Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson for August 04, 2021

Time to feign a stomachache and get a pass to the nurse’s office.

Sounds like…..Hamburger Helper.

What a considerate coach. (Calvin’s father will then say aerobics build character.)

Is it any wonder kids go straight from school to the hospital?

Just give him a good knee shot where it counts. Bullies run away from anyone who stands up to them……especially when you grow 6 inches over the summer.

I grew up when they were doing “tracking” to put the bright STEM (though they didn’t call it that then) kids into the fast track. Too bad they wouldn’t do something similar (and likely pretty much inverse) for PE. When I finally got to High School, I found I could avoid PE by being in the marching (during football season) band. That was actually fun.

Methinks Calvin is a budding Progressive – pacifist and destructive in precisely the wrong areas of life.

How many are willing to believe that Calvin’s coach is Coach Lockjaw (remember him from the “baseball arc”).

It may be wrong, but I wish all bullies, male and female (including Moe) would succumb to COVID-19.

I went to boarding school, with no escape they could just leave it to any time they chose.

Tom Browns school days, Lord of the Flies etc., novels that were supposed to be a warning, not an instruction manual.

Scots PGC Warwick, Class of 1988, 1987, 1986, 1985, I’m talking about YOU.

Coaches have only one imperative, make the kids suffer. I imagine when the kids die of heat exhaustion the coaches just consider them wimps!! And yes, it happens.

This strip could not be written today, sadly.

It’s the running away that’s the aerobic part.

It too bad character doesn’t build Calvin.

Gym class teaches aggression and, oddly enough, humility. Sort of mixed messages there.

Every school coach ever.

Heh, I don’t remember really having periods in elementary school, though we did have a “special” period at one point in the day where we’d go to either the gymnasium, the art classroom, the music classroom, the media center, or the health classroom, depending on what day of the week it was. It probably didn’t help that the school I went to for grades 1 to 6 didn’t even have a bell system in use!

From what I recall, in elementary school, we had one teacher for everything, including gym or “PE” as we called it. There was no “coach”. Separate classes with a different teacher for each subject started in 7th grade.

Of course, that was a long time ago. Even some twenty years before Calvin’s time.

Many sports are thinly veiled organized violence. That’s why they are so fun!

I hated gym class. Got picked on too much. Finally got fed up and punched the biggest jerk who was picking on me. That ended all the “picking on.” Got suspended for a couple days! :-)

The summer when I was nine was ruined by an emergency appendectomy, but we’ll worth it, as I was excused from gym the first semester of 5th grade, which focused on gymnastics.

I actually had a kid like that in HS. He was an upperclassman, and liked to pick (extort) the freshmen boys in gym class. The “teacher” never seemed to be around the last 10 minutes of the period. Knowing what I know now, I should have just left the class and gone straight to the main office and sat down.

Calvin must have gone to my school…

Back in the day, school would have been tolerable were it not for mandatory gym class – horrible horrible memories.

By the time you get to Junior High gym class becomes more anaerobic.

My childhood in four panels.

Quick Calvin – grab some Catsup! It has natural mellowing agents!

Moe is going to have a good time in San Quinten.

My gym teacher though PE was a recruiting ground for his basketball team

Our gym “teacher” was, of course, the football coach. One of his favorite activities was “jungle ball” – basketball with no fouls called. He would invariably put the football goons on one team & the smart kids on the other. Calvin’s experience in re “aerobic violence”is close to a universal.

I hope coaches like that don’t exist anymore.

Calvin ought to be creative enough to outsmart him.

Calvin, borrow that Roosevelt stick from Lucy in Peanuts and make this jerk smell some asphalt in the gym class.

Sometimes, fear of the beating is worse than the beating. But only if you survive.

It builds character.

I see some commenters suggest that fighting back against bullies will make them stop bullying you. That may work against lone bullies who have little-to-no support backing them, but like I said earlier, I grew up in a community where the bullies were in gangs. Anyone who fought back that wasn’t the police had to deal with not only the bully again but his friends, as well. As hypocritical as it seems, they saw fighting back as disrespectful and they took it as an invitation to push harder.

They were, however, not always the brutish “thugs” that people were quick to label them as. They actually respected authority as long as they were treated fairly, and as long as those with authority acted with authority and made sure the punishments fit the crimes. It’s plausible to theorize that’s where the whole mess began, with authority either abusing or relinquishing their power, and allowing the situation to cycle out of control or something.

My mother taught in the district I grew up in, and she found that approaching bullies and talking to them helps. It wasn’t a magical one-step solution but it helped the smaller kids get through their school days. If you have authority, then talk to the Moes so you can help the Calvins. They tend to be more receptive to advice, at least more so than the anti-vaxxers do.