Held back in school..... for sports?

@George,

I'll probably read it because I enjoyed his other books but I'm wondering if you could give us a synopsis of his thoughts....

1 Reply

@Linkat,

Quote:

But I do think some areas, because economically the kids are not as advantaged that sports play a greater role - they think this is the only way to get scholarships or to get a head even in girls' sports. So they try every advantage they have and holding them back a year is one of them.

I think that is understandable and I can't really fault parents for that, I guess. I think that might be what these parents are doing. We live in a upper-middle-class neighborhood but these kids live with their parents at a grandparent's house so they're economically ambiguous.

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@saab,

That is the saddest story. What a bitch! I love it that you eked out a private revenge.

I was not a stellar student until I got to college and found that making A's was really pretty easy. My parents were supportive and never worried about my lackluster academics. I was accepted at every school I applied to. I see so many young people today completely freaking out over getting a B and thinking it's going to ruin their future. Scary.

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@boomerang,

When I was a kid in school,
I refused to participate in sports; waste of time
(unless the sport has a useful purpose, e.g., fishing,
swimming, gunnery, etc.).

I continue to believe that.

David

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@boomerang,

boomerang wrote:

I read something not long ago, engineer, about how we moved from the idea of the scholar/athlete to the idea of the dumb jock. The idea of the dumb jock is pretty new.

I remember a teacher of advanced students also commenting on the "geek" stereotype saying that as a general rule, most smart kids were reasonably good at sports as well. As for the scholar-athlete, that brings to mind "Chariots of Fire" where all the elite athletes were from an elite college.

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@saab,

saab wrote:

It is nothing unusual and absolutely nothing to be ashamed of in Germany to repeat on school year.

I did it .... even twice.

The only reason was ... I was two lazy. (The secaond time, it was more voluntarily, because all my friends were in that class.

It didn't really matter: I left school at an age, most others had as well: 19. (The reason is quite simple: we changed the school year from Easter to summer - and had so-called "short school years").

Today, I've read that many parents and pupils do it voluntarily as well: in all states, we are changing now many (in some states most) 13 years at school to 12. Some thing, you can't get all the stuff in 12 years.
(Disclaimer: we learn at grammar ("high") schools all that, too, what Americans study in the first two years at college.)

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@engineer,

There is definately truth to this - many athletes are individuals who are driven and motivated. For both academics and athletics one strong trait is to be driven, ambitious and motivated. Helps you excel in both.

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@boomerang,

boomerang wrote:

I'll probably read it because I enjoyed his other books but I'm wondering
if you could give us a synopsis of his thoughts....

It all has to do with being among the older children in the group. Youth
sports leagues group children by age and an arbitrary date determines the
cut-off. For Canadian youth hockey, the cut-off is the first of January.

So children born towards the beginning of the year play in the same
division as those born later in the year. At younger ages, a few months
difference can be significant. The kids born earlier in the year are, as
a rule, going to be bigger, stronger and faster than the others simply
because they are older. But because of this they are marked early as
better athletes. So they get more attention from the coaches and are
then picked for the more elite teams and get better coaching and play
against better competition. There's a cascading effect.

1 Reply

@engineer,

engineer wrote:

As for the scholar-athlete, that brings to mind "Chariots of Fire" where all the elite athletes were from an elite college.

You must have missed the point of that motion picture. The modern Olympiad insisted upon "amateur" athletes precisely because they wished to exclude working class athletes who had to play for money in order to be able to devote their time to their athletic training. "Elite athletes" from elite universities (what the English call a college we would call a private secondary school--either that or a subdivision of a university) were from the class which could afford to forgo a professional career in order to train as athletes.

Ian Holm portrays Sam Mussabini, who was disdained by the university crowd because he was a professional coach. However, in those days, most running coaches were little more than glorified masseuses, and Mussabini used a "scientific" method to improve the performance of his charges. The runner Eric Liddell was the son of christian missionaries in China, and was born in China, and would go back as a missionary and die there. In Scotland he was (and still is) revered, and he routinely addressed workingmen's athletic organizations, with an evangelical christian message. The film puts the runners at Cambridge, although they were actually at Oxford (all the charaters are based on real people, and almost all the events are historically accurate). For the university set, Liddell and Mussabini were not comme il faut--Liddell attended the University of Edinburgh, and that combined with his evangelism created a gap between him and the aristocratic crowd from Oxford. To their credit, the runners from Oxford ignored this.

George's post speaks to the advantages enjoyed by older children in sports leagues. Chariots of Fire missed an opportunity to portray the advantages enjoyed by university men in Olympic competition, where most working class athletes could never compete, because they needed to compete professionally in order to devote all of their time to training and perfecting their skills. Events such as track and field, where there was no professional option, virtually excluded everyone but university men.

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@George,

Thanks, George. That makes sense.

That puts Mo's friend in a strange spot. He's bigger than kids who are older and much bigger than his classmates despite his late July birth date.

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@JTT,

I was reading an article today about the "creativity crisis" and it reminded me of this thread.

I said:

Quote:

I'm probably all wet but my observation (not backed by any research) seems to be that kids that struggle a bit in school seem to be more creative in many ways. Maybe it's because they develop ways to cope with things that other's don't?

JTT replied:

Quote:

Maybe it's that school isn't intended to create diversity of thought, though there is a lot of suggestion given to the idea that there is. Maybe those kids that struggle are actually being held back by the sheer boredom, the inanity of a lot that is presented in school. They then come away with the idea that it's their fault.

The article says:

Quote:

It’s also true that highly creative adults frequently grew up with hardship. Hardship by itself doesn’t lead to creativity, but it does force kids to become more flexible—and flexibility helps with creativity.

<snip>

From fourth grade on, creativity no longer occurs in a vacuum; researching and studying become an integral part of coming up with useful solutions. But this transition isn’t easy. As school stuffs more complex information into their heads, kids get overloaded, and creativity suffers. When creative children have a supportive teacher—someone tolerant of unconventional answers, occasional disruptions, or detours of curiosity—they tend to excel. When they don’t, they tend to underperform and drop out of high school or don’t finish college at high rates.

They’re quitting because they’re discouraged and bored, not because they’re dark, depressed, anxious, or neurotic. It’s a myth that creative people have these traits. (Those traits actually shut down creativity; they make people less open to experience and less interested in novelty.) Rather, creative people, for the most part, exhibit active moods and positive affect. They’re not particularly happy—contentment is a kind of complacency creative people rarely have. But they’re engaged, motivated, and open to the world.

Here's the rest of the article, for those so inclined: http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2010/07/10/the-creativity-crisis.html

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Held back in school..... for sports?

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