Adios to the Communal Shower
December 4th, 2007, 22 Comments »
Over at YPulse, Anastasia links to a story about the declining popularity of the communal shower after high school gym classes:
Longtime physical education teachers say the decline began more than a decade ago and may have started when schools cut back on laundering towels to save money. Kids forgot to bring towels, and it spiraled from there to become optional. Nobody complained, and gym teachers found better things to do than monitor the showers.
This is my favourite quote from the article:
“The only person I saw take a shower this year was a Canadian kid that moved here,” said Jack Taylor, a Wilsonville High sophomore.
We Canadians are very clean.
When I was in high school in the late eighties, we almost never showered after gym class. There really wasn’t time in the schedule for it, and the school certainly didn’t provide towels. There was only a shower room, but we mostly used it for soaking our clothed friends on their birthdays. Good times.
Communal showers remind me of the movie Carrie (not safe for work) more than anything. They seem to regularly feature as a backdrop for high school cruelty, actually. I also remember a hokey-more-than-scary scene in Stephen King’s It. Which, speaking of my high school years, featured a scene shot at one of my classmate’s houses in West Vancouver. I remember it as one of the first films I was aware of that was (partially) shot in Vancouver.
Did you take showers after gym class in high school?