffed and fouled, but sometimes I blasted it into the outfield. I was also not so terrible at running. In fact, in junior high school when Eddie Kowalski ripped off my hat and ran away with it as I was walking home one late winter day, I shocked him (and, quite frankly, myself) by catching up to him and snatching it back.
“Man you run fast!” he said, and I forgave him immediately. As far as I was concerned he could have ripped my hat off every day for the rest of the winter — but he didn’t. He never tried to take my hat again.
In gym class across the United States in the 1960s, a student’s ability was measured by the President’s Physical Fitness Test: to prove our agility, strength, and speed, we had to do squat thrusts (today they are called “burpees”), sit-ups (with our feet held down by a partner) and run a short course as fast as we could. Although I thought of myself as a complete failure, I was actually more of a slightly below-average student.
In retrospect I probably would have been average, had I had the appropriate encouragement from my teachers and classmates. I certainly would have enjoyed it more. After all, as Eddie Kowalski discovered, I could run pretty fast. Also, I liked running. What I didn’t like was organized sports and the attendant messages I’d gotten throughout my life that I wasn’t good enough to participate and shouldn’t bother because all I was going to do was bring down the team.
Eddie’s comment sparked something in me. In ninth grade, my first year in high school, I decided to try out for the track team. I had never tried out for any sport. I was an orchestra kid: I did music. But high school was a new environment, a place to remake myself. And I was going to remake myself as someone who was good at gym. I knew a couple of other girls who were going out for track. They were nice, but they were jocks. The gym was their natural environment. It took all my courage to just walk into that cavernous room and take a seat on the bleachers for the first meeting. I was barely able to hear the coaches over the voices in my head screaming Who are you kidding? You don’t belong here.
Long before the meeting ended, anxiety propelled me off the bleachers, out of the gym and back to the orchestra room. I arrived just in time to catch my seat partner and the resident mean girl switching the strings on my violin, the music nerd version of a practical joke. I was less mad at them than I was at myself. This is what you get for thinking you belong on the track team, I told myself.
I wasn’t a complete sloth. For instance, I loved riding my bike and I did so nearly every day that there wasn’t snow on the ground in Utica. But because that was fun, it didn’t occur to me that it was a physical activity. In my addled mind, physical activity wasn’t fun, it was something you did either for survival or because you were forced to (sometimes the two overlapped). Mom and Dad signed me and my sister up for swimming lessons at the YMCA not because they thought we’d enjoy it, but because we went to Cape Cod every summer and they didn’t want us to drown. They signed us up for ski lessons, too, but those didn’t last long. I remember a lot of time sitting in the snow feeling cold and miserable. Maybe that’s why the skiing lessons were short-lived. All I know is, my favorite winter sports have always been board games by the fire and reading a good book.
In Which I Discover the Root of What I Mistakenly Believe is my Intense Dislike of Physical Activity
I first heard the term physical literacy from my friend Linda, whom I met when I wrote a feature story about her for Sports Illustrated in 1997. She had taught the first-ever coaching course for women in Iran in the early 1990s, sent there by the International Amateur Athletic Foundation, the world’s governing body for track and field.
Linda is a former NCAA All America heptathlete and Canadian champion who has a PhD in kinesiology. In the mid-1990s, she helped develop a program, Run, Jump, Throw, to help kids become physically active for life. The theory behind the program is that running, jumping, and throwing are the basis for pretty much every sport, and if you want kids to enjoy sports so that they’ll grow up and be physically active, the way to do it is to give them a strong foundation in the basics. That foundation, Linda explained to me, was intended to make kids physically literate.
As the daughter of a reading teacher, I was offended that track and field was co-opting the term “literacy.” Literacy belongs to the realm of the literate, to reading, comprehending, and communicating, all essential skills to succeed in life. But Linda made me realize that physical literacy is just as critical, and that I lacked it because I’d had such miserable experiences not just in elementary school gym class, but in swimming, where I was slower than everyone else and took forever to graduate into higher levels; and at Girl Scout Camp, where musical gifts were not nearly as valued as physical prowess, and I was inevitably picked last for every land-based sport and constantly got bonked in the head with the boom during sailing lessons. When I signed up for the canoe trip one summer, there was an uneven number of girls, so I was the kid whom the counselors chose to be a passenger. I was very pointedly not given a paddle. They might as well have put a sandwich board on me that said “Too weak to contribute. Will never amount to anything.”
Still, I didn’t give physical literacy much thought until recently, when I helped edit a book written by graduate students at the University of Alberta. The class focused on something else I’d never heard of, Meaningful Physical Education. The students, all physical education teachers, had varying degrees of classroom experience, and if the papers they contributed to the book are to believed, every one of them is committed to teaching students not to compete or excel or become professional athletes, but to develop skills and competency and confidence so that they’ll want to be physically active for life.
At 63, I am less flexible but more physically literate than when I was a kid. I’ve always biked and hiked, but I’m in better overall shape physically and emotionally thanks to two fit friends who invited me to take a boot camp class with them in January 2011.
Thirteen years later we’re still working out with a trainer. I have very fond memories of discovering my biceps while soaping my arms in the shower in 2012. I did a double take. Were these my arms? (They were! They are!). My friends are great for my fitness level and my ego—they encourage me and remind me that I’m strong.
And, a bonus: when Covid hit and we had to do our workouts over Google Meet, my sister was able to join the class from her home in Milwaukee. Now she works out every week with me and my friends. I never would have imagined, as an elementary school kid miserable in gym class, that I would willingly sign up for gym class. Neither can Amy—who remembers Mrs. Williams saying to her, “You’re so weak you shouldn’t even be able to sit up.”
Sometimes I wonder how much different my life would be if Mrs. Williams had had the same mindset as the phys ed teachers at the University of Alberta whose papers I edited. But to quote Joni Mitchell, “we can’t go back, we can only look behind from where we came.” I’m grateful for future generations that educators are finally figuring out that the recipe for lifelong physical fitness is not to make clumsy kids feel even worse about themselves, it’s to meet people where they are.
*When I was in my early twenties, I went back to my hometown for a visit. My friend Yvonne and I were in a bakery when we ran into Liz. Clearly she and Yvonne were now friends, which I surmised must have meant that Liz had become nicer, because Yvonne had always been nice and I couldn’t imagine her befriending someone as mean as Liz had been.
“Debby, do you remember Liz?” Yvonne asked.
“Yes,” I replied. “When I was in gym class with you at Hughes School, you and Madelyn asked me if I was retarded.”
The smile on Liz’s face evaporated, replaced by – horror? Embarrassment? I honestly can’t tell you, because I was more focused on how I felt than how she looked, and how I felt was unburdened. I’d never be an Olympic athlete, but all of a sudden I wasn’t a victim anymore, either.
I’m pretty sure I was pleasant when I answered Yvonne’s question. It wasn’t as if I’d been practicing what to say if I ever had the opportunity to tell Liz how much that comment had hurt me. Until that moment, I don’t think I was aware of how much it had hurt me.
Yvonne did not share my newfound enthusiasm at having shaken off the sting of cruelty that had wrapped itself around me more than a decade earlier. As we walked home from the bakery, she lectured me. “Why did you do that? You made her feel horrible!”
“You asked me if I remembered her,” I said. “That’s what I remember.”
Gym class fond memories….dribbling basketball drills. The goal was to walk/run while dribbling, looking where you were going. I ran into someone equally as inept as me and she fell and sprained her ankle. Now at almost 68 I am stronger and more active than I ever was. We all have to find exercise that’s enjoyable, it’s not a punishment.
I can relate. I vividly remember those President’s physical fitness tests. I hated them. He’s to run the mile 3 times to get under 10 minutes. And I hated swimming in high school because they didn’t have blow dryers back then and you had to go around with wet hair all day in the winter. Ugh. Miss Misko I will never forget. How I hated her.