Monday, August 15, 2016

Doctor's note: Avoid gymnastics activities due to concussion

I changed my major 4 times in college. I started in Business, ugh, boring and too much math. I'm not sure I remember major 2 and 3, I think Sociology and Social Work too depressing, then I ended up in Education. I liked sports and I liked to read so I chose Physical Education with a minor in English with the assumption that I would teach and also become a big time coach, probably football. American football. Possibly basketball - I imagine I would have been in the NBA by now coaching Dirk had I stuck it out.

However, that's not how it worked out. When you're majoring in PE you are required to take PE classes. Weird. I took soccer, basketball, volleyball, and other stuff - don't remember what else. I do remember having to take gymnastics. Yup. Gym-freakin-nastics. The instructor had a name like Barbie (for real that was her first name) Barnes, Brown, Barnett. I don't remember the last name but she looked like a Barbie B...I called her something else that also started with a B but that's not important. Part of the problem was that I had a huge crush on my Kinesiology professor and she was dating him, the other problem was that she wanted me to do gymnastics while in her stupid gymnastics class. What a cloosterfooken that was. So, I'm on the balance beam, the real balance beam, not a beam on the floor but the real one, just like in the Olympics. I'm on the beam, I have no idea even how I got up on the damn thing and next thing I know, I'm not on the beam anymore. Barbie's in my face asking me how I'm doing. Barbie, I just fell 30 feet off of that 1/2"  beam, how do you think I'm doing? It's possible it wasn't 30 feet tall and it's also possible it was wider than 1/2" but at the time it felt like it was tall and narrow. I ended up dropping the class that semester (had to retake it though) because I had a concussion and had to suspend my gymnastics activities for a while - suspending gymnastic activities was not something I ever thought I would hear.

Funny, I never had to teach gymnastics. Of course, after my student teaching debacle I never had to teach anything. I did my student teaching at a high school my last semester of college. It was then that I discovered I don't even like kids. The very first unit I "taught" was weight lifting. I weighed 105 soaking wet and I was teaching football boys weight lifting which should have been the beginning of my incredible coaching career but was not. I broke my thumb the first week when I dropped one of the weights directly on my thumb, my right thumb. I'm right handed. My supervising teacher was a coach, basketball coach and I might have seen him twice the entire semester. He would send one of the boys out with the attendance book and I would send it back in to him when I was finished. The person that I am now would NEVER stand for that kind of nonsense but I was too afraid to say anything to him. Even if I hadn't had a bad experience I never would have taught. I can't for the life of me imagine why I ever thought I would teach, I guess I chose that degree because underwater basket weaving wasn't an option. Of course, I would have probably cut myself while I was underwater weaving baskets, bled, and gotten eaten by a shark so that wouldn't have worked out either.

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