Sadly, PE is one lesson you’ll never forget
Cast your mind back, dear reader, to the squeal of rubber plimsoll on wooden gym floor. To those green rubber mats you lugged out of the store. To the rope burns and blisters on tender young hands...
I wasn’t surprised to learn that memories of school PE lessons still cause what George Eliot called “the tingle of a remembered shame” in six out of 10 adults. According to a survey by myphizz, 64 per cent of Britons say PE was absolutely the worst thing about school, with kids of today having no idea how bad it used to be.
I asked my followers on Twitter to share their PE horrors. Here are the hilarious, mortifying, brutal, and very often creepy highlights.
Michelle: “Being told by cross country teachers, who were standing there, keeping warm with mugs of coffee, to ‘keep running, you’ll get your second wind’. Forty years later, I’m still waiting for it!”
Terry: “At 15, a word out of place during PT, you were made to hang from the wall bars until you dropped, shouting: ‘I am a little s---’.”
Helen: “Bottle-green PE knickers with just my sports T-shirt for indoor gym and trampolining with boys – so embarrassing at 13.”
Andrew: “Getting a medicine ball hurled at me by a psycho games teacher. Best memory, five years later, knocking the same teacher out on the rugby pitch.”
Anna: “When my (very average) convent school rounders team unexpectedly beat the best local team, they were so outraged they set about us with their rounders bats. So we were led running from the school by a nun shouting: ‘Run for it, girls – they’ve got it in for us!’ Sweet memories.”
Caro: “Doing wheelbarrow races – girls being the wheelbarrows and boys holding our bare legs.”
Lara-jane: “Having to walk naked in single file in front of the sports teachers. One watched you walk into the communal showers and one watched you leave. Does this still happen? It sounds utterly abusive in hindsight.”
Please send me your own PE memories, and we’ll print the best.