Burnley Grammar School

Naked swims at school.

Can you just imagine in such a swim class being the one big fat overweight boy among a set of fitter slimmer and regular shaped boys. That would be so unkind wouldn't it.

Comment by Geoffrey.

A good point and I think this site might just illustrate quite effectively that British attitude to our bodies being on display.

Tony, You make a good point about comparing attitudes in different countries. It would be interesting to know whether there are folk in Scandinavia, northern Europe, France and so on, who read this discussion and chuckle at how hot and bothered the British get over nudity.

If someone from elsewhere or who went to school elsewhere has something worthwhile to say I don't see why they should be put off from commenting about those experiences. For example, didn't the PE teacher Graham who hasn't posted here for a while actually say that he had also worked as a teacher in both Canada and France or something like that, as well as back here at home. I think so. It's quite interesting to compare our own country to others I feel. Often it's so similar actually.

When you look at what Paula said, mentioning less than a thousand schools, that's not many across a country as large as the USA is it.

Comment by: Chris G on 15th April 2024 at 21:39


"I'm not sure where the Catholic School swimming connection comes from, but I think our trans-Atlantic cousins should be aware that this site is dedicated to British history and, that to a certain extent, what happens (or might have happened in someone's imagination) in America stays in America....."

Could I just point out, Chris, in Paula's defence, that in the past, though this is a British site, people have posted film clips from Russia, Poland, even the Middle East to justify bare chested P.E.

Your school sounds the sort of place that I would have been happier in, though as I am not a Catholic it would have been a bit difficult for me to get into it..

I think in the past generalised non sexual group naked bodies were far more common than people nowadays appear to realise and this was not looked on as remarkable as it now is. The 1990's are not really that long ago at all and all my three sons were at school at some point during that decade and all of them experienced routine and weekly school group nudity which didn't present many problems and I saw no problem with it. I agree with the previous comment that said there are significant differences in the kind of activities one does, and although I have no issue with my own sons having been told to shower properly after school PE lessons, just like I did at both my middle and upper school, I would certainly have questioned any hint that they were swimming naked in school if I'd found out such a thing was taking place, even if they didn't mind it. I'd not have accepted a teacher demanding it for a minute, but I suppose if individual choice was given and my own sons had decided they liked to do so I'd not have stood in their way over it if they felt confident enough to do so. Is it remotely possible that demanding such things can actually make some boys more confident than they would otherwise be, whilst acknowledging that some others might be simultaneously adversely affected by it.

Trying to work out how I might have reacted at school at the age of about 12 or 13 to being told by the swimming teacher that I was taking a dip without swim kit on is not easy and I'm very unsure how I would really have reacted to that one.

The best thing I can think of saying about naked swimming is that as long as you are in the water you have what amounts to some kind of coverage. This might explain why those with bare chest anxiety had a better tolerance of being that way when they were swimming in the water rather than standing up and about in the gym more visually obvious because going shirtless in the school gym seems to have been a far bigger deal to some than doing the same for swimming.

Quite what top notch American universities were up to back in the 1960s only they know, what with these peculiar naked swim tests for the newcomers on campus and such other oddities as doing surveys on posture requiring front, back and profile photography while naked, all forced into doing so.

Actually if you went to some of these places in that time you might have had to not only be made to do a mandated naked swim test but then go along for another mandated photo session to check your posture out too. It all seems quite demeaning actually, and these are not even children but young adults by anyones standard.

I'm not sure where the Catholic School swimming connection comes from, but I think our trans-Atlantic cousins should be aware that this site is dedicated to British history and, that to a certain extent, what happens (or might have happened in someone's imagination) in America stays in America. I attended two secondary boarding schools in England in the middle of the last century, both run by Catholic priests. At neither of these was there any hint of impropriety on the part of the staff. At the second school we did actually have a swimming pool. Not only was access and use carefully monitored, but the walls at each end bore large painted signs saying in no uncertain terms "Swimming Costumes must be worn at all times". There were rare occasions when this rule was infringed, generally when the sixth form, assumed to be responsible individuals, had their allotted swimming session last thing in the evening before lights out.

Interestingly, although we never managed to persuade the powers that be to permit even voluntary topless PE, nobody in authority batted an eyelid at the sight of a dormitory room housing a couple of dozen bare-chested teenage boys retiring for the night with not PJ top to be seen anywhere.

I vaguely recall the Jeffrey comment you are mentioning here Greg and would like to re-read that one so if anyone recalls when it was posted it would be handy to indicate on here to refer back to.

That comment you made about girls costumes being made of the same fabric but much more of it is very well made. Just looking up this specific subject provides plenty of what looks like genuine information in written form but also looks to provide a collection of rather suspicious looking photography also from other sources.

Taking this naked swimming to it's ultimate conclusion I was thinking this during the past hour when also reading about the Paris Olympics Opening Ceremony in an item. Just suppose for a minute that a top level male swimmer knew for fact that he could set world record times, nit with drugs and other illicit substances but simply through swimming naked through the water, and that his swimwear reduced his potential times, they still wouldn't allow that swimmer, or any others who might go faster or fastest like that, to do so. Yet at school it was once fine and mandatory for all the boys to have to do so. There must have been quiet fear among so many at that rule. Let those who have a desire for that type of swimming do so and others who don't not I say. Why is it so hard for minor choices like that not to be the norm ever.

Naked swimming, hell yeah! The last time I did this was on a young guys week in Corfu a number of years ago when me and three guys the same age found a quiet inlet along a deserted off the track beach area and did the skinny dip thing for a short time. I've also done this as a child once or twice with friends away from general eyes. It was good fun and I enjoyed it a lot.

But that aside, and my own slightly overconfident exhibitionist tendancies in abeyance, there is an obvious difference about doing what I've done and doing it in school. I myself think I'd have found it relatively easy to go naked swimming in school but fully understand the big difference in going on your holidays with young guys and deciding to give it a go, or being a youngster deciding to do it somewhere for a bit of fun, and actually being instructed to do so and that decision being taken out of your own hands. That's a bit rough for many I agree and I know I'm on the more confident end of the scale compared to others.

There probably wasn't much of a high truancy rate from most of these naked swimming classes at the time.

A certain madness seemed to reign in the USA over all those years. I did do a little research on this subject some years ago as I was intrigued. But it seems there is no known reason for this country’s obsession of routinely making (only) males swim around at every invented opportunity completely naked. Adult men in charge seemed to want it; many females interviewed on the subject wanted to retain it. Geoffrey, there was a fabric blocking pool filters nonsense that was a well known feeble attempt to come up with a reason to support this enforced, peculiarity. This was so obviously untrue because all females, who were never required to swim nude, often using the same pools on alternate days, would wear huge, ungainly costumes of identical material, and with these costumes requiring at least four times the amount of it.

It seemed for some reason that an attempt was made to obliterate any form of bodily self-awareness or even self-respect that is naturally present in any healthy growing young lad. Why, I don’t know; possibly to produce willing, faceless, cannon fodder for future conflicts? I’ve always hated any gendered double standards, and in fact any form of disrespect for others, but it seems that the good old US of A had adopted both these failings with the volume turned right up to 11 for all the young males of its country over all those years.

There was someone, I think called Jeffrey, who wrote on here some time ago a very detailed and personal account of growing up within this mad culture, only this time he was taking part in a public swimming gala. It seemed all the local girls were invited, together with friends, families, lunch boxes and flasks. They all came to enjoy watching the boys they all knew from school, which seemed to include lots of naked parading around outside the pool area in front of them. His ’short essay’ concluded with him winning his event, going on to give a detailed bodily description of himself and his feelings while suffering the indignity of standing before them all on the winning podium. He might take this opportunity to reappear if he’s been waiting for this tired subject to reappear.

Despite all Jeffrey said, there is no actual written evidence in any reported publication that anything like this ever took place with invited public to attend. There’s probably still the many badly photoshopped photos on line to try to support this though.

Neil, You ask about the history of nude swimming. There is much historical material confirming that until modern fabrics made swimming costumes a practical option, nude swimming for men and boys was the norm. The practice was commonplace until the outbreak of WW1 and continued in single sex boys' schools with their own pools until roughly the 1970s. As you say, nothing to do with power or perversion, and certainly not confined to Catholic schools.
This was discussed in this thread a couple of years ago by a number of contributors who swam nude at school, may not have been keen at first, but, as with showers, quickly got used to it. My parents told me that as we were all boys together there was nothing to fuss about. Attitudes have changed but that was good advice and I was never stressed by nudity at school.

Regards what Paula says, I studied civil engineering at university and have never had too much interest in swimming, so going to university as an undergraduate in that subject only to be told you can't progress your course unless you strip naked for us and get in that pool and prove you can swim a decent distance would have made my eyes roll in disbelief. I suppose these guys knew they faced that and it wasn't a big surprise once they arrived, but all the same, what a very strange thing to ask of anyone.

Also, if you could swim, or even if you couldn't, what was wrong with simply telling them this information one way or the other did they not trust people to be honest answering the question without needing visual proof. It would have been more important to give new university and college entrants tests in basic arithmatic and grammar actually, and not while naked I hope.

The ways of this world are certainly strange in places.

Comment by: Stephen on 14th April 2024 at 22:02



"Easy to say that now but I bet you wouldn't have refused Alan, not when that age and maybe faced with an overbearing and possibly loud PE/Swim teacher giving his orders. Much as we might like to imagine ourselves refusing something like this, it's a proven fact that nearly all of us would go right along with it at those ages.

Look on here, not many people, if any at all, say they openly revolted against a PE teacher do they."


Every Wednesday afternoon, Stephen, we were marched down to Central Park for a whole afternoon of "games" (what an innocuous sounding word!). We had no playing field. There were weeks I just couldn't stand the thought of it, and I would bunk off after registration. I got caught a few times and punished for it. I bear no ill-will for that, but I never regretted it or promised never to do it again, because I wouldn't make a promise I knew I wouldn't keep. It would be football or cricket or sometimes just open air exercises. I might add I wasn't the only one to do it, just the most persistent. If nude swimming had cropped up, you can be sure I would have played truant every week.

Comment by: Tony on 14th April 2024 at 21:46



"Naked swimming at school appears to have been something that once took place if reports across the internet are to be taken at face value and I don't for one moment doubt they were true. I'm sure as Alan says that there were a few isolated instances of British boarding schools and grammars around the place that might have indulged this a little bit or even a lot. But I do think that when you are starting to do things like this then you are really crossing over into outright naturism territory and that is very much a lifestyle choice that gets made by those who do that and is not something that should be imposed in a school day across whole classes as was obviously once done....." g told by teacher to swim with nothing on at all. Is that a fair assessment?......

.......I cannot imagine how this must have affected those boys who came to realise they were gay and were getting told they had to do this, and in an earlier time that was less accepting or even outlawing such people. It must have been quite difficult for so many."


You make many fair points here, Tony. It stands to reason that if there were homosexual teachers, there were also homosexual pupils, and it must have been a terrible ordeal. Where was child psychology back then - and why were there not educationalists who asked out loud why these very dodgy practices were dragged on into the second half of the 20th century.

By the way, following on from Paula's post, there were very odd things going on in America - especially in colleges. I remember hearing a radio programme a few years ago, which mentioned in passing the "Ivy League Photographs", a very dubious practice that went on till the the 1970s. This was a Radio 4 programme on eugenics, because many people believed that this was why this grubby practice went on. There are several mentions on the internet, this is just one of them:


Ivy League nude posture photos - Wikipedia

Ivy League nude posture photos - Wikipedia



There must have been some very sick minds at work in the field of education in both Britain and America

Easy to say that now but I bet you wouldn't have refused Alan, not when that age and maybe faced with an overbearing and possibly loud PE/Swim teacher giving his orders. Much as we might like to imagine ourselves refusing something like this, it's a proven fact that nearly all of us would go right along with it at those ages.

Look on here, not many people, if any at all, say they openly revolted against a PE teacher do they.

Naked swimming at school appears to have been something that once took place if reports across the internet are to be taken at face value and I don't for one moment doubt they were true. I'm sure as Alan says that there were a few isolated instances of British boarding schools and grammars around the place that might have indulged this a little bit or even a lot. But I do think that when you are starting to do things like this then you are really crossing over into outright naturism territory and that is very much a lifestyle choice that gets made by those who do that and is not something that should be imposed in a school day across whole classes as was obviously once done. This is a very different situation to the widely accepted going naked for showers and I think the two are very different. Those who were quite accepting of that kind of school nudity situation, and most if us did accept that we had to shower after PE lessons like it or not, would probably not quite so easily accept being told by teacher to swim with nothing on at all. Is that a fair assessment?

I cannot imagine how this must have affected those boys who came to realise they were gay and were getting told they had to do this, and in an earlier time that was less accepting or even outlawing such people. It must have been quite difficult for so many.

Yes guys this naked swimming here really was a thing. My own father did this - he's not a Catholic.

I was here once before saying that our PE teachers don't make any boys go shirtless these days in this part of the State I'm in. I deplore that they did once make the young do far more than this over this way and go naked for swimming in so many places.

Even my own uni that I graduated from in the 70's was known to hold a swim test for the freshers on entry just a year or two before I arrived myself. Even if what you were studying had nothing at all to do with anything physical all freshers would have to attend an arranged swim test to prove they could swim competently a number of lengths of the pool. Once done you didn't have to go near a pool again, but you couldn't not take the test or you would not be able to graduate. The boys even at my uni had to take this test naked as well, I don't know when it stopped, I think it was something like 1972. A real strange thing everyone did on entry to higher academia in certain institutions across the US. Real answers about why are hard to come by.

I deplore the whole concept but tens of thousands of freshers did this, male and female, although just the boys were asked to take the tests while naked and tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands did so because they wouldn't graduate otherwise so went with it and none were allowed to wear a thing.

Comment by: Greg2 on 14th April 2024 at 11:42


"Oh, I would have really hated having to do swimming without trunks. I would have found that very difficult to put up with, and you can bet all sorts of people would have found reason to wander around while all ages of boys were in the pool, or indeed out of it. But no doubt, whatever you are made to believe is the norm and therefore expected of you when growing up, you try to accommodate it. You trust the adults around you as you have nothing to compare anything with but what you find happening around you. I think it’s only as adults years later that you wonder what was going on."


I would have just point blank refused, and they could have caned me as often as they liked. I think everyone, regardless of age should be allowed to draw the line somewhere.

One of the problems was that our teacher was not trusted. We had one lad, as green as grass, whose parents were both in the Salvation Army, and even he decided at 13 that our Mr R was "an old q***r" and that was the impression we all formed. We, very luckily had no school pool, and if he had dared try that at the municipal baths, everyone, not just the boys at school, would have been aware of his sordid aberrations.

Certainly if adults removed their swimwear in a public pool they would be arrested because their behaviour would be, even today, I suspect, described as immodest and indecent. "Outraging public decency" is still a charge on the books.

I don't know if nude swimming was a peccadillo just indulged in by religious schools, but I do know in the Catholic religion, if you are a naughty boy during the week, you can seek absolution from the priest at the end of it, and can presumably repeat the procedure as often as required/needed as it wipes the slate clean, so to speak.

I am just glad kids are more streetwise these days, and I very much doubt that any school would even dare suggest it now, but none should ever have been put in that position in the first place.

Comment by: Alan on 14th April 2024 at 03:12
Quote - 'If we can also say that this was in the main, teachers exercising their precious power in most cases, there was a degree of perversion in others. Anyway, it was the most egregious form of abuse of power.'




I really don't think it was about power or perversion really, but I've no idea why it would be seen as something that had to be done. Does anyone really know? I may be wrong but doesn't the practice seem to belong only to a certain kind of school in the first place, mostly Catholic ones for whatever reason. Why should the Catholic faith mean a requirement not to put a pair of swimming trunks on though!

I suppose once in the pool you barely noticed the nudity anyway, as long as there wasn't too much standing around poolside. I#d have wanted to just jump in quick as a flash. The year Joel mentions was interesting, on the verge of WW1 but that may just be a coincidence. I actually thought that this type of swimming was something that was common in the Victorian period in the late 1800's anyway, but away from school just more generally.

Joel Peterson, Zack, Alan.

Oh, I would have really hated having to do swimming without trunks. I would have found that very difficult to put up with, and you can bet all sorts of people would have found reason to wander around while all ages of boys were in the pool, or indeed out of it. But no doubt, whatever you are made to believe is the norm and therefore expected of you when growing up, you try to accommodate it. You trust the adults around you as you have nothing to compare anything with but what you find happening around you. I think it’s only as adults years later that you wonder what was going on.

I did have a friend when growing up who was only part of our ‘gang’ during school holiday times, as he boarded at a posh prep school somewhere in the south of England. I do remember hearing in disbelief once when he mentioned the boys swam naked at his school; his sister who attended a girls’ school said she didn’t, which is just typical. Just as bad I remember, was when he once mentioned what the boys did on a normal getting up morning routine. It sounded like he was sent away to live in a mad house to me at that time, and I was glad I was nowhere near a place like that. He was a strange boy too in many ways, as he seemed to have almost no self-awareness. I did quietly love hearing him speak though, even though I would never have told him that at the time. He had a beautifully clipped, precise, and quite old fashioned speaking voice, and with a much wider vocabulary than the rest of us. This would have been the late 60s. You could always hear his voice clearly amongst all of us if we were shouting together.

I always hated swimming anyway, I’m sure due to a bigger lad of about 14 coming up behind me and pushing only me under several times when I was about 9. I left the pool and sat on the steps, and I’m sure that put me off being in water for life. Consequently, and despite being a sporty kid usually picked for school teams, I was always in the non-swimmer group during swimming class ages of 10-12. I’m sure that idiot’s behaviour denied me of much childhood fun of swimming at every opportunity with friends during warmer weather, as I always felt awkward and left out of that.

Comment by: Zack on 13th April 2024 at 22:18


I agree with every word you say here, Zack. It seems this highly dubious practice of making boys swim naked went on in some British schools (mainly grammar and boarding schools) till very late in the 1970s. If we can say that in the early part of the 20th century people were more ignorant and primitive, you cannot say that in the 1960s and 1970s. I am sure if parents could afford to send their sons to such establishments a pair of swimming trunks wouldn't have broken the bank. If we can also say that this was in the main, teachers exercising their precious power in most cases, there was a degree of perversion in others. Anyway, it was the most egregious form of abuse of power.

Joel Peterson.

I would have found it absolutely terrifying as a schoolboy to have been told I had to swim without swim trunks on. I get that there are some that didn't mind maybe but just imagine being ones that did. I'd never heard of this before and it astonishes me, I've looked it up further tonight in complete disbelief and found more about it.

Chris G.

I used to get a very physical internal sinking feeling sensation hit me when our PE teachers made the decision that our PE class had to remove our tops and go bare chested and really disliked it a lot and found it a very difficult thing to do easily.

All adolescents are body conscious and school picked the worst age to engage kids like me into mandatory bare chested PE lessons and the naked showering tedium. When I grew up I grew out of these worries to a large extent thankfully but school hit you with stuff like this just at the wrong moment in the lives of many I think.

Karl's posting about sudden and unexpected topless PE reminded me of my own introduction to the practice in my last term at Primary school and some two or three years before I found myself topless in the gym at Secondary school. Back then we hed no formal PE kit other than a pair of plimsolls. The rest of our outfit consisted of our regular school shorts, together with most, if not all, of what we wearing on top that day, generally pullover, shirt and vest.One hot sunny afternoon, as we gathered in the tarmac playground for PE, which I think was the last lesson of the day, the teacher who generally took boys' PE Mr Begley, told us that as it was so hot, and that we would be running around for a bit, we should "strip to the waist" as he put it. As it was summer, most of us weren't wearing pullovers, but almost all of us were wearing vests, but it all came off without too much protest. And that was that! I think we all enjoyed the all too brief interlude of toplessness, but it never happened again, and at the end of that school year I moved on to. Secondary with a more conventional approach to PE kit. For some reason embarrassment probably, I never told Mum about the experience, although for some reason I told my younger sister

Given a choice everyone eventually ended up shirtless at my school gym - shock horror!

How big were others gym classes on here? Mine seemed large, about 40 per class, they merged at least 4 separate classes of boys sometimes into one gym PE lesson.

Unlike quite a lot of you on here, where I was at school, a normal state comprehensive school in Winchester in the late 70s the PE kit when we did the gym part of PE was optional on shirts or going skins and we were allowed to decide for ourselves. Most boys in my gym class removed their shirts for those PE lessons, probably very close that three quarters figure that has been mentioned on the surveys actually. I took mine off voluntarily too. This was from day one at comprehensive school in class. What I noticed over the course of the next few weeks when we did gym PE was how even more boys kept their PE shirts off voluntarily too and soon there were only a couple left who kept them on and within six months our entire gym PE class in my first comprehensive year was shirtless and no PE teacher had ever actually told us we absolutely had to be, it had happened completely organically by choice and possibly a bit of peer pressure not wanting to stand out as different from the rest too.

It's all really rather interesting. I've seen the comments about "bareskin" running on here. When we ran the school X-country there were always boys running it with their sweatshirts hanging tied around their waists and doing it shirtless so proving that even many schoolboys liked that method of running along in the fresh air when they were allowed to, and our PE teachers were easy either way on that. I personally never gave that a try but there were a sizable handful of about 7 or 8 in our X-country that ran like that, they were the ones who tended to think of themselves as the fittest and fastest competitive runners in general and it was a bit of a statement they made about themselves.

Another thing I remember about the late 70s and early 80s and hanging about out of school was just how often boys my age at the time, pre and very early teens, 11 to 14 let's say, left the house to play with our mates and didn't bother to wear anything, we were simply shirtless for quite a lot of the time sometimes, as well as kids of a younger age like our younger brothers too if we had them. Our parents weren't bothered by this childhood public shirtless choice. I had a best friend whose mum made it clear if he was intending to go "uptown" with us then he must put something on, and we all did that anyway but general dossing around with each other shirtless was often something we chose to be without giving it a great deal of thought.

Further to the poll that Nathan conducted recently which discovered that 75 percent of his own British boys preferred to do PE bare chested, and his recent answer on showers, you might like to know that going all the way back to 1960 at a school in the United States called North Tonawanda High, in New York State, the boys there were given a poll on swimming at that time, and at that school the rule was that boys could not wear anything in the pool to swim, and went in completely stark naked. Now being asked to do that must have been an absolute shocker for some lads I'm quite sure, but when given the opportunity to express an actual opinion on it for themselves the boys came back with a result matching Nathan's own British poll on bare chests, they also voted 75% in favour of continuing to go swimming at school without bothering with swimming trunks and being naked. Even much later in 1973 there was a school in Minnesota that took a poll of its own boys there and that saw another vote in favour of going swimming at school the same way.

As a rule this kind of thing was going on roughly from 1913 until finally fizzling out around about 1980, a rough estimate suggests that many hundred of places, something like 600 to 800 large schools over those years made it mandatory that all their male pupils on the school roll must take swimming lessons and they must always do them wearing absolutely nothing but the skin they were born in.

My own uncle went to school in Bloomington, Illinois in the fifties and did this himself and told me there was some open dialogue against it at that time from a small minority but those people were completely ignored.

I remember August 1978 very well. I can still take in the weeks before starting secondary school and the things I was fixated about that kept running through my own mind at the time. Not that I mentioned it to anyone, it was just quiet internal ruminating for the most part, and upcoming PE lessons and the full knowledge that going up to this new school definitely meant I'd be expected to do certain PE with no shirt on, but most glaring of all the full strip off for the class shower played on the mind a lot. When some of our new teachers turned up at school in July and one said we had to have showers after PE an electrical frisson ran through me at the very words being said aloud. But as I said on my 29th February comment, all that over analysing and thinking was largely for nothing in the end and it really was as in the old FDR phrase - 'the only thing you have to fear is fear itself'. It was mostly true. Like anything new it was a touch awkward first go, hardly a surprise really, but being made to shower in school had a mostly positive effect on me I'd say and it made me confront and realise something about myself, that my own shyness was nothing near as bad as I had thought it would be.

The worst thing, looking back, would have been to create trouble about it, or for the teachers to start overindulging some of us. I'm glad neither happened, it would have been a mistake.

I think Greg you've written a well thought out piece here especially about how you can make things worse for yourself by resisting things sometimes. It may sound completely counter intuitive I know, but the best thing for a really shy, insecure person to do, in this case in a gym class if asked to do the shirtless lessons he hates, or take that group shower that mortifies him, is to quietly get on with it and do as the others do rather than create the fuss that then leads to far more attention and an even bigger judgement being made about you. That is a very hard ask for some I'm sure, but it's the best way. Mark Twyford here (18th February) more or less made this point with his real life story of such a boy didn't he.

When I cast off my own fear almost immediately it was like a huge weight lifted off my shoulders I can tell you. If you confront things that worry you, scare you, or frighten you and do them, overcome them and deal with them then it has a huge effect on your personal esteem, and that can apply to anything well beyond schooldays fears of being seen in the gym without a shirt on or in the changing room shower with nothing on.

Comment by: Karl on 10th April 2024 at 03:04

If he was a good looking kid he might have just started to become a bit self-conscious, especially at just around that age. I know that sounds strange and difficult to understand but it can happen. At that age you haven’t quite worked out the consequences of your actions really, and you’re not quite able to assess too far ahead. All your emotions are immediate and in the present, so he was probably thinking he was avoiding a situation that would make him uncomfortable, but not understanding that he was making everything worse. I suppose he thought he would avoid attention, but in fact created even more. I remember all those mistakes. Didn’t a very sensible sounding gym teacher write on here some time ago, that if a troubled boy is allowed to keep his shirt on for a few lessons, he’d likely eventually learn that this made him even more noticeable, and so eventually learn and realised it’s better to just be the same as all his friends, and take it off.

What would some have done if told to take your top clothes off and come to the front of a co-ed class to help with a biology demonstration, so that our female teacher can point at my ribs etc? As I mentioned previously, I was told to do this when I was 11, but fiercely refused. I think she was surprised and began to insist I do it, but I just wouldn't. She eventually gave up with me, but another boy seemed happy to do it. Would that have bothered some of you, or not?

Back to this boy, if he was so upset about having to remove his top, how did he cope with the showers when the lot came off? Showering was always difficult for most of us to get through at first, but we all had to do it years ago. I remember my first time as almost feeling like an out of body experience, rather than just an out of clothes experience. I remember thinking I couldn’t believe I was actually in there with them all. This odd feeling was probably due to attending gym for weeks, but being unable to take part until I’d had clearance that my broken leg had sufficiently healed. even then I had to be careful. I do remember kids asking when I'd be joining them for gym, instead of doing my homework sitting along the gym wall in my school uniform. One even asked when would I be having my first shower! I must admit this worried me a bit as I began to wonder whether he meant some strange initiation ritual would take place or something. Thankfully there was no such thing when I eventually joined them. I suppose they checked me out as I was eventually in there with them as someone new, but it didn’t last long as they saw I was obviously just the same as them. We all work this out in the end, but I was the first one out of there; as I remember the gym teacher shouting at me for putting my shirt on before drying myself properly. I do think it must have been an easier moment when all shared together for the first time as something unique when so young, but I never experienced that.

I completely agree with Nathan's teaching position here. Nothing wrong with it at all.

I don't know John.

I didn’t have much of a problem with it per se, but if you do have something you're sensitive to, having it literally pointed out can ge hard.

Even if others can't understand why that particular thing would bother you.

Comment by: Nathan Hind on 9th April 2024 at 22:51
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...."Not so many schools do compulsory showers as they used to but I see nothing wrong with it and expect it. Ours are open communal, everything must come off. I had to take communal showers at school 25 years ago too, just the same. ".....

The oldest and flimsiest reason beloved of schoolteachers. I had to do it, so you will too.

If you had been around 40 odd years ago, Nathan, and you got frequent colds, for example, the school doctor would probably have recommended you had your tonsils yanked out. It did damn all good (schools are breeding grounds for germs, as you know), but luckily the medical profession, at least, has moved with the times. Your profession seems stuck in the past.

Seriously It's. up to the INDIVIDUAL. .If he chooses to shower privately, back home, that's his right to privacy… Why this constant subject to have all lads supposed to shower together?? - get over it gentlemen, . TIMES HAVE CHANGED…And I think for the better

This applies btw, to all of you, not just Nathan.