Green Shorts

Since the Olympics are winding down and in a rare feat, an American lady won a medal in weight lifting, and since school is about to start, here’s one high school memory that I don’t mind sharing.There’s no Civil War link this week.

Green shorts at Longview High School were a questionable status symbol because athletes didn’t earn them. Athletes earned letter jackets.

Green shorts were earned in physical education class and were the prize I most yearned for in the spring of 1967.  Green shorts were awarded to those who earned an A+ on the six-weeks test in PE class. Everyone else wore white shorts.

The test was the same each six weeks:  In one class period complete 80 sit-ups in two minutes, 60 squat-thrusts in one minute. Do 40 push-ups, and 20 chin-ups.  No modifications, no grading curve. Six weeks to prepare for one hour of testing.

Coach told us about green shorts on the first day of school and I imagined my chances of going to the moon were just as good as my earning them. Sure enough, for a year my efforts landed shy of “green short” status, although I was morphing from a soft dumpling boy into a semi-dumpling.

During my senior year, I signed up for PE again, just to earn those damned shorts. For five grading periods, five tests, I kept my grade at an A, but couldn’t quite reach the trophy standard for sit-ups and chin-ups.

Finally, I had one last six-week test to reach the green short standard. If I was going to join the elite, and wear shorts of honor in class, they had to be earned during the next test.

With determination, I managed to top out on all the tests but the chin-ups, and they were last. I had never done 20 of them without dropping off the bar.  On that test day I did 18.

I had done the math many times, so I knew I had earned a 97.5 and had missed the mark again. I was in the locker room pulling off my gym clothes when Coach called me.  I went, dejected, until he handed me a pair of green shorts. “Glad you made it, Mac.”

I smiled as I clutched the green prize, yet I know my eyes still said, “Nah, Coach, I missed it by one chin-up.” 

I wish this story had ended there, but sure enough, a few minutes later, Coach came over to my locker, and contritely said, “Sorry, Phil, I was wrong. You needed one more chin-up,” as he held out his hand for the green shorts.

I wore white gym shorts in PE the rest of the year. The sky didn’t fall, and no one called the principal to complain that the teacher’s mistake shouldn’t have been corrected at my expense. No one suggested I be given another test.  No one suggested that Coach fudge the grade to protect my self-esteem.

I’ve never forgotten that I missed the mark on my last shot at the green shorts, but I also know I was treated fairly, and I know that I had not done all I could to prepare for the last test. I hadn’t coasted, but I hadn’t done extra chins every day either.

Over the years, as a career educator, I’ve had occasion to talk to many teachers about what qualities are shared by the best teachers. I never hesitated to identify my PE teacher as the best I had.  My choice often irritated “academic” folks, until I told them the story of the green shorts. While that personal tale of my near-miss would simply garner sympathy from some, others “got it.”

 

They got that Coach had done a lot of things right. Coach had laid out his learning expectations on the first day of class. Coach had clearly and concisely told us how we were going to be tested and graded on the curriculum.  Coach spent a substantial portion of every class period preparing us for the test. Coach enriched the curriculum with games and sports, but always focused on his primary goal of developing our personal fitness.

Coach didn’t inflate grades or give easy “extra credit” assignments. Finally, perhaps most importantly, Coach was honest with me, admitted his math error, and didn’t let me walk away with a coveted prize “almost” earned

In August of 1997, thirty years after I missed the green shorts, my neighbor convinced me to go to the new gym in town and try weight lifting with him, I’m still going. Yes, there is a chinning bar in Mike’s gym. It doesn’t haunt me or tempt me. Too much.    

     

Punishments Now and Then

As a fourteen-year-old ninth grader in the 1960’s, only once did I go through the indignity of being told to bend over so a man teacher could swing a wooden paddle and bust the hell out of my rear-end. It hurt. It likely hurt so much I kept my smart-aleck mouth zipped more often in class.

I was an assistant principal at two Dallas high schools in the ‘70’s when corporal punishment was an acceptable and expected form of discipline. I swung the paddle.  When I was principal of the high school in Lockhart in the ‘80’s, we kept paddling as an option in our quiver of disciplinary arrows, but used the board less and less as the years passed. 

I expect that by now, 25 years later, the paddle is an extinct dinosaur in public schools. Having received and given “licks,” or more delicately “swats,” I’m glad corporal punishment is gone. My experience was that “spare the rod and spoil the child” is wrong. 

Sure, the “rod,” or paddle, worked with some kids, like me. But a phone call to my mother would have worked just as well.  As a school principal, I found that the paddle more often simply hardened a child towards adults and school.

I’ve wanted to say that to someone for quite a while, but I’m uncomfortable enough in my history of participation in school paddling, that I’ve remained silent about it until now. Those memories are not of my best work as a principal.

Having said that, I admit to silently wishing I could use a B-B gun to sting the occasional jerk at the top of the gym bleachers who would decide not to stand during the Pledge of Allegiance at football pep rallies.

The armies of the 19^th century had no such qualms about applying the rod, or the lash, or the red-hot branding iron, as means of disciplining soldiers. 

They also did indeed shoot deserters to death on occasion as a deterrent to other home-sick and war-weary soldiers.

In the first two Captain McBee Civil War novels, I didn’t include the punishment of a soldier in the plot, but just last week the storyline of Defiant Honor prompted me to choose among several punishments routinely doled out for “minor” misbehaviors.

In 2016 we blanch, as we should, at the cruelty of the punishments in the armies’ quivers of discipline options. Suffice to say, times were different and harder.

Consider these well-documented punishments:

Should I “buck and gag” James Fisher, the private who incurred the ire of his company commander? That means tying up the soldier like a roasting chicken going on the spit, with arms bound over his bent knees and a rag stuffed in his mouth.

Or have him stand on a stump wearing a sign all day? 

Or put a barrel over him and parade him around the camp for hours?

Or should I make his infraction serious enough to tie him to wagon wheel and use a whip to lash his back up to 39 times, drawing blood with each stroke? 

Or brand his cheek with a letter, forever publicly designating his sin to all who see him?

Since Fisher’s infraction wasn’t too serious, I chose to have him “ride the rail” from dawn until dusk. You can see the period drawing of that particular punishment and see an actual Civil War photo of two soldiers straddling a split rail as punishment.

Note the large wooden “toy” sword held by the man on the rail in the drawing. It would have been really heavy and added to his ever-increasing pain as he endured the weight of it on his shoulders for hour after hour.

Interestingly to me, both the drawing and the photo image were done during the 1864 siege of Petersburg, Virginia, the same setting as in Defiant Honor where I needed to punish a soldier. It was during the long hot summer when both armies were manning earthworks with little activity, but lots of discomfort and boredom. Day after day, week after week, of living in a sweltering smelly dusty ditch, elbow-to-elbow with other soldiers, always with the danger of a sniper shooting you if you raised your head too high. Just the sort of situation when young men screw up.

If any of you readers are modern veterans and care to tell the rest of us how military discipline was-is administered in the  20^th and 21^st centuries, I urge you to offer a comment.