Surviving junior high PE nightmare gives confidence

Confidence in my ability to survive a global pandemic comes largely from history: I survived junior high.

Junior high school – now called middle school – is a battlefield. There's no other time in your life when you're more insecure, awkward and exposed to ridicule.

In my day, physical education classes were probably the worst. Junior high PE classes in the 1970s seem like they were led by characters from "The Tiger King."

The strangest PE class at my junior high were led by a PE and history teacher who I'll simply call "Mr. B." (Partly for anonymity, partly because his last name had a series of vowels that always made it tough for me to spell.)

Mr. B was passionate. Mr. B was intense. Mr. B loved war. In my ninth-grade history class, Mr. B had us watch the "Why We Fight" propaganda films from World War II. He talked incessantly of war. If a student dropped a pencil, Mr. B would throw himself on the pencil and pretend it was a grenade. It was amusing the first time, but got increasingly strange. The guy cared about teaching, though.

Anyway, I managed to avoid his PE class. The stories were legendary – they were like the classes the rest of us took, but crazier.

It's no surprise that Mr. B enjoyed having students (our classes were just boys) play "war," which was just dodgeball with a more violent name. But Mr. B didn't follow the normal pattern of splitting students into two groups, who threw balls at each other from opposite sides of a line. In the traditional version, if you hit someone, they come to your team. If they catch your throw, you go to their team. You play until everyone's on one side.

Mr. B had students play like they were in a war.

He would have the seventh-graders (many of whom weighed 65 pounds and still watched "Sesame Street") belly crawl across the gym floor while the ninth-graders (in my memory, most had mustaches, drove to school and worked 12-hour shifts at the local mills to support their wives and families) fired volleyballs at them.

Hard. In my memory, most ninth-graders could throw a volleyball in excess of 100 mph.

When a seventh-grader was hit, he had to yell "medic!" The previously eliminated seventh-graders would sprint out and try to drag him to safety under a hail of volleyballs from the ninth graders (assuming they weren't taking a cigarette break).

I don't know the purpose of Mr. B's plan, other than to give the ninth graders an outlet for aggression and to teach the seventh-graders their spot in the pecking order.

Here's the thing: While that seems insane in retrospect (since I never had Mr. B as a PE teacher, I don't know whether the ninth graders ever were targets, or it was just 55 minutes of firing volleyballs at little boys), it didn't seem weird at the time. It seemed like junior high.

The ninth graders at my school had their own lawn (you'd get punched if you accidentally wandered onto it). The teachers – when they weren't busy crowding into their staff room to smoke and complain about tenure – were just making sure none of us wandered off where we could do damage to the neighboring homes.

The fact that my peers survived junior high – the social part was just as terrible – makes me confident in this: We will somehow survive a global pandemic.

And if one of us gets knocked down, we can look for a bunch of seventh-graders to run out and drag us to safety under a hail of volleyballs. We will survive.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@hotmail.com.