In the event the bureaucratese has confused you, let me break down where they’re going with graduation requirements at Manhattan High: Put simply, they’re going to get rid of a year of required gym class, and they’re going to add some other stuff. What that other stuff is not particularly relevant to this column; my subject today is that it appears that kids will be required to take a semester of gym and a semester of health class in order to graduate. Currently, the requirement is for two years of gym.
That’s fine; I don’t really want to nit-pick. I start from the assumption that educators know what they’re doing.
I do want to reflect on gym class, since I went through freshman and sophomore gym at Manhattan High when I was that age. That’s what everybody had to do.
There was something egalitarian about that, a communal experience that bound everybody together. If you were a guy and you went though Manhattan High, you had the common bond of doing 10 sets for Greg Marn as a freshman on those wood floors in the North Gym, and 10 sets for either Bill Congleton or Butch Albright as a sophomore on that oddball rubbery surface of the South Gym.
Sets? Yeah, I can tell you: 10 pushups, 10 situps, 10 squat-thrusts. That was just the warm-up. Then there was some activity — might be basketball, might be weights, might be running a mile. Basically we were Crossfit before Crossfit was cool.
(Side note: I often think, as I hear about the latest workout or weight-loss or muscle-buliding fad, that all anybody really needs to do is what they did in gym class. Go hard at something, regularly. Period.)
I can still hear the inflection in those gym teachers’ voices, counting out the reps. “Up!” You could blindfold me, put me in a sensory deprivation chamber, and I could pick out the smell of the North Gym floor, the way a shoe-squeak echoed in the South Gym. I’m willing to bet 100 percent of the people my age, regardless of where they are now, could do the same.
Whether you were a future accountant or a future NFL linebacker, that’s what you did. Everybody moaned about it, but everybody did it. In fact, the moaning about it was part of what drew everybody together. You might not hang out routinely with the theater kids, but you knew one of them because you both groaned about that tenth set on that dusty floor.
The rest of high school — and for that matter, college and the rest of our lives — is about self-segregation. You’re a jock, you’re an egghead, you’re a mean girl, you’re a goth. You took AP classes, or you took shop. I’ve got a couple classmates who only found (and eventually married) each other in recent years; they never knew each other in high school because, as she put it, she was an A Hall girl, and he was an E Hall guy.
There were — and I’m sure there still are — other common experiences: The lunchroom, the Commons during a passing period, freshman English class. But those experiences run through different filters. Gym? There’s no filter. You either do the pushups or you don’t.
Getting rid of a year — actually a year and a half — of that common experience will mean that a substantial portion of that common experience is lost. Multiply that across the state, and probably across the country, and that’s a pretty profound change.
I’m willing to defer to the wisdom of making the change. I’m just saying that there’s a cost.
