Every year at around this time – when I’ve exhumed my sweaters from the back of the closet, returned my mittens to their rightful place on the radiator, and resumed my wintertime habit of grounding myself before petting a cat, lest the two hundred volts accumulated by my shuffling over the wall-to-wall in stocking feet spark a St. Elmo’s fireball of static that travels the length of said cat and occasions an offended “Moouuuw!” – I find myself with a slightly dislocated feeling. Six years my formal schooling ended, I still associate the passing of the seasons with the mileposts of the school year, and the first cold snap of autumn brings me back to school days – smoking cigarettes and marking copy in the hallway outside the newspaper office and wondering aloud how we’d gotten to midterms already, or piling gratefully into the warm back seat of carpool, or feeling my lungs seize up during first-period gym as we “ran” laps around the upper field. And then the nostalgia trip ends when I remember how much I loathed gym class.

I don’t dislike sports as a genre, and I don’t even dislike participating in sports and physical games, as long as the people with whom I participate can tolerate my injurious flailing. (Bunting’s First Law Of Frisbee: I can manage exactly one decent throw per Frisbee session, which will and must make contact with the face or neck of someone at whom I did not aim. Bunting’s Second Law Of Frisbee: If you would like to walk over and hand me the Frisbee, by all means do so. I will still drop it.) But I hated gym class. I hated everything about it, most especially the pointlessness inherent in forcing a bunch of kids to run around for a state-mandated thirty-two minutes three to five times a week. Evidently, the federal government viewed the fact that the United States had the highest proportion of obese and sluggardly children among developed countries as a threat to national security, but instead of classifying snack chips as a controlled substance and giving us a study hall, they put us at the mercy of closeted Cruella DeVilles with double majors in field hockey and war crimes who loved nothing more than to break our spirits with sets of squat thrusts.

The problems began, as they so often do, in the locker room. The locker room had not seen the business end of a wet mop since the days of the air-raid drill, and athlete’s foot germs seethed on every dingy surface, so we usually stood on top of our bookbags to get changed before shoehorning the bookbags into the shoebox-sized lockers on top of our school clothes. As to the horrors of actually getting changed well, suffice it to say that I got boobs before the rest of the girls. Enough said? Yes, I thought so. And the uniforms did not do any of us a single favor. Fortunately, once we reached high school, the PE department relaxed the rules to permit “appropriate athletic attire,” but prior to ninth grade, we dwelt in a circle of hell populated by ill-fitting white polo shirts with numbers on them (no, I don’t know why) and green athletic shorts born of an unholy union between mercerized cotton and sandpaper. The shorts, a retina-searing kelly green, also sported a powerful elastic that a boa constrictor would envy, and the marks from the elastic remained on our waists for the rest of the day; they didn’t fit any better than the shirts did, and while the leg holes gapped open far too immodestly, the legs themselves had absolutely no give. I could never remember to take home my gym clothes and put them in the wash except before a vacation, and every Monday I would open my locker, remember that I’d forgotten to bring the uniform home, and wince as I pulled the limp sweat-yellowed shirt and so-crusty-they-crackled socks out and prepared to put them on. In later years, I’d just pile more and more fresh t-shirts in each week until a veritable heap of laundry tumbled out by the end of the term, but in middle school, I didn’t want to risk bringing the uniform home and forgetting to bring it back, because our teachers would hand out demerits for improper attire and then make us “participate” while wearing our regular clothes anyway, and playing dodgeball sucked enough without having to do it in tights and a woolen kilt.

And the teachers. Oh God, the teachers. In all fairness, we did have a couple of reasonably cool gym teachers over the years, but for every Ms. Tizwhiz, who genuinely seemed to enjoy our company and chuckled tolerantly when we disrupted the aerobics unit by “Doin’ The Butt” a little too enthusiastically, we had a Miss Loggia, who despised us and made no secret of that fact. Why these women felt determined to punish us for their regrettable career arcs, I don’t know, but we lived in fear. Fifth grade brought with it the reign of terror of Miss Matthews, a short bemulleted blonde built like a tree trunk with a voice that could cut glass. Miss Matthews instituted the gym-class institution known as “squads,” which meant that, after we got changed and came upstairs, we had to wait for her in the smaller gym building, seated cross-legged and with backs ramrod straight in alphabetical rows of five girls each. If Miss Matthews emerged from the office to find us “horsing around,” “acting up,” or non-squad-like in any other way, yelling (her) and endless lap-taking (us) ensued. She ran us like Army recruits, too, and I’ve never seen an educator so enamored of the jumping jack as discipline tool as Miss Matthews.

Eventually, mysteriously, she started to soften up. She’d smile; she’d let us go to the playground sometimes. Maybe we’d come down with a serious case of Stockholm Syndrome, but we started to like her. We’d sit in our little squads and whisper that she must have fallen in love or something. Sure enough, she had – with Miss Loggia, and no sooner had we begun to reap the benefits of love in bloom than a student walked in on them kissing (or so we heard), and they both got the boot. The next year, we had the privilege of drawing Miss Hatteras, a.k.a. “the Mad Hatteras,” as our teacher. Miss Hatteras, one of the most singularly unpleasant human beings I’ve ever had the misfortune to encounter (and I used to work in a mall, people), had badly bleached hair sprayed into a Darth Vader-esque helmet around her head, and an overbite. She berated Red to the point of tears for having a knock-kneed gait. She called us “morons” and “brats” and “wimps.” She once told us she couldn’t stand the sight of us. I would accuse her of taking pleasure in hurting our feelings if I thought she had any feelings herself. But at least it couldn’t get any worse than Miss Hatteras, and by the time we got lumped with Miss Del Mara, “Del Moron” didn’t seem that bad. She didn’t like us either, and she blew that whistle a lot, but after our tour of duty with “Hatter Batter,” vague contempt suited us just fine.

Quite frankly, surviving the gym “unit” without breaking a bone or humiliating myself utterly concerned me a lot more than dealing with the teacher most of the time. I didn’t really like any of the units except tennis, in which I had a modicum of skill; almost every other sport-focused unit gave me problems. Basketball? No good. I could shoot from a standstill, and I could run, but shooting while running? No. Passing? No. Receiving a pass without tripping over my own ankle? Not a chance. During the softball unit, I’d endure the customary “Bunting’s gonna bunt, haw haw” jokes, only to have the ball knock the bat out of my hand. And the less said about our archery unit, the better, although at least I cured Mr. Landry, one of the history teachers, of taking that particular shortcut from the parking lot.

And then there’s gymnastics. I despised the gymnastics unit. Everyone else in the class required one, maybe two tries to get over the pommel horse, but not me. I could not get over that goddamn thing if they’d shot me out of a cannon, a course of action I suggested to Miss Hatteras, who had begun to lose what little patience she had with me after I ran around the side of the horse on the first attempt and scrambled underneath it on the second. On the third attempt, the vault shot me straight up in the air. On the fourth, I flew headfirst into the pommel instead of over it. On and on this went seasons changed presidents took office I flew off on the diagonal, or almost cleared the horse but caught a toe on the corner and landed on my face, or missed the vault and bounced off the horse. At last, Miss Hatteras ordered me to “get over the horse, Miss Bunting. I don’t care how.” I walked up to it, hiked myself up in the manner of hoisting myself out of a pool, and climbed down the other side. I got a C minus. Then we moved on to the balance beam. I spent the entire balance beam unit clinging to the underside of the beam like a sloth to a branch. “Get to the end of the beam, Miss Bunting. I don’t care how.” I crawled, upside down. Another C minus. Next up, tumbling. I thought I could eke out a B. I thought wrong. During a somersault, my hand pinned the edge of my shorts to the mat and down they came, pinning my ankles together. “Pull up your uniform shorts, Miss Bunting.” Disgraced, I accepted my C without comment (no minus this time). By the time we got to the rings, Miss Hatteras had given up; she let me spot my classmates, and I pulled another C.

A lot of girls loved the gymnastics unit; I dreaded it. A lot of girls despised the dorky girls’-school gym games we sometimes had to play, like scooter hockey (indoor field hockey played while sitting on square four-wheeled scooters, with little plastic flippers instead of sticks) and pillow polo (indoor field hockey played with large dildo-esque foam sticks and a Nerf ball); I sort of liked them, because they leveled the coordination playing field. But we all hated the Presidential fitness tests. Who cares how far the average American thirteen-year-old girl can broad jump? Who cares how fast she can run the fifty? Or the six hundred meters? And the shuttle run? God, I couldn’t stand the shuttle run. Or the flexed-arm hang. I think my all-time best on the flexed-arm hang is seven seconds. What do these things have to do with anything? Then the Presidential Commission On Fitness (a.k.a. “The Way Republican Presidents Reward Large Donors Who Have Retired From The World Of Sports And Have Nothing Else To Do”) decided that the flexed-arm hang discriminated against girls, so they made us do chin-ups like the boys. We had to start from a hanging-down position. Miss Howarth prompted me, “You can start now, Sarah.” I couldn’t get my elbows to bend even a little bit. “Sarah, you can start.” Face maroon, every muscle in my body screaming, I gritted out, “I have started.” “Well, then just pull yourself up.” “Just”? I never did a single solitary chin-up. I think one girl – a tiny thing with very little in the way of boobs to weigh her down – managed two of them. Everyone else just hung there the same way I had, teeth clenched, knuckles white, and got the same results – none – before falling to the mat and crawling away. Our teachers sadistically saved the sit-ups for last. We had to do something like fifty-five sit-ups in the space of a minute. I could usually manage thirty before losing consciousness. One girl always made it, and that one girl always threw up afterwards. What purpose did this serve? Did the President actually care how many sit-ups we could do? Would the relative fitness of the country’s youth really impress anyone at the UN? “Well, we’ve got complaints about your policy in the Middle East, but at least the average American eleven-year-old can run the fifty in six seconds”? Give me a break.

Gym class sucks. It’s Lord Of The Flies half the time and dead boring the rest of the time, and it’s not going to make the non-athletic kids athletic; it’s just going to make them bitter. The kids who want to play sports will play sports, and the kids who don’t want to play sports won’t learn to want to in gym class. The Department Of Education should seriously consider scotching PE requirements entirely, or making PE an elective and teaching activities that kids would actually consider doing in their free time, like dance, yoga, martial arts, weight-training, or rock-climbing. Exercise is a good thing, and American kids should probably do more of it, but what’s the incentive when they’ve only got rope-climbing and murderous games of kickball to look forward to?

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