PT: Physical Torture

The Horrors of Phys Ed

 In Primary School, no two letters could make my palms sweat and elicit a sinking feeling in my stomach like PE, Physical Education, or colloquially referred to as PT, Physical Training. However, both of those terms were inaccurate descriptions of the weekly humiliation that they entailed for me and many others. There was no education involved; the only things PE lessons "taught" me were that I did not have an athletic bone in my scrawny body, to be embarrassed of my athletic shortcomings and to come up with creative ways to avoid said public humiliation. Now that I think of it, PE should have stood for Physical Embarrassment. It was not fun. It did not make me fitter or healthier. Instead, it was a physical torture that took me years of hypnotherapy, acupuncture and PTSD (Physical Training Stress Disorder) support groups to recover from. Even now, my left eye starts twitching whenever I hear a whistle.

Our Primary School had a pool, which to an eight-year-old me looked Olympic in size and equally intimidating. The smell of chlorine made me shiver with dread, as did putting on those little black Speedoes we were forced to wear. I could swim okay but I could not dive for shit. No matter how hard I tried to keep my head down and arms straight ahead of me, I would hit the water stomach first and splutter my way to the surface, struggling to see through the burning chlorine. My attempt at the butterfly resembled a drunk white person with no rhythm trying to dance to Nkalakatha at a wedding. And the powers that be made sure that you knew your place in the swimming hierarchy, grouping us into tadpoles, fishes and dolphins. I mean, even at eight you knew what a tadpole was (the tailed aquatic larva of an amphibian, lacking legs) and what that made you. But later I realised that this was actually the best group in which to be placed. Tadpoles develop into frogs, amphibians, who can survive on land AND in water. Can fishes and dolphins do that?

I would pray for rain, hail, a plague of locusts (I was still going to Sunday School at the time) - anything that would prevent us from having to dive (in my case flop) into that menacing body of water. Some weeks my prayers were answered. Some weeks I had a sick note - and I didn't even need to fake an illness because on the day of PT I'd be serving up nausea realness. Of course, some weeks the PT lesson was moved into the hall which was filled with instruments of torture: gymnastic equipment such as ropes, rings, pommel horses. My head would tell me I needed to lift off from that springboard and over the pommel horse but my legs said "not a fuck". The same with a high jump beam. One teacher thought she was being funny when she yelled "you've got long legs, this should be easy for you!" Sorry, bitch, but we both know that it is not going to happen. A disabled giraffe had a better chance of making that jump. Straight into the pommel horse or high jump beam or hurdle I would go.

Of course every class had at least one boy, named Justin or Jason, who had failed Standard Two twice, had hair under his arms by the age of ten and was stealing "smokes" from his dad by the age elven, who LOVED PT and could not change into those little, little white shorts fast enough when the bell rang. That boy who could do twenty pull-ups and multiple somersaults without breaking a sweat - figuratively. Literally, he would be drenched with sweat after his fervent display of athletic prowess, and would proceed to spray Brut all over himself as if that would make the sweat go away. Jason or Justin would always get to pick their teams for those wonderful team games like touch rugby or dodge ball, where my goal was just to avoid the ball until the bell rescued me. Yes, I knew all about the Hunger Games long before Katniss did and the odds were never in my favour. After the best athletes had been selected, I would be left, along with the boy who needed a training bra and the boy with asthma and unfortunate ears (yes, some had it worse than me).

As we got older, I envied the girls who got a "get out of PT free" card once a month - or more if the PT teacher wasn't paying attention. "It's that time of the month" was not an excuse that I could use to avoid that week's torture although my cramps were certainly authentic. But the girls didn't always have an easy time either. Our school colours were brown and yellow and in Primary School, girls had to wear these brown broekies (there were actually checks done to ensure they were wearing the correct panties). If a girl left her PT clothes at home, the teacher would make them run around in the brown broekies as punishment (in the days before children had "rights"). These panties must have been designed and manufactured by a retired lesbian army sergeant because besides being brown, they lacked any kind of aesthetic or comfort - so I am told.

PT went away for a few years and I silently celebrated its long-overdue death. But then the Department of Education resurrected it and made it a compulsory part of Life Orientation (which has to be the biggest waste of time in the school curriculum but that's a whole other article), thereby subjecting a whole new generation of awkward and athletically-challenged minors to public humiliation. Then I saw some of these PT lessons for myself - children doing a couple of laps around the field, walking it if you feel like it, kicking a ball, a couple of star-jumps. And because they have rights, technically teachers can't force them to participate, yet the syllabus requires that they receive a mark for their participation - just one of the many paradoxes that is our current Department of Education.

The youth of today will never know the struggles of our generation and when it comes to Physical Torture, that's a good thing.