Wednesday, June 15

[gottawonder]

Today I am grateful for:

A bit blustery today, but not raining. There is water lying everywhere, which is nice, since it was so dry here.

The birds seem very happy.

I can see some of the garden is coming up now.

The big rain tanks are full now. I can use that water for the garden for quite some time now.

I talked with Trainwreck sister on the phone for a few minutes, and I am just glad she isn't holding a grudge about Mom's house. She told me that she and a few others are seeing if a woman who has a second hand shop will come and get what is left, since we have taken what is special to us. She and another sister were able to attend the funeral of the lady I mentioned who passed away recently who was a friend of the family's.

I talked to Brother T for a while too. They have had so much rain already this summer that it is almost too much. We also spoke about the arrangements being made for the last of Mom's things. It isn't much after everyone took what they wanted. About a truck load.

He said he told Mom they had sold the house, and she wasn't sure which house he was talking about, so in a way that's a good thing.

I went to the barn to see River. He was still nice and clean because he had a rain sheet on. His breathing wasn't too bad today.

The woman who started lessons recently picked out a bracelet. I hope I wasn't too pushy; I made a point of showing them to her because she normally wouldn't go into the barn. She trailers her horses in and brings her own tack. she goes directly to the arena.

R is planning to foster a horse from the rescue I am raising money for. Likely later this summer.

We had a good lesson. We worked on doing side passes on the ground from farther away from the horse. We worked on a simple pattern at Liberty that we are hoping to have ready for a virtual show.

In our ridden work River seemed to be giving better to the bitless bridle. We are trying to keep him light and carrying his front, instead of leaning on the bridle. He did well with it today.

I came home and let everyone out on to the pastures for a while.

I learned that in many schools in the United States that had swimming pools, the boys were required to swim naked. Apparently this went on in many places until somewhere around 1970. It was supposedly because it was believed that swim trunks harbored a lot of bacteria, and that fibers from the suits would mess up the filtration systems. The girls wore swim suits.

Even weirder, in Chicago, the women's suits were color-coded to bust size:

The Chicago public school my mom and aunt attended in the late 60s required them to wear swimsuits color-coded by bust size. Women with 32-inch chests wore maroon, 34-inch chests wore navy, 36-inch chests wore red and women with 38-inch chests wore green. Our family is historically flat-chested and my mom and aunt always wore maroon.

https://medium.com/dose/a-brief-humiliating-history-of-swimming-in-gym-class-350a58e3e5d6

Comments

[ratunderpaper]

How bizarre (the swimsuits).

I'm trying to decide how I would have found a way to trash a strange rule like that which humiliates just about everybody.

[gottawonder]

I can't imagine why anyone bothered to participate at all.

[ratunderpaper]

Obedience was a big thing back in the good old days, when authority figures had the right to exercise corporal punishment.
There are still people who believe that troubled or delinquent youth benefit from a beating with "the strap". Strange and stranger.

[gottawonder]

Yes, this mindset was mentioned in the article, and I DO remember how they tried to push that bullshit on me in school. Blind obedience, even if they humiliate you. They still had the strap with one principle I had, but I think he was the last one. He threatened my with the strap in grade one because I was trying to be cool and just used his last name without the "Mr.". I had seen that in a movie or something, where buddies just used their last names. He could have just explained that I needed to use his whole name.

I also had a teacher threaten to wash my mouth out with soap for lying, when all I did was comment in class that rabbit supposedly tasted like chicken. She asked me if I had eaten it, and I said no, so she called me a liar. I wasn't old enough to have the sophistication to say "I have heard others say that it tastes like chicken", I think I said "it tastes like chicken" and then she asked if I had eaten it. What a bitch to not understand that a six year old kid is just trying to share an idea.

Then by grade four, I got a "modern" teacher who encouraged us to be expressive, to write notes to a stuffed lion about how we were feeling, and read to us from "The Hobbit". I loved her.

That's what they don't mention when they post the articles about how the church abuses kids, is how the church also demanded obedience, and would shame you for things you didn't initiate. The adults of the kids would be so indoctrinated that they would not let their kids talk about it.

Same thing about schools. The teachers and the principle were like gods.

Sure makes one hate the system, doesn't it?

[ratunderpaper]

What happened to you is disgusting. No wonder kids refuse to take orders from teachers when arbitrary authority is forced upon them. It doesn't mean that people in positions of authority shouldn't be respected, but it does mean that if one is in a position of authority, one had better earn that privilege by showing respect and teaching respect.

Now that I'm on my high horse, I will say that I have witnessed kids suffer the churchy demand for obedience you mentioned. I think you might want to read that Miriam Toews book. I liked it, but growing up under such a heavy religious thumb was an alien world to me.

(Others, hm, lived it first hand.)

[gottawonder]

For the most part, I was respectful. I always resented arbitrary rules that felt like there was no need for them other than to exert power or to "train you" to do what you were told without question.

Like the one teacher who had a meltdown because I didn't bother to do what he wanted about our daily notes. Notes that were meant for our own use only.

He wanted our notes in his class to have a specific order of our name, the date, and the title of the class across the top, with each item to be underlined twice in red ink.

We weren't handing them in or anything, they weren't for marks. It's just what he wanted. He kept noticing that I wasn't underlining them twice in red ink, and he finally blew up at me one day, throwing my binder and scattering the pages everywhere and calling me defiant.

There really wasn't anything he could DO to me, since it wasn't something he could give me a detention for, or get me kicked out, and I knew it. It was just a thing for his ego.

[ratunderpaper]

Running into a teacher like that, who seemed determined to extract submission/obedience from his students, is bad luck. You didn't do anything to deserve that treatment - but you already know that.

The nastiest teacher I had was a kindergarten teacher who tried to punish me for writing a lowercase letter "a" exactly as you see it here, with a "terminal" or "open counter" over the top. (I told Lois, who intervened and that was the end of the punishment. To this day I think that teacher was hostile because she didn't like my looks. I shouldn't dwell on it; she's probably dead by now.)

[gottawonder]

Isn't it bizarre, the tiny things that people choose to demonize others for. Of course, the small thing is not the real issue; it is the need for control and to see your compliance, as you have noted.

There are too many things in the world like this.

[ratunderpaper]

It's best to hit one's limit of doinkery-taking early and get on with living happily and peacefully.

[spatzenpost]

What an absolutely bizarre and humiliating dress code. I can’t imagine how anyone would have thought that a great thing.

[gottawonder]

I really don't know what kind of sociopath came up with a system based on bust size that would so openly advertise like that. Or, how making the boys swim naked with their also naked coaches was acceptable.

I guess when all the rules are written and enforced by perverts and sociopaths, anything is possible.

[ratunderpaper]

Then again, there was the "Ivy League Nude Photo Scandal", which lasted several decades. A number of Ivy League colleges and universities forced their incoming students to pose for front, side and back photographs, supposedly to gauge posture and identify potential problems.

I'll bet the problems that stemmed from this were more psychological in nature than anything else.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_League_nude_posture_photos

[gottawonder]

Yes, and this feels like using the fine art of humiliation as a form of control and submission on these students.

[sherlockishere]

Oh, heavens, surely this was some bizaare local weirdness? I remember back to the early 60s, and I've never heard of a school that did this! But then at my schools in Louisiana, there were no swimming pools! But still-- the thought of naked boys and color-coded girls would have violated the sensibilities of all of the teachers!

[gottawonder]

I hadn't heard of any pools requiring this either in Canada, but we didn't have a pool in our school. Actual swimming pools were likely even barely known in most of rural Canada until the '70's, it would have been a city thing, and only in the big cities like Toronto or Winnipeg.

The articles I found spoke a lot about Chicago, but I got the impression that it was fairly common practice. Then I found this article that talks about it being a thing in YMCA swimming pools.

https://medium.com/@Robbie.Mukai/swim-class-for-american-high-schoolers-was-required-naked-bebbc4a5ded7

It does clarify the reasoning; this was before synthetic material, and swimsuits made out of wool or cotton were bad for filtration systems.

Here is another good article that also talks about how the suits were a bit of a luxury, and fabric rationing during the wars.

https://sites.google.com/site/historicarchives4maleswimming/home/ii-archives-early-20th-century-after/c-public-schools-municipal-pools-and-ymca-history-of-mandated-nude-swimming

[lantairvlea]

That is weird and interesting and more than a little crazy on the nude swimming and color coded suits. I know in parts of Europe (especially Germany) nudity is not so much of a big deal. Also after doing a few semesters of life drawing seeing nude people became more of a shrug and carry on thing. Nudity doesn't have to be sexual and part of me thinks that greater society could benefit from understanding that.

[gottawonder]

You know, I felt the same way. The only reason why the nudity at the pool would be an issue, is because nudity is not a normal part of our culture in North America. Yet, because we are so uncomfortable with it, the nude swimming at pools would have been uncomfortable and would have felt very unnatural.

If it were part of our culture to sit in saunas together nude, or in hot springs, or at the beach, or anything like that, then the pools wouldn't have been odd.