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Recently, a high school student with a high ACES score talked to me about her Physical Education class. She told me she hates gym because all they do is play dodgeball. While I'm sure there is some hyperbole in her account, I do wonder what alternatives she has? This student is one with sometimes crippling levels of anxiety and memories of physical and sexual abuse from large groups of people at her home.

Does anyone know of gym classes doing any particularly trauma informed work in their schools?

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We have begun to recognize PE as one of the classes where students with high ACES scores are anxious and uncomfortable. Our alternative is to allow the student to work on the WII fit program in an alternate setting- they are  allowed to bring a friend too. On days where the weather cooperates we have a walking activity the students may select. 

I was 'reminded' of some memories in my high school PE/Swimming class, where we [males only class] swam nude, in a closed sub-ground floor pool at our high school] at that time, but the PE teacher who carried a masonite clipboard [to sometimes hit the bare/wet buttocks, presumably for 'disciplinary' purposes], ... although I am grateful to the classmate who 'hauled' me out of the pool, on that one occasion I got a stomach cramp...and massaged the cramp away on the pool 'deck'...

My maternal grandfather, who was possibly cultured by the [german] 'Parenting Manuals' which Swiss psychologist Alice Miller noted [the barbarity of] in her book, had 'thrown' [by herself] my mother off a low bridge into a small bay [in the 'Bavarian tradition'] when she was about three years old-ostensibly to teach her to swim. My mother learned and later taught 'swimming' by 'the Red Cross method', both at a girl's summer camp, as a teen, and later in which she accompanied and held up young children like my sister and I, and neighborhood kids, who came to the [swimming hole] pond in our semi-rural suburban neighborhood. Apparently, the American Red Cross did not subscribe to the 'Bavarian tradition'...

Last edited by Robert Olcott

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