Sophomore Year, 1st Period: Physical Education

"How many periods do you have a day?"

"Six."

"Don't you get tired of bleeding that much?"

Due to a lot of stuff happening in my current life, I've had to suspend some activity on this blog for the last couple of weeks. It was bad, because at one point, I was about four weeks ahead on my posts. That eventually dwindled down to the point that I literally did not even have time to write the posts one day ahead of time.

So as I start fresh with my high school years, I will start by examining the classes that I had to take and the impact they had on my life. This will constitute the content for today and the next few days. Once the general education is out of the way, I can get to the more juicy stuff.

So I get to start with the class that made me feel most like a loser: PE. The good thing was that I got the roughest part of the day out of the way first thing in the morning. When you're a sophomore, you are forced to take either PE or Athletics. However, you only have to take it for one year. I actually took it for only one semester because I got to take Tennis for the second semester to round out the PE requirement that way. Taking Tennis was my Mom's idea. I guess she knew how rough it was in PE. This would be one of the few nuggets of her wisdom for which I would be grateful during high school.

My PE teacher also happened to be the head coach of the high school's football team. He treated the class like some sort of joke unworthy of his abilities. He would start out teaching us some sport that we were able to do in the gym. Then, he would throw out the ball and go into his office for the rest of the hour.

Absolute mayhem took place at this point. Even though the students only needed to take PE during the sophomore year, there were a number of juniors and seniors who continued to take the class, presumedly for the easy "A." These boys were not the Alpha males who would play on the football team. These were the boys who would grow up to be the scary punks who worked at the refinery. The upperclassmen tormented the sophomores. I remember one boy who got hit in the back with a tennis ball so hard that the bruise literally displayed the area of impact.

I was also a frequent target of attacks, but I never got any visible injuries. The general advice is to stand up to bullies. I can tell you that doesn't work, especially when there is more than one person doing the bullying. Yeah, you can stand up to one, but stand up to 10 and you are quickly outnumbered.

The funny thing was that during "playtime," some of the upper classmen would go hang out with the coach in his office and talk about whatever. I never saw the logic in this. These were guys who couldn't play football. What good was chatting up the head coach going to do? He wasn't going to put them on the team. They were in the wrong class for that.

Years later, he stopped being the head coach and became the principal at the high school. A few years after that, he became the city school superintendent. I know teachers who worked harder than he did to educate students and I couldn't believe that he could just walk right into those positions. However, my Mom and Dad said he turned out to be pretty good principal and superintendent.

So that was the only time I had to deal with those shenanigans in high school. I considered myself lucky.