Making a case for the end of physical education in schools.

I can't do it. I've put too much pressure on myself for my 200th post. I thought about writing about the epiphany I had when I burned the mac and cheese today, but it wasn't all that profound. I thought about writing about last night when I accidentally used the "bad soap" on one of my body parts, and while I tried to un-do the damage by immediately following it with the "good soap", I am now suffering the consequences of not paying attention when I shower. But that's just too much personal information. I thought about writing about all the things that no one tells you when you become a mother - like how hard it is to breast feed when you actually have no breasts; but as I wrote that one in my head, it sounded like I was ungrateful to be a mother, and I don't feel that way at all. At least not most days. I'll save that one for later.

It's a serious case of writer's block.

So, I'm going to write about my fourth grade teacher, and we'll see where it goes. I can't say that it won't be a ten on that lame scale that I mentioned previously, but here we go anyway.

At ten years old, I was living in Layton, Utah. We moved a lot as kids, so we went to more schools than I can remember... nine or ten, maybe. I spent fourth grade at Sarah Jane Adams Elementary with the world's oldest teacher. From my youthful perspective, she was on the verge of death and I couldn't understand why she was still working and not drooling in a nursing home somewhere. Her name was Mrs. Anderson. She wore a muu muu every day, she had short, gray, curly hair, and a raspy voice. And though she looked the part of a grandmother, I don't recall ever seeing a cookie in our classroom.

Utah education was different back then. When we moved from Utah to another state, we were always a tad below their grade level, but when we returned to Utah, we were way beyond what the other kids our age were doing. Make of that what you will, but I'm going to go ahead and assume that there were budget issues. Is that a decent excuse? Anyway, at Sarah Jane Adams Elementary, there were no music or physical education teachers, so those subjects were left to be taught by our regular teachers. Mrs. Anderson would pass out the recorders once a week and we would all practice playing Pop Goes The Weasel into the mouthpiece of an instrument that had been used by a different kid the week before. It wasn't my favorite subject.

Worse than music class was P.E. You might think that a nearly-dead fourth grade teacher wearing a muu muu would glaze over the teaching of sports and health, but you'd be wrong. Every day that there was no snow on the ground, Mrs. Anderson would don her whistle on a rope, grab a playground ball and herd her class out to the baseball field where we played kickball, like it or not. Always kickball.

I have never been the athletic type. I don't know the rules of most sports, and I don't want to. P.E. class was the bane of my existence from third grade until I could finally opt for other courses my junior year in high school. The best I could do was to try to avoid participation and therein not cause injury to myself or others. I used every excuse in the book to get out of class, including menstruation, my bunions, and a wart on my big toe that had recently suffered freezing via liquid nitrogen or some other painful chemical. On the days that I could not avoid "dressing down" and playing their ridiculous games, I inevitably made a fool of myself by attempting to keep my gangley limbs from spazzing out and killing anyone.

Back to Mrs. Anderson's fourth grade kickball sessions. So every day we'd line up and be counted off into teams. One, two, one, two, one, two... We had all figured out that we needed to stand one person away from our friends in order to be on the same team. (Utah education couldn't have been that bad if we were smart enough to figure out those important things.)

Once we got separated, Mrs. Anderson would blow her whistle and yell, "Play ball!" with the energetic voice of a woman a third her age. And play ball we did. When my team was in the outfield, I knew well enough to get out of the way when the ball was headed for me and let the boys catch it and throw it to whatever base they felt was best. And when my team was doing the kicking, I knew to quickly get to the end of the line as soon as I had flung my leg out and missed the ball entirely, so as to not waste valuable playing time, or prolong my own embarrassment. Whenever someone did kick the ball into play, Mrs. Anderson would croak out, "Run like mad!!! RUN LIKE MAD!!!" It was a little bit scary, to be honest. She was an entirely different woman when ruling the kickball field. She moved more sharply, growled a bit more and surely would have bitten anyone who interrupted the game to ask her how long until the bell rang, or why she never brought cookies to class. "Run like MAD!" I was confused as to what she meant by that. Run like you're angry? Run like a crazy person escaping from the loony bin? Run really fast? I was glad I never had to worry about how to run like mad properly, because my foot never made contact with the ball.

There was one afternoon in spring, when we had again spent part of our afternoon on the baseball field with our classroom kickball. My friends and I were headed back to the school building with our classmates, and we were celebrating our victory as members of the winning team. Yes, we had contributed by successfully staying out of the way. My friend, Ashley, tossed her arms out to the side, yelled, "We won!", and spun in a circle. One of her outstretched arms hit me across the face, and thanks to the dry Utah climate, my nose sprayed blood so far that the bricks on one whole side of the school had to be pressure washed. I lost so much blood that I was sure I was going to die, or at least get to go home early. I clamped my nose shut as best I could and hurried back into the classroom with crazy Mrs. Anderson. She instantly became more maternal when we were indoors. She helped me to clean up my hands, face, arms and legs, all of which were streaked with my life's essence. My new, neon birthday dress was a total loss though. One less piece of neon to brighten the world.

Apparently there was cause for concern beyond my ruined birthday dress, because my mother was called, and when she arrived, Mrs. Anderson took me out into the hallway where she and my mother studied my nose for what felt like hours. They were trying to determine whether the bump in the bridge of my nose had always been there, or if Ashley had broken my nose with her arm swinging and caused this bump.

Wouldn't you think that my mother would quickly be able to tell Mrs. Anderson which was the case? I stood there, feeling unloved and unnoticed because there was so much discussion and debate involved in trying to decide if my nose was hideous due to genetics or physical assault. "I think it's always been like that," were my mothers kind words.

I would like to take this opportunity to say that I believe the opposite. I believe that my nose was not disfigured prior to the kickball celebration incident. I will stand by that unless someone can prove to me that I'm wrong. I blame kickball for the below picture.

The bump. Go ahead and click on this picture to see a close up of my greasy pores. Unless you're eating, and then I wouldn't recommend it.

Pre-kickball photo, with cute, straight nose.

Glasses worn during fourth grade, which sit right at the spot where I now display my bump. I suppose the glasses could be as much to blame as kickball. By the way, you can't tell me that those aren't some stylin' frames.