I took both gym and P.E., depending on which part of the country I was living in at the time. P.E. is a West Coast thing.
Gym shoes -- today’s athletic shoes. How they love to change the nomenclature to make things sound so much more important. We got along fine with tacky old gym shoes, and I still get along fine with my laceless $29 Ked’s no mater what I’m doing. Their scare tactics of “you must buy our $150 shoes made in China, which should sell for $25, or your back or feet will die.
And, by the way, why are all those fancy Dan shoes so damned expensive? They’re made in China or some other country where they pay slave labor wages. Could it be all the shipping costs and/or all that expensive advertising?
*Flunking gym was not an option, even for stupid kids! I guess P.E. must be much harder than gym.
As a wussy girl who was born athletically deprived. I would have flunked P.E. if I wouldn’t have had the guile to “schlump” when our posture was checked for Corrective Class eligibility. Miraculously, my curved back, stooped, rounded shoulders, one hip higher than the other and pigeon toes were instantly cured the second I was picked as the prefect Corrective candidate.
On the two gloriously magnificent days a week we didn’t have to dress for gym, we went out to the archery range where I became Deadeye Sandy, and learned a skill I never used again.
*We must have had horribly damaged psyches. What an archaic health system we had then. Remember school nurses? Ours wore a hat and everything.
*I thought that I was supposed to accomplish something before I was allowed to be proud of myself.
Now every student gets a gold star, deserving or not. And what’s with all the graduation ceremonies, where no one walks away without a commendation of some sort. Besides, they’re not graduating from anything; they’re simple moving to the next grade.
It’s no wonder we have so many underachieving employees who think they don’t have to do a damn thing to succeed. Constant praise from mothers and teachers taught them nothing on how to succeed in the real world.
*I just can't recall how bored we were without computers, Play Station, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital TV cable stations.
I for one wish we would have had those things back then in the hope that it would have helped me become computer literate in today’s world.
*Where was the Benadryl and sterilization kit when I got that bee sting? I could have been killed!
When I was stung by a bee picking up a apple on the ground in Mrs. Langer’s back yard and shrieked for the entire world to hear, she came running out, told me to shut up, pulled out the stinger and said I should go back to playing with Kirk and I’d live.
*Remember when kids played 'king of the hill' on piles of gravel left on vacant construction sites, and when we got hurt, Mom pulled out a $.48-cent bottle of Mercurochrome (kids liked it better because it didn't sting like iodine did) and then we got our butt spanked.
Now it's a trip to the emergency room, followed by a 10-day dose of a $49 bottle of antibiotics, and then Mom calls the attorney to sue the contractor for leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where it was such a threat.
Only $49? That’s getting off cheap.
*We didn't act up at the neighbor's house either because if we did, we got our butt spanked there and then we got butt-spanked again when we got home.
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