![]() ![]() I wasn't the sportiest kid around, but I did the typical soccer, basketball, softball rotation every year. In sixth grade I made it to 27 while some poor unfortunate soul (Hi Brooke Daskin) had 23. For the rest of the year kids would crack jokes like "hey, I didn't see you there, you should really SIT UP" or repeatedly find ways to get the number nine in a conversation. Thus, when it came time to do as many sit ups as possible in a minute, I did 9. However, that normal was really just being out of shape as fuck. I was not fat, nor skinny, but kind of normal. ![]() First year we had to do it was fifth grade. people were so humiliated having to exercise in front of their classmates they actually spent years not exercising because of the bad memories: Not exactly the outcome I was hoping for. ummm, might need to lay off the burritos and run some, okay?" with a disgusted look on her face. She then looks me straight in the eyes and tells me, "wow. My partner asked me, "Do you have asthma?" to which I managed to stammer out a "no". I went next, and around 20, I was tomato-red in the face, sweating buckets, and panting like a dog in a sauna on the sun. So I was partnered with the girl I'd had a crush on for like 2 years for the sit-up portion. On the sit-up, somebody was closely examining your failure: You could be slow on the mile run, but everybody else was running too, so they weren't all watching you. sit-up portion required monitoring by another classmate. People of the opposite gender would find you gross, the cool kids would know you were uncool. It was the fact that everybody in your class saw you trying to exercise and saw how bad you were at it and knowing they had the image in their heads of how out-of-shape and bad you were and knowing that this image of your failure would resonate in their heads every time they thought of you. The worst part of the Fitness Test for an out-of-shape kid wasn't the actual exercise. (Feel free to add more in the comments.) It seems the vast majority of Presidential Fitness Test experiences fall into a few important categories. We asked people on Twitter to share their memories of the event. For the kids the test really needed to reach, it was a failure. Instead of encouraging these kids to reach for attainable goals, it made physical fitness seem like a farway milestone. It made them associate exercise with failure. It forced unathletic kids to try and fail to be athletic in front of their classmates, generally leading to humiliation. The idea was to motivate kids to get in shape to earn the rewards, and perhaps for the 15-20 percent of kids on the verge of receiving that award, it worked.īut for the rest of us, it was dreadful. If a student placed in the top 15th percentile in every category, they received the Presidential Fitness Award. The challenge asked students to undergo a series of tests in various physical activities. The Presidential Fitness Challenge was first started in 1966 under Lyndon Johnson, with the premise being that American kids weren't in shape. Like every other schoolchild in America, I took the Presidential Fitness Test when I was a kid, and like, oh, 50 percent of those ex-schoolchildren, my memories were traumatizing. The news was a bit old - President Obama replaced the program in 2012 - but seeing as I am not a child in PE class, I was unaware of it until now. I recently found out that the Presidential Fitness Test was dead. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |