"Pretend you’re a tree." This was the earliest memory of physical education for one former student, introduced to gym class by a tall and thin teacher whose broad nimbus of dark hair was edged with gray, asking her second-grade students to make-believe. By, as it was understood, simply not moving. In a gymnasium class.
Even at that tender age, the confusion was palpable. Somewhere in the elementary school’s wood-floored gymnasium, ropes waited to be climbed, mats to be tumbled on, and balls to be kicked, thrown, and dodged. Yet the children were being corralled into a dumbed-down modern dance—the kind of alternative, counter-cultural exercise style typical of a Western Massachusetts college town.
This was not born of a craving for traditional sports. The author was never made for gym. Small and perpetually the second-shortest boy in the grade, he was slight and uninterested in the major team sports that dominated public-school athletic curricula. He did not own a catcher’s mitt; no sane, responsible adult would have allowed such a small child to play tackle football.
At the same time, he was physical. He was a normal child who wanted to run around, try a handstand, lift a dumbbell, shoot a basket, or score a goal. Despite being uncoordinated and largely unenthusiastic about organized school sports, he was not entirely untalented. He remembers running a seven-minute mile in fourth grade, being flexible enough to touch his toes and put one foot behind his head, and competing with his friend Jason to see who could knock out sixty sit-ups in a minute first.
However, those achievements and activities had nothing to do with gym class as it was actually experienced. In the same way that English class was not designed to make philistines love literature, or biology to inspire a lifelong dedication to the scientific method, gym class was not about converting average students into athletes. Instead, it was a class tailored for the kids who were already athletes—those who played baseball and field hockey for fun, owned weight machines at home, and didn’t need to sit through a teacher’s confounding explanations of what it meant to be "offsides."
There was a pragmatic acceptance of this hierarchy. The non-athletic students didn’t necessarily begrudge the natural athletes their special domain. After all, they could spell and do algebra while the athletes could throw an arcing spiral. It was simply the way of the world, even in a Massachusetts town populated by former hippies.
That dynamic might have remained tolerable if gym class had strictly adhered to mainstream sports. Being bad at soccer or basketball was harmless enough. But gym classes routinely branched out into more marginal, idiosyncratic activities, turning the designated hour into a weekly source of dread.
Swimming, in particular, was a profound trauma. At age eight, during a year his family spent living in Brighton, England, he was so tearfully reluctant to enter the pool that the school’s headmaster had to personally throw him in. As he grew older, the trauma morphed. Back in Massachusetts, the locker room after eighth-grade swimming lessons resembled a horror movie scene. The underdeveloped student had to undress surrounded by his much larger, physically advanced peers.
One hazy memory suggests he once changed entirely inside a locker, though physical reality makes that unlikely given the narrow, ten-inch width of the compartments. Another memory, however, is starkly real: during one class, he dived into the deep end, and the force of the water yanked his swimsuit down to his ankles. He somehow managed to pull his trunks up before surfacing, an inadvertent lesson in survival and composure.
The psychosexual torture escalated when gym class briefly pivoted to ballroom dance. Already socially awkward around girls, and intensely uncomfortable with the implied romance of ballroom choreography, he suffered the misfortune of being paired with a classmate whom another friend had dubbed "Turtle Butt." Despite having no discernible resemblance to a reptile, the nickname stuck, and the humiliation of dancing with her loomed large in the adolescent mind.
Decades later, hindsight reveals that the humiliation existed entirely within his own head. He remembered the potential for embarrassment with infinitely more clarity than any actual jeers or taunts, largely because there were none. But such is the insular world of adolescence, where internal fears and anxieties routinely dwarf reality.
What he feared most of all was being seen. In academic subjects, exposure was limited. A student might know where the Mason-Dixon Line was, or how to deploy the quadratic formula—or fail to know either. Either way, nothing was exposed except intellectual capability, or the lack thereof.
Gym class operated differently. Everyone understood that some children possessed athletic prowess while others did not, and there was little inherent shame in being terrible at sports. Asthma could reduce a student’s mile time to twenty minutes by the eighth grade without causing a crisis. The fundamental difference, however, was that in gym class, a student existed purely as a physical being. Strip away athletic performance, and the individual still stood exposed among classmates, clad in sneakers, sweats, or ordinary school clothes. You could pretend to be a tree all you wanted, but you remained entirely visible: prepubescent in stature, lacking muscle tone, and bearing the full weight of your physical self. There were no classroom desks to hide behind, and no escape from the collective gaze and judgment of peers.
The only real escape was growing up. When his family moved to Southeastern Virginia during high school, he anticipated an even more intense sports and gym-class culture than the academic environment of the Northeast. Instead, physical education was treated as an afterthought, dropped as a requirement after the sophomore or junior year.
The school was full of dedicated student-athletes—boys playing soccer and football, girls on the field hockey team—yet gym class itself was surprisingly lackadaisical. Driver’s education occupied a portion of the curriculum, and on Fridays, students were bused to a local bowling alley, where less athletic students could at least take pride in knowing how to properly score a game.
For the author, that bowling alley was familiar territory. He spent his afternoons just outside its doors, meeting skateboarder friends to ride the concrete drainage ditch adjacent to the parking lot. In high school, skateboarding became an all-consuming passion, a sweaty, gritty, and deeply rewarding alternative sport.
Though he never considered himself professional material, he was competent enough to hold his own among peers at local competitions in Virginia Beach and road trips to Richmond and Washington, D.C. More importantly, skateboarding offered a community free from the mainstream judgment of school hallways. Skateboarding required kids to accept one another across all their quirks and eccentricities, because alternatives for skating partners simply did not exist.
He maintained skateboarding for nearly a decade before transitioning to distance running and rock climbing in adulthood. Appreciating the physical experiences of these activities in ways he could never have imagined during high school, he occasionally wondered whether discovering running or climbing earlier in life would have changed his trajectory. Ultimately, he doubted it.
Like much of formal schooling, traditional gym class had little to do with real life beyond offering superficial options that might, years later, prove interesting—or not. The true education happened outside the school building, in every sense of the term. Yet public physical education did impart one enduring lesson: if you make like a tree, you can always leave.