Edmonton's current heat wave triggered a painful memory today. Back in junior high, we sometimes played team sports in gym class. I didn't (and still don't) care a whit for sports, but I would have been fine with participating had the gym teachers not divided the teams by forcing half the players to strip to the waist, a practice known as "shirts vs skins."
I hated being on the skins team. I was very uncomfortable in my own skin, thinking myself too scrawny. I also felt incredibly vulnerable, perhaps because I'd been a victim of bullying pretty constantly at the time. (Things got better in high school.) I remember thinking it seemed incredibly unjust, that teachers could force us to take half our clothes off against our will.
As far as I know, no one else in my class complained, nor did they seem bothered by the practice. I stopped protesting, but I hated every moment. Those classes definitely raised my already present antipathy for sports.
I also remember a communal change room in junior high, another agonizing rite of passage. There were communal showers without any privacy dividers, too, and while I'm sure we were made to use them, I have no memory whatsoever of showering at school. I suspect I blanked those memories out somehow. Is that even a real thing?
In retrospect, I'm rather amazed that "shirts vs skins" was ever seen as acceptable. A cursory search reveals that some schools still do this.
I recognize that I might have been overly sensitive about this. But given how sensitive teenagers can be, I feel like exemptions should have been allowed, at the very least.
Monday, July 22, 2024
Shirts vs Skins
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4 comments:
For better or worse Earl, I NEVER showered at school that I can recall. I can’t recall anyone who did, actually, particularly in junior high…
I never remember having time to shower. The football team showered, but they were given the time to do so.
In order to shower, you'd need a towel, and I don't remember having one in my locker. Nor do I remember having room in my locker for that stuff. Nor do I remember my locker combination or even my locker number, something that haunts me when I have dreams that I need to get something out of my locker...
Maybe we didn't shower, in which case...ugh!
Definitely ugh. One kid in my class (an all-boy's school no less), the brightest and most talented, was into weird magazines. Back then it was maybe analogous to the Dark Web, anarchistic stuff. He answered an ad in the back of one of these magazines for a bean pill that promised to make a person super gassy. When the pills eventually came in the mail, he ate a lot of cabbage and onions and then consumed the beans.
He wasn't exactly ill from the effects, but the flatulence did keep him from gym class. He definitely had volume and frequency, it was impressive. The rest of us were required to submit to some kind of floor hockey game using a volleyball. It was something like water polo but played in a gym. I only remember it because Coach yelled "Shoot the ball!" at me when I caught a pass and I obeyed by sailing it into the rafters. I recall the eyeroll, but if our places had been switched I would have been equally incredulous.
That's all beside the point and only serves to cement that day in my memory. The next class was History, and we didn't shower and The King Of Beans still had much of his wind power. By that time he had lost frequency, but the onions had kicked in.
They say that the sense of smell triggers the strongest memories.
They are right.
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