Was this the norm in your school?

[Ko-Ko]

What's with all this about your schools only requiring you to take a year or so of gym? At my school, we have to take gym every year we are at that school! We can drop any other subject (not including English) yet we still have to take gym! And to whoever said that students could get out of gym by taking band, I envy all those kids so much right now.

Ko-Ko

[Cyndi]

Lunch was about 35 minutes long when I was in high school. I tended to bring my lunch so that I didn't have to waste time in long lines. Besides the one time I ate cafeteria food, I got food poisoning, so I never ate from it again.

[Sleepingmediocre]

PE in my school was only mandatory in grade 10. Afterwards you had a choice. I was glad to give it up because the PE teacher was incredibly mean and would make fun of me in front of other students.

My school went from grade 5 through grade 12.  In grades 5-8, you had to take some kind of "movement" class (PE and other assorted similar classes) every year.  In grades 9-12, you had to take PE at least one year out of the four, but the other three years you didn't have to take anything at all.  Nobody wanted to take PE if they could possibly avoid it, because our school (small, poor private school) didn't have a gym, so if the weather was good you played outside, running laps around the portable classrooms or playing some kind of sport on the gravel and concrete.  If the weather was bad, we stayed inside the portable classroom and played table tennis or learned country line dancing.  Yes, country line dancing.  To this day I have nightmares about the various steps to the Carolina Tush Push being barked at me by our ex-Marine PE teacher...

[Buffy2424]

That's awful; I had no idea that was going on in public schools.  We had a science lab too, separate from science class, but it didn't take over lunch.  There totally would have been a sit-in.

I went to a Catholic HS in the 90s.  We didn't have a cafeteria per se, we had a lunch line at the "snack bar" and then we ate at outside tables. 

We had about 40-45 minutes for lunch, which always felt short to us.

My usual lunch was a turkey sandwich, snack bag of 'smartfood' white-cheddar popcorn, and water.  Then I'd often hit the bulimia line in the bathroom.  Sometimes it was back to the snack bar after school for more popcorn. 

On Fridays we were all alloted two pieces of vegetarian pizza and a big, icy Dr. Pepper.  Oh, how we loved those Dr. Peppers. 

Seniors were allowed one off-campus lunch per month.  Our senior-year hotspots were
1. Friendly's or Friday's for stuff like mozzerella sticks or
2. The local Japanese restaurant

Oh, and sleepingmediocre, we learned country line dancing too!  In middle school we had gym a couple times a week and it was pretty lame... running, flag-football, dancing. 

In HS we only had gym class freshman year, but it was pretty good. Sophomore year was Health class.  There were optional gym-like electives available for the last 4 semesters-- stuff like weight-lifting and sports medicine. 

[ginlyn32]

Jeeze.

If that were my kid's school, I would seriously consider pulling them out or petitioning the school. I bet the teachers and other school personel don't have to go without lunch!

I went to HS in Indiana. No, this was not normal. I had I think about 20 minutes, but after you stand in line for about 10 min, it was really only about 10 min. to eat.

Once, in protest, I continued to sit out in the commons, which was where we ate our lunch, about 10 min past the lunch period. THe princepal asked me why I was not in class and I told him that after standing in line and getting cut in front of most of the time, that after I sat down, I had about 5 min to eat. I was not going to swallow my food whole. I asked him if he ever was forced to go without lunch and how would he like to sit through the next three hours knowing you could not eat until you got home? He let me eat.

I also told him I thought the lunch period was too short. I told him that teachers got an hour break and so should the students!

I doubt anything has changed much in the last 15 years!

Ginger

PS: I do think it is WRONG to FORCE children to go without eating to do science labs. NOTHING is that important. What do they do about those students who are diabetic and MUST eat?

[Clara Bow]

I was in high school during the reign of the Tudors and we got a regualr lunch peroid daily. There would have been fullscale mutiny otherwise, with parents on the outside having a fit. I can see cutting the period a few minutes, but eliminating it? Umm...don't we have enough problems with teenage eating disorders without encouraging them to go all day without eating?
And eating in a science lab? Umm...the first thing I learned in chemistry was "don't lick the spoon." The badchemist can back me up on this one....

[Chivewarrior]

We did country square dancing rather than line dancing, and it was in music class. (I was one of the few who absolutely loved that music teacher- but I was also the only one who enjoyed the square dancing.) And once a month we had ballroom dancing. This was mostly in 4th grade, but the ballroom dancing happened intermittently every year.

And Buffy... the "bulimia line"?

[Sophia]

Jeeze.

If that were my kid's school, I would seriously consider pulling them out or petitioning the school. I bet the teachers and other school personel don't have to go without lunch!
...

If I remember right, making employees go without lunch is against regulations.  You work 6+ hours you get a lunch. 

[hobish]

OooooH! We had square dancing in gym class. I loved it! Our group even won a contest at the end of our unit. Haven't done it since, but it was loads of fun in gym class. We also did a polka and the jitterbug (which i still cannot do).
The funniest was when we did the cha-cha. Picture a whole gym full of 16 & 17 year olds going forward 1,2, Stomp-Stomp-Stomp and back 1,2, Stomp-Stomp-Stomp, to the left, 2, Stomp-Stomp-Stomp, and the right, 2 Stomp-Stomp-Stomp. It was horrendous. Luckily there was a gorgeous Spanish girl in our class whose father owned a dance studio in Philadelphia who finally had enough of us massacring the dance. She found a graceful partner & went to the center of the gym and showed us how the cha-cha is supposed to be done. It was beautiful. The stomping was fun, but left to the polka after that.

[Venus193]

Three words:  Take the Lead.

[Lisbeth]

Three words:  Take the Lead.

When I was in middle school I went to a magnet school that combined a program for gifted kids with programs for kids who were deaf, retarded, and had other disabilities.  They had their own academic classes, but often they joined us for classes like PE.

They made us square dance together with these kids, some of whom couldn't hear the music and couldn't follow what was going on, and we hearing, able-bodied kids were told to lead them.  That meant jerking those poor kids around.  I hated it-it made me feel undignified and made me feel bad for the kids who were being jerked around in time to music they couldn't hear and in some cases couldn't follow for other reasons.

[Venus193]

I hated it-it made me feel undignified and made me feel bad for the kids who were being jerked around in time to music they couldn't hear and in some cases couldn't follow for other reasons.

I expect to be flamed for this, but I really disagree with programs like this.  It is far more productive for schools to recognize that segregating kids by ability is a lot more productive.  Not to mention that this probably ruined the potential enjoyment of this activity by the kids who could have appreciated it among themselves.

[Buffy2424]

Yep, that line. 

We also did square dancing, and one year, the tango.  I liked that one.

[freakyfemme]

I hated it-it made me feel undignified and made me feel bad for the kids who were being jerked around in time to music they couldn't hear and in some cases couldn't follow for other reasons.

I expect to be flamed for this, but I really disagree with programs like this.  It is far more productive for schools to recognize that segregating kids by ability is a lot more productive.  Not to mention that this probably ruined the potential enjoyment of this activity by the kids who could have appreciated it among themselves.

Why would anyone flame you?  It's considered quite normal and appropriate for students to be divided into, say, reading groups based on ability, so why NOT have different groups for gym?  There are ways to do it so that it's not immediately apparent which groups are "better" than others.  When I was in grade one, the teacher let us pick our own reading-group names, based on a "favourite candy" theme.  My group's name was the Tootsie Rolls, and yes, we were the highest group, but that meant that, since we already knew how to read, we were reading stories, and sometimes writing our own, while the kids in the lower groups (Chocolate Bars, Lollipops, and Gumdrops, respectively) were still working on other stuff, like sentence structure, phonics, and which way "b" and "d" are supposed to face.  I'm not trying to sound conceited, but if I'd had to sit through all that stuff, I would have probably wanted to stab my eyes out.  Meanwhile, in gym class, I could hardly catch a baseball without instinctively trying to cover my face.  So, I knew even at that age that there was no point in trying to maintain any pretense of "equality," because it just wasn't there.  Of course, I believed that nobody in the class was a better PERSON than anyone else, but I knew that I read better than average, while Jimmy over at the next table was the best athlete in the class, Bobby was the best at math, Susie was the best artist, and so on.  That was in 1990-1991, so I wonder if ability-based reading groups have been abolished since then,

[Sophia]

It used to be quite normal.  But when you take mainstreaming to an absurd degree, you take out all differentation because the kids in the lower groups might feel bad.  Then you add in the philosophy of 'teach to the slowest child'.   I was subjected to these dual teaching philosophies from middle of 3rd grade through 6th.  The only thing that saved my sanity was that the teachers knew I would cause havoc if they didn't let me read.  I was reading Tolstoy in 3rd grade.