as small as a world and as large as alone

1:12am August 4, 2015

karalianne:

madeofpatterns:

fierceawakening:

newvagabond:

I thought it was good that they encouraged us to be physically active in school but I feel like PE teachers were way too hard on everyone. Once a week we had a whole PE period just for running and my teacher told me that it didn’t matter if I had chronic bronchitis (I was sick like, every few months, I even had walking pneumonia once), I still would be graded on how many laps I could run in one hour, which wasn’t many. If we walked, we got yelled at and would get points taken off our grade. I even failed a semester of aerobics in highschool because I had a nasty ovarian cyst, even though I had doctor’s notes and everything. :T What was up with PE class, man.

I don’t know about anyone else’s, but I’m pretty sure what was up with mine was “pointless ableist nonsense.”

Yours too it sounds like.

i got in trouble for ~not trying~ when I was asked to do demonstrably physically impossible things

I hated Phys.Ed. class. Only class in school I got a D in regularly. You weren’t just marked for trying, you were marked on how well you did. Which absolutely favours people who are coordinated and good at sports and penalizes anyone who’s bad at these things.

Also, I am afraid of things flying through the air at my head thanks to two incidents with basket balls in grade eight. I don’t think the boys responsible even got in trouble, and I needed new glasses after the first one.

My gym teachers were so out of touch with reality that they actually claimed I wasn’t flexible enough.  I’m hypermobile.  However, my arms are not proportional to the rest of my body at all.  So their one flexibility test, I routinely failed.  Not because I was bending less than anyone else, but because my arms were too short to reach as far as anyone else.  Even measuring my arms against my height, which is very simple to do, could have shown them what the problem was, instantly.  But instead they recommended that I do all these stretching exercises to become even more flexible than I already was.

I could put my feet behind my head, flexibility was hardly a problem area for me, or rather it was a problem area but because I was too flexible.  I actually told them that my mother was too flexible, because I knew she’d been diagnosed with hypermobility at one point, or something related to it.  And they told me, “There’s no such thing as too flexible.”  They actually said that.  Hypermobility comes with a huge list of medical problems including potentially a reduced range of motion later in life from joint damage.  But apparently to  most gym teachers, there’s no such thing as too much of a good thing.

Oh also, I had a few teachers over the years who clearly wanted to be gym coaches, or who actually were gym coaches in addition to the subjects they teached.  Invariably these were the same classes where I was subject to all kinds of ableist bullying beyond the usual, often instigated by the teacher.  In two of those classes, the teachers even listed me as “having a great sense of humor” on my report card – which was a twisted way of saying “Mel is the butt of all my jokes and I like making the class laugh at hir, so I’ll say sie has a great sense of humor even though actually sie breaks down crying sometimes”. 

And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the same teachers who did that were always the ones who made it very clear that they wanted to be (or, in fact, were, in addition to teaching their regular subject) teaching gym class.  Because there’s a very particular way that the worst of gym teachers look upon disabled students (whether diagnosed with a disability officially, or just everyone knows unofficially that this person is “different”, and treats them accordingly).  And these teachers do that even when they’re not actually teaching gym class at that moment.

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