Throughout a student’s years of school, physical education is a mandatory requirement in Illinois, all the way from kindergarten to senior year of high school. During this time teachers take students through their gym curriculum which varies by school and even by teacher, eventually, most students just accept this as part of their lives and treat it as a menial task. Elementary school students, though, feel an entirely different way, most look forward to the part of their day when they can just run around for an hour. Most look back at these days fondly, as a time that was stress-free, the hardest task consisting of running the mile every few weeks or doing five pushups. Today, most students deal with an extreme amount of pressure from sports, school and work but gym is not stress relieving for many it is stressful.
In Antioch, some games span generationally, such as the game “Highway,” this is a game that consists of the entire elementary school class moving across the gym on two mats, with many obstacles in the way; The only rule: do not touch the gym floor. Although this game seems relatively insignificant, it creates bonds between many of the students who attended Antioch Elementary School, but even more impressively it ties students from multiple decades together.
“It’s a kind of weird camaraderie for us AES kids,” Samantha Kanya AES alum and now Antioch Community High School teacher said.
This is something many AES alumni can agree with such as senior Laila Salata who has bonded with Kanya over some of the games they both played at their old elementary school. In another corner of the town exists Emmons Grade School, which a handful of students graduate from every year such as senior Claire Policht who reminisced about her time in gym class playing the same games with the same 30 kids for almost seven years.
“We played gymnastics, we had different equipment,” Policht said. “Like the parallel bars where we would have to perform dismounts and certain moves on it, This was somewhat unique to our school that we can all talk about today.”
Many seniors at ACHS are now almost halfway through their final year of mandatory gym and one of their possible teachers is Heather Coleman. Coleman has had some of these seniors for three or four years now and has built a bond with these students. Coleman mentioned that what many students want to play in gym are the same games she wanted to play when she was in school.
“My favorite games were dodgeball and kickball, the same games the students love to play now,” Coleman said.
Although many students will never get to experience the joy of playing dodgeball, kickball or highway again, they can still look back on those memories with other ACHS alums and laugh knowing they got to share the same funny memories of highway, gymnastics and dodgeball.
