We do have Bodies: Physical Education Doesn’t Have to be Shaming
A middle school experience with physical education
In the seventh grade, I go to a school where the mascot is the road runner. Our logo has a picture of a cartoon bird that probably resembles the Loony Toons cartoon more closely than Warner Brothers would prefer, but it’s Southern California so I’m sure if they were going to press the issue, they would have done so already.
The cartoon bird looks really cool on the tee shirts the PE teacher gives out to those who earn them — its legs are a blur as it races across the top of the words “7 minute mile club” or “6 minute mile club” or the ever elusive “5 minute mile club.” She shows them to us on the first day of class, and I’m certain from the start that I will never be a member of any of those clubs. Not now, not after I’ve practiced running the mile for a semester. If I somehow end up staying in middle school for a decade and I practiced running the mile every day, I know I still wouldn’t earn myself one of those damn tee shirts.
This PE teacher appeals to me though. Even though I know I’ll never a get one of the shirts, I still want one, and something about the way she talks about running makes me feel like it’s worth trying, even knowing I’ll not get there. Maybe I’ll be able to make some kind of progress, even if it doesn’t earn me a shirt. She tells us we’ll run the mile every Friday, and she’ll keep track of our time and progress. Although she does show us the shirts, she doesn’t stop there. She talks about progress. She doesn’t care, she says, if we start with a twenty minute mile or an eight minute mile, she wants us to practice and improve our times. Same with pull-ups, shuttle run, and some of the other markers we’re supposed to meet.
Her name is lost on me, but she wears her hair in a short butch style and has the lean, tan, muscular legs of someone who takes full advantage of the temperate climate by spending a lot of time outside, not sunning herself, but running, cycling, hiking, and moving. I feel nervous, as a doughy adolescent, about having to perform physically in front of someone who so obviously places high value on physical fitness. Most of my PE teachers up to this point had been mostly disappointed with me. “Oh, it’s okay. You can keep working on it,” they’d say when I clocked my abysmal mile times. Or “You’re just growing! Soon you’ll be able to do a bunch of them” when I hung humiliatingly at the chin up bar, unable to pull myself more than halfway up.
This teacher doesn’t do that. For those of us who walk a lot during that first mile run, she encourages us to try to work on being able to run the whole way without stopping. When we pass her on the track she shouts, “You’re doing great! Keep it up! Keep running!” I wait to walk until a little while after I pass her because I don’t want to disappoint her. I try hard to keep running as much as I can. Early on my times are around fifteen or sixteen minutes, but most weeks my times get a little bit faster than the week before. As we walk back to the locker rooms, the teacher carries her clipboard and tells us how much we improved from last week’s time when we we ask her.
She sees that I’m trying, and she encourages me to keep at it. When we do the shuttle run, she is surprised that I am one of the fastest kids in my class. “Do you play any sports?” She asks.
“Basketball,” I reply, my chest puffed. I am good at basketball and lead my team in rebounds and blocked shots.
Somehow she is able to structure the class so that we are grouped with other kids of similar ability when we have to do the individual tasks like pull ups or the shuttle run. I don’t know how she does it, but for once I can just try without making a spectacle of myself, without being the cautionary tale of how being fat will ruin your life and your physical fitness.
That year was the first time I tried going jogging for the sake of physical fitness. My mom helped me plot out a course through the landscaped pathways of our neighborhood park that equaled around a mile, and I practiced jogging the whole way. I was also becoming obsessed with basketball, and I knew running would help my stamina on the court. I never did run fast. I bet my fastest mile time that year was around eleven minutes, but I ran the whole way without stopping, and I was proud of that. I felt ownership of my body, like it could do things and I had some level of control over how well it did them.
It was only my second year living in Southern California (and though I didn’t know it, it would be my last). Having lived in the Pacific Northwest up to that point, I felt like a fish out of water. All the girls and women seemed to have dark tans, thin bodies, and blonde hair. I remember hearing girls as young as eleven or twelve talking about the cleanse diets their moms had them on. I was a fat, weird kid who couldn’t seem to make the transition from tomboy to teenage girl, and as much as I loved living there and the other girls my age were actually pretty nice to me, I never fit in with them. Neither my body nor my introverted nature would allow it.
Maybe that’s why that teacher worked for me also — I wanted to impress her because fitness was important to her, not because thin-ness or femininity were important to her. I could be a tomboy unapologetically. I could try my best and she would call my best good enough.
I was right, then, that I would never run a seven minute mile. But I would go on to enjoy basketball, swimming, and other sports throughout my middle and high school years. I would go on to run multiple miles at a time without stopping to walk, and run a mile in as little as eight or nine minutes. If running was my sport I’m sure I could’ve gotten my time down lower, but running was always a means to some other end for me (faster swim times, better stamina in basketball, etc.) so I never pushed for it.
Her method, in hindsight, was imperfect. Knowing what I know now about bodies, fat phobia, and health-ism, I think there are better ways to approach body movement. However, what I took from the class was a net positive — my body could do things, trying hard was good enough, with some effort and practice, I could train my body to do some of the things that I wanted it to do. All of those things felt helpful and empowering.
Out of all the PE classes I had through thirteen years of public schooling, only one of them didn’t make me feel terrible about my body.
