The worst school subject

[Gift2humanity]

I didn't so much hate PE as I hated the way it was taught.

When I was young, PE served two purposes. One was extra training for the kids who were good at stuff and maybe would play on the school's teams. The other was to prepare us for boot camp. Most of us could count on being drafted and many of us could count on being sent to war. That's just how it was in the 60s, with Vietnam looming. PE was a little boot camp with formations and drills followed by practice in whatever sport was in season.

I was no good at all at any sport requiring proprioception, muscle memory, or eye-hand coordination. I wasn't wired for it. If someone had taken the time, I could have grown from a horrible athlete to an adequate athlete. Just a few minutes off to the side every few days would have done it but PE was really focused on the top 1/3 and the rest of us were along for the ride. Always being picked last, the disgust of the other students for having you on their team, ridicule by the coaches, all these things wear on you.

I could have been good at strength-based sports or track and field but I lacked any enthusiasm after being knoocked down for so long. Just a little encouragement would have done it but it wasn't the purpose of PE to lift the poor performer but to enhance the already good performer. Ah well.

Then we got into the locker room for mandatory nude showers. Yet another prep for the military. (This was long before the internet, tiny digital cameras, and pedophelia fears. Same sex social nudity didn't strike fear into anyone.) I wasn't circumcised - the only uncut person any of them had ever seen. None of them had even heard of the term and thought penises were naturally circumcised. More teasing and ridicule, just what I needed.

Solved that by retracting my foreskin and suddenly I looked "normal." But that meant other issues "came up" if I wasn't quick about that shower.

By the time my daughter got to high school, PE didn't really exist. The instructor had no real training for it. Classes were coed, showers were forbidden (nude or clothed) and no sports. All they did was kick or throw a ball around if they felt like it and walk around the track if they didn't. Gone from one extreme to the other.

I know what you mean about the way it was taught.
In our school if you were good at it you got attention, if you weren't you got ignored, whereas in art, the art teacher gave equal attention to all kids.

I am a little younger than you late 70's early 80's.

I am no good at all at any sport requiring proprioception, muscle memory, or eye-hand coordination either. Some espies aren't wired for it, others who are may have poor fine motor skills, like an excellent hockey player who can't tie her boots fast enough and gets taunted by other team members.

I do know what you mean about the talented kids getting attention, it was in our school because they got in the teams and the schools had some kind of leagues so the not so sporty kids got cast aside.

I was always being picked last, yeah teachers weren't that great to me, except Mrs A who treated me like a human. One who ridiculed me said I always try on my report only because I craved to be good at it instead of nurturing my art.

Sorry about the track and field events.True, it wasn't the purpose of PE to lift the poor performer but to enhance the already good performer.

Oh the mandatory nude showers. Sorry you went through penis shame enough to adjust your anatomy.

PE should be enjoyable, the poor performers together exercising then they get the purpose of it, not the competitiveness ego driven thing just the chance to burn off energy.

 

[Au Naturel]

I know what you mean about the way it was taught.
In our school if you were good at it you got attention, if you weren't you got ignored, whereas in art, the art teacher gave equal attention to all kids.

I am a little younger than you late 70's early 80's.

I am no good at all at any sport requiring proprioception, muscle memory, or eye-hand coordination either. Some espies aren't wired for it, others who are may have poor fine motor skills, like an excellent hockey player who can't tie her boots fast enough and gets taunted by other team members.

I do know what you mean about the talented kids getting attention, it was in our school because they got in the teams and the schools had some kind of leagues so the not so sporty kids got cast aside.

I was always being picked last, yeah teachers weren't that great to me, except Mrs A who treated me like a human. One who ridiculed me said I always try on my report only because I craved to be good at it instead of nurturing my art.

Sorry about the track and field events.True, it wasn't the purpose of PE to lift the poor performer but to enhance the already good performer.

Oh the mandatory nude showers. Sorry you went through penis shame enough to adjust your anatomy.

PE should be enjoyable, the poor performers together exercising then they get the purpose of it, not the competitiveness ego driven thing just the chance to burn off energy.

The only teachers who ever had any use for me were English lit and the soft sciences, like sociology and psych. They appreciated my "deep thinking." Even the science teachers wanted little to do with me. Science and math were being taught thru rote memorization of lists and formulae and not on understanding principles. I scored well on tests but didn't fit into that methodology.

I don't think I ever felt penis "shame." I thought it was a perfectly good penis that did everything I'd ever asked it to do. I understood about circumcision and the cultural factors around it. Not because I was taught anything useful by my parents (They never mentioned it - or anything at all about sex.) but rather because I had an insatiable curiosity and I had the ability to find information about things that were obscure or even forbidden.

It was more of how ignorant the others were and how viciously they visited their ignorance on me. I thought of "adjusting my anatomy" as a matter of protective coloration, like a chameleon turning green in the forest so as not to stand out.

I never did and still don't advocate for the elimination of group showers. Just a bit of practical sex education would have saved me more than a bit of embarrassment. Maybe I'll start a thread on the importance of sex ed.

 

[Streetwise]

I know what you mean about the way it was taught.
In our school if you were good at it you got attention, if you weren't you got ignored, whereas in art, the art teacher gave equal attention to all kids.

I am a little younger than you late 70's early 80's.

I am no good at all at any sport requiring proprioception, muscle memory, or eye-hand coordination either. Some espies aren't wired for it, others who are may have poor fine motor skills, like an excellent hockey player who can't tie her boots fast enough and gets taunted by other team members.

I do know what you mean about the talented kids getting attention, it was in our school because they got in the teams and the schools had some kind of leagues so the not so sporty kids got cast aside.

I was always being picked last, yeah teachers weren't that great to me, except Mrs A who treated me like a human. One who ridiculed me said I always try on my report only because I craved to be good at it instead of nurturing my art.

Sorry about the track and field events.True, it wasn't the purpose of PE to lift the poor performer but to enhance the already good performer.

Oh the mandatory nude showers. Sorry you went through penis shame enough to adjust your anatomy.

PE should be enjoyable, the poor performers together exercising then they get the purpose of it, not the competitiveness ego driven thing just the chance to burn off energy.

Our teachers were lesbian and leered at us, I never took my clothes off without something on the closest layer to my bare skin,we were punished but apparently a male and female teacher were sacked ,we learned a long time later, but always immediate punishment for us .

 

[Crossbreed]

Yeah it's common for Aspies to hate PE, I've heard we hated team games I was no exception, I felt inadequate as we didnt know AS then.

I liked PE when it wasn't a team sport, like [low] hurdles (I was in cross-country), archery & wrestling, but it never felt like a bona fide academic class.

In elementary school, I was good at dodging in dodgeball, but not so good at throwing.

...to develop Osgood-Schlatter disease.

I had that, too.

 

[Anaaewp]

Took full advantage of the fact that I had asthma as a child to never do PE because I HATED it with a passion. I was sorta bad in math, but only because I get distracted easily and changed the order of the numbers, luckily my teachers realised it and one of them would even give me extra points so I wouldn't fail. I'm actually good at it now (basic at least, it's not my area after all) and I think it's fun. I actually didn't like chemistry and biology, but was never bad at it.

 

[Metalhead]

I hated American history, but that had everything to do with my high school history teacher. He was a massively narcissistic piece of work who took pleasure in singling out students who answered his questions wrong and humiliating them. I never personally faced his wrath, but it was painful to watch him do it to my fellow classmates.

I also hated my high school biology teacher for bringing out jars of aborted fetuses to guilt the entire classroom into his pro life message - that was revolting and most of the classroom saw right through it.

I also did not like my high school English teacher, who tried to discourage me from reading Salman Rushdie because she assumed that his novels would be too challenging for me. Her assistant also thought Salman Rushdie was a very evil man who deserved the price on his head. She made assumptions like that about all her students, so I did not take it personally.

Hell, my high school experience totally sucked all the way around. It wasn't until I started a couple of years of college that I started to enjoy school period. The college I went to had teachers that upheld professional standards, and I did not have to worry about bullying at my college because it seemed like every student there had already moved past that stage of their lives. It's amazing how people who start to earn their own way become more respectful of others in the process.

 

[Dadamen]

Luckily we never did volleyball I just know I would have been terrible.

We did a lot of volleyball in primary school and it was terrible. I feel extremely lucky now that we have a good teacher in high school. We have a P.E. as a last lesson on fridays and then he lets us to go home. But have that typical aspie thing that I'm bad at ALL team sports. I also run and jump badly.

All this disdain for history, sociology, poli sci, etc. I don't understand.

I liked history in primary school, but now we have an awful teacher. Sociology teacher is also boring. In sociology test she placed us a thing that we didn't mention on lesson.

We are not suited to mainstream school. I know I was maladjusted because of choosing to be naughty but aspies should be in schools that are more friendly to their needs.

Don't know for others, but I wouldn't choose to go to special school despite my struggles. My marks are mostly good, but I want to have all A-s (5 in my country), so i find annoying when I study for hours and than get a 4 or 3 (B or C) from a test. I don't go out as my classmates do, but there is one more guy that dosen't go out, so then it's easier for me. Waiting next year and a half to pass and then I'm done with that high school and hope to study medicine.

 

[Dadamen]

https://www.appliedbehavioranalysisedu.org/5-top-athletes-on-the-autism-spectrum/
Of 5 athletes with ASD only one is in team sports.

 

[Kalinychta]

American history. Sooooooooooo boring. I loved European history, though. But oh dear god, P.E. I hated P.E., too.

 

[Jorg]

Language (spanish)/literature, I just hated to classify poems by structure, words, ir they were past tense, present tense, etc. I once had an exam that was all about classifying or making sentences in every time available, I didn't study because I thought maybe there was going to be a section about a book and nope, I got like a score 20/100 and I had to repeat that year (back then, where I live if you lost a class you had to repeat the whole year including the courses you have passed/won).

Ironically, I like to read a lot and write.

Chemistry in highschool was a nightmare, I really don't know how did I pass, well, the professor was really easy, but the subjects and the class were horrible, not even in university I ever saw the kind of chemistry I learned in high school. But as I said the professor was easy, a guy once gift him something similar to moonshine but made from corn XD.

 

[LadyS]

Comforting to know my top two worst subjects have the higher percentages . P.E. was and will always be the worst. Foreign languages have always been difficult even though I grew up in a bilingual environment. I excelled in all other subjects, but for some reason physics was the toughest concept for me to grasp, especially in college. I think it was just too many variables to consider and figuring out how they work together that throws me off.

 

[SchrodingersMeerkat]

Literature...Having to answer questions on what the author was thinking. Second hated was music. When in public school, every teacher was mean and nasty to me. When homeschooled, it was just boring. My public school art teacher was mean and nasty too but since I did art on my own when being homeschooled it was treated as extra circular... Favorite subjects? Biology, Biblical studies, algebra.

 

[Dadamen]

Literature...Having to answer questions on what the author was thinking. Second hated was music. When in public school, every teacher was mean and nasty to me. When homeschooled, it was just boring. My public school art teacher was mean and nasty too but since I did art on my own when being homeschooled it was treated as extra circular... Favorite subjects? Biology, Biblical studies, algebra.

Yes, literature is awful. I also hated music, but don't have it any more. We had to go to opera and write a rewiew, but then covid emerged and everything closed and then no opera and no rewiew. Art lessons were fun in two years of high school art. Sometimes we played pictionary instead of learning about history of art.

 

[GrownupGirl]

In elementary school my only true weakness was math, possibly due to my undiagnosed dyscalculia, although I had so many problems in phys. ed that I remember being excused from class to have a therapist watch how I played a game of hopscotch or caught a ball. Of course it's easier where you don't have to worry that one little mistake will have the entire class screaming laughing at you.

And then when I got to junior high social studies became my next worst subject. All kinds of super boring Canadian political nonsense about names and dates and places I can't remember. And then eventually nearly all my grades were bad except for math because that was the only subject where I had the privilege of having a private teacher instead of being in a class full of idiot kids and other distractions.

 

[BoltzmannBrain17]

I'm pretty bad at most academic stuff except math. At the moment I have an F in P.E, an F in English, a D in American government and a B+ in AP Calculus BC.

 

[Dadamen]

The survey results are similar to NTs except P.E. that is liked in NTs but disliked in ASD. To me maths is easy, but computer science is really difficult.