A Martinet Helped Us Learn

A recent survey shows that the average person did not enjoy gym class when he or she was in grade school and for that reason would sit on the sidelines and watch whenever it was possible. However, I once had a gym teacher who averaged a 99.9% class participation rate.

It had less to do with her feelings toward children and their physical fitness than with her philosophy of teaching, which was that nothing, not rain or hail or sleet or snow, could keep one of us from taking her class. As long as you were not comatose or in the hospital, you would be in class participating.

This also included doctors’ or parents’ notes from home. My sister once broke her finger and had to wear a splint. However, even with the requisite doctor’s note, she was later seen dribbling a ball around the court that day.

A friend down the block had asthma. Her grandmother had died from it. Yet even with a note from home, she ran around the field during spring training with the rest of us.

Here was the Marquis de Sade of physical education.

Oddly enough, no one expired from her antics, and no ambulances ever had to be called to school, either. None of the parents ever complained because they were afraid of what she might do, and no one wanted their child drafted into this woman’s version of basic training.

Not that she was alone. Another gym teacher once yelled to a portly fellow to “get rolling over here” when he didn’t come back from the field on time. Another time, my sixth-grade teacher made me put gum behind my ear when I didn’t dispose of it after repeated warnings. It stuck, and I had small sideburns for several months.

Today, none of this would have gone on, but back then most people did not question authority as they do today. None of us knew about students’ rights, and none of us felt abused. And in its own way, it was good for us.

It was good for us because we learned not to be wimps, and we learned not to blow small incidents out of proportion. We didn’t whine about our rights because the teacher didn’t talk to us like the maitre d’ in a five-star restaurant, and we didn’t try to get her fired because of it. We simply learned to tough it out.

School trained people for the real world back then. We didn’t expect preferential treatment, no one got indignant over some real or imagined slight or insult. We didn’t run to the school counselor because a teacher had yelled at us, and it would have been the rare parent who would have supported his or her child over such pettiness.

Is it a coincidence that fewer of us wound up on welfare or behind bars? Or that we didn’t ride around in gangs with guns at our sides? And no self-respecting teenage girl would have walked around pregnant and proud at 15.

We simply learned to swallow our lumps and move on.