Mr. GYM

First of all I want to say that I am a Physical Education Teacher. I am NOT a GYM Teacher. I do not teach students how to be a gym and even though I have taught thousands of kids only a very few have been named Jim so there were times when I was “Jim’s teacher” but not a Gym teacher or “Gym coach” as some of my students have referred to me. You might ask, “What’s the difference?” and the best explanation I can think of is, to be crude, the same as referring to a black person by using the “N” word. It is offensive and demeaning and not a true definition of my job. My job is to educate physically.

For the first nine years of my elementary teaching career, I was the only male teacher on the staff. We did have a male custodian by the name of Jim Hill, affectionately known as Mr. Jim, who was a great person and did a wonderful job of keeping our school in working order. Being the only male on the faculty I was asked to do lot of jobs outside of my job description, such as carrying things for the other teachers or checking the boys bathroom and on more than one occasion having to kill a snake.

One day I’m in the gym just teaching away when these two third grade boys came into the room carrying a trash can between them filled with old moldy pumpkins. They walked up to me and said, “Mrs. Harper said you would take this out to the dumpster for us.”
Normally, I would have obliged, but something about the situation just went across me the wrong way. I don’t know if it was that it happened right in the middle of my class or that it was just presumed that I would drop everything I was doing to go empty someone else’s trash.
So I told the boys, “You take that back down to Mrs. Harper and you tell her she can empty her own trash.”
The boys looked kind of stunned then looked at each other and off they went back out of my gym, carrying a trash can full of moldy pumpkins between them. As I watched them leave I made a mental note to myself to have a little conversation with Mrs. Harper after school about trash duty and then went back to my lesson. A few minutes later here comes Mrs. Harper walking into the gym and I’m thinking “I can take her. I’m a good foot taller than her and she probably wouldn’t weigh more than 110 lbs. with rocks in her pocket and wearing lead shoes so if it comes down to a fight, Yeah, I can take her”. But before I can get good and squared away she opens up with “I am so sorry. I told the boys to take the trash can to Mr. Jim.