What Should Physical Education in Schools Actually Look Like?

Hi I'm Rebecca and my only qualification for writing this is being fucking traumatized by my gym classes.

My body can do stuff. I am 22 years old and it is late for this revelation, but my body can do stuff. We go for runs sometimes, even though our progress is slow. We can exercise at our own pace, being mindful of the limits my chronic pain condition imposes. We can have dance parties while doing the dishes. I am still so alienated from my body that I find it easier to write about it in third person but we are moving on. 

One of the only good sides of quarantine was seeing so many different people on social media speak out about how they are rediscovering exercise after feeling alienated from it. Many people are beginning to fall in love with their bodies again and exploring exercise and moving.

Many of us fell out of love with our bodies during high school gym class. (also thanks to Instagram, the media’s overwhelming obsession with thinness, and our own families. But mostly high school gym class.)

It’s infuriating because physical education (and I’ve never met a gym teacher that didn’t get anal about the difference between the two terms) can help students so much. After eight hours of being forced to sit and pay attention, physical education could be an opportunity for kids to blow off steam and get some well-needed exercise they don’t otherwise have time for. It could be an opportunity for students to explore different ways of exercising and how to figure out what works best for their needs. Physical education, combined with a well-designed health curriculum, could be an opportunity for students to learn how to take care of their bodies and to understand what being healthy really means.

Instead, physical education classes become yet another way for the school system to punish students who deviate from the norm. I can’t remember the number of times students would mock other students who had disabilities, were overweight, or just didn’t have the same physical abilities as others. And the teachers, instead of stopping it, joined in. All of my gym classes embodied the absolute worst of public school education in general and its attempt to turn us all into robots.

You know what I actually learned in my physical education and health classes? I learned how to push my body past its healthy limits, as I and countless other students exercised until we vomited, passed out, or coughed up blood and the teachers kept pushing us. I learned how to ignore my chronic pain condition instead of treating it, because didn’t my gym teachers tell me “pain is just weakness leaving the body”? (My physical therapist, who told me if I don’t wise up I’d have to use a cane by the time I hit 40, doesn’t agree with that assessment of pain).

And my health classes taught me how to be a really fucking good anorexic. My health teacher introduced me to the term “TOFI,” or “Thin on the Outside, Fat on the Inside.” It gave my wired, anxious brain another thing to worry about and it made my mother’s job trying to talk me off of my self-destructive ledge even harder. No, mom, it doesn’t matter how much you tell me that I’ve lost weight and that I look fine, I’m really fat on the inside! My health teacher even said so! It was my health teachers and physical education teachers that also introduced us to the concept of food tracking apps. I have no idea who thought that was an appropriate assignment for a group of vulnerable teenagers, mostly girls, but it did teach me new ways to obsess over every morsel of food I put in my mouth. Every time I put an M&M in my mouth, I remember my health teacher telling us, “Don’t forget to record all your bites, licks, and tastes! Those things add up!”

To be fair, the issues with our physical education curriculum cannot be blamed just on our physical education teachers. Administrators and higher-ups have transformed the whole schooling process into an endless factory of grades, tests, and evaluations, and physical education hasn’t been spared. The fact that physical education is graded alone, let alone that we have to take a national physical fitness exam, is ridiculous (raise your hand if you’re still traumatized by the sound of the pacer test, years after you’ve taken it). Even if administrators are serious about their stated goal of fighting the “obesity epidemic,” this isn’t the way of going about doing it. Instead of encouraging students to be more active, all that a physical education curriculum designed like this does is permanently link exercise with humiliation. If the powers that be are serious about physical health, they’d provide healthy breakfasts and lunches, lessen workloads so kids actually have time to exercise instead of spending four or more hours a day doing homework, put programs in place to support kids that live in food deserts, and make sports and the outdoors more accessible. But health isn’t the point—the point is humiliation and shaming students into blind obedience. 

Sports and fitness should be for everyone. And it’s time to change the way we go about teaching it in schools.