Recently I came across a copy of my old high school transcript – and wow, was I ever shocked!

I am not an athlete. I never had any desire to be an athlete, either. In particular, I don’t have much use for team sports. They always bored me. You have the ball, you throw the ball to someone else, and then you have to get the ball back? Please! I’d rather sit in history Class and actually learn something than put up with nonsense like this. I did like individual or fitness sports like track or slimnastics, but even with those I wasn’t exactly the class star.

And as it turns out, there’s a phyical reason affecting all of this. My feet don’t just have low arches. My arches are almost nonexistent.

This might have been enough to get me out of the Army had I ever been drafted, which of course I wasn’t, but it wasn’t much good in Gym Class. Jumping around just wasn’t my thing. I’m lucky I didn’t break something.

However, during the time I spent at my wonderful high school, Scotch Plains-Fanwood High in New Jersey, I only missed maybe four days of school in three whole years. I was always getting a nice letter from the principal at the end of the year congratulating me on my excellent attendance record, since there were lots of other kids who played hooky or cut class regularly, and they were a problem.

I did not like gym class, but hey, I went. I never, ever cut a class in the three years I was at the high school. Not even a gym class, though putting up with it was a misery.

Still, I showed up. I wore the required gym class dress code. I didn’t love it, but I was always there.

So when I found my high school transcript, I was in shock to see that I had been given letter grades in gym. That they counted as part of my Grade point average. What?!! And that all those awful grades I’d received in gym class had brought my grade point average down to an embarrassingly horrible level!

Ladies and gentlemen, this is wrong! This is dead wrong! This is grading kids, first and foremost, on the genetic hand they’ve been dealt! I would even go so far as to say it’s a form of discrimination.

It brought to mind another gym class I had been in, years before high school, in the seventh grade at St. Bart’s, where I couldn’t do some kind of a jump for a fitness test. Good God, how the teacher yelled and yelled at me! I believe it was some test where you had to jump five feet forward or something, and they measured it. They actually measured the kids’ jumps.

Well, I couldn’t jump the full five feet. I only made it as far as, I don’t remember just what it was, probably something like four feet seven inches or whatever. I tried and tried. I fell short. I just couldn’t get there. It wasn’t for lack of trying.

I can still remember how the teacher railed on about how “horrible” I was just for not being able to do this useless stunt. If I could have pulled it off, I would have, if only to shut her up.

Getting back to the situation that existed later at Scotch Plains-Fanwood High School, I believe that affecting the grade point averages of smart, decent students who just don’t happen to have been born with the wonderful physical or muscular structure of, say, a Simone Biles is absolutely outrageous. Kids can try, they can persist, they can work at it, but take it from me, if they have something like bad arches, folks, then they have bad arches – period. It’s going to affect their gym performance. That’s not about their attitude or motivation. It just is what it is.

Gym classes should be Pass or Fail. They shouldn’t bring down a student’s average. It’s outrageous such nonsenes was ever allowed, and I hope it’s no longer the case at SPFHS.

As for the sort of adults who need to make careers out of sitting there measuring kids’ jumps, or judging their cartwheels, or rating their ability to kick a ball, and yell, scream or downgrade them if they find them in any way lacking, well, don’t even get me started on what I think of that. But here’s a hint. I’m filing this blog post under the category of “Corruption.” :-). May they take a nice flying leap over that!