![]() With the coach happily encouraging the bigger, bolder, more aggressive kids to plow us milder, meeker, unathletic, smaller ones into the ‘exercise field.’ He was going to make ‘men’ out of us if it killed us.Īfterwards, showers. Then, outside to exercise, get formed into teams and slaughter each other in what they call contact sports and I considered something along the lines of gladiators trying to kill each other in a pit. The coach, a big, not exactly friendly looking monster, mumble-yelled something to us about how we might want to get supporters, which most of us had no idea what he was talking about. Then we changed into shorts and T-shirts, with sneakers. We dressed out, which was embarrassing, having to strip to our briefs, herded into the stinking, kind of dark, cement floored, feet smelling, crowded locker room, with walls painted a high glossy red and white in prison quality industrial paint. I was a spindly, shy, quiet youngster, still stunned by changing from 1 class of 25 familiar kids all day long to 6 classes of 30 strangers with 7 different teachers and having to run from one end of the school to the other between periods as well as try to jam into the always smoke filled, noisy, kid packed, mosh pit they called the boys bathrooms in order to try to take a pee. When I entered 7th grade, we got mandatory PE, and I recall it vividly. Thankfully, showers were not mandatory at high school. The teacher was never censured or reprimanded as far as I know, and as for us, our hated showers continued. Indeed, he never returned to school at all, at least not to ours. We all got out of there as fast as we could. The teacher, realizing what he had done, moved in to try to help. Just a little hole.īy this time, poor Jeff was on the shower floor bawling his eyes out and frantically trying to cover himself. Rudimentary testicles yes (he was only 12), but no penis. And we saw why Jeff never wanted to take a shower. I don’t remember what happened after that terribly well, but here’s pretty much what went down: the teacher grabbed Jeff’s towel and gave him a push in the door. Jeff refused, the teacher angered, Jeff cried, the teacher had had enough. ![]() (Not easy to do, let me tell you.) And we watched the gym teacher beg, plead, cajole, and coax Jeff in with us. So there we were, thirty naked 12-year-old boys, standing in a room that measured about nine feet square, embarrassed as hell and trying not to touch each other. So he decided to make sure that everybody–including Jeff–took one. The teacher would see our wet hair and assume we had been in there.īut one day, somebody tipped him off that we weren’t really taking showers. Most of the time, we could get away with wrapping a towel around ourselves and sticking our head under the shower head just inside the shower room. We had one kid, Jeff, who racked up detentions like nobody’s business. ![]() ![]() Refusing to take one earned you a detention. It was a communal shower, no separate stalls. At the school I attended for grades 7 and 8 (this was in the early 1970s), we had to shower after gym class.
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