The Crisis: Opportunity or Heresy?

Every crisis is an opportunity.

The covid-19 pandemic has put US schools into a crisis.  I would suggest that this crisis gives us the opportunity to rethink how we deliver education. Most importantly, what we see as education.

Some questions we need to ask about our school system.

Do students need to attend school 5 days a week?

How do we evaluate whether or not a student is successful in reaching the required goals?

To what extent can we use distance learning?

What about sports and clubs? WHAT? Now you’ve gone too far.

I am now going to suggest the unsuggestable. Heresy. Beyond the pale. An idea on par with a justification for the Holocaust. The end of American civilization as we know it.

Sports and clubs in school. Exterminate them. Eliminate them. Toss them.

An admission. I have coached high school sports and advised clubs. I have coached softball, basketball and soccer at the high school level. I have advised the UN Club, a debating team, for over 20 years. I coached a high school championship chess team.

These kinds of activities have long been considered central to the “high school experience”. And I oppose them.

Why? Because in many schools the extracurricular interscholastic activities drain resources that would be better used for a more rigorous and inclusive educational experience for ALL students. Resources that could reduce class size and increase teacher salaries. Resources that should be used for education, capital “E”.

How do sports programs drain resources? Let me illustrate. In most schools there is a budget for extracurricular activities like sports. This usually includes coaches salaries and equipment. This money (provided, recall, by property taxes) is only a part of the costs of sports, however.

There are many costs for sports programs that are “hidden” in the school budgets. For example, the budget proposal for a school I taught at for over 25 years is linked below. There is a $59 million budget. Nowhere in the budget does it have sports program funding. Yet, the district offers 24 different sports teams. 24. (see links below). Now, I am not singling out this district . It is typical and I use it only to illustrate this point.

School sports costs are seldom broken down so the taxpayer can see what the actual costs are. For example. In the school I am referring to there are the following costs, not expressed as sports costs.

Athletic Director and office staff, devoted solely to school athletics. (Hidden in salaries budget?)

Coaching and in some cases assistant coaches salaries for 24 teams. (Hidden where?)

Pay for all umpires, referees timekeepers, scorekeepers at all home games. How many home games does each team play? (Hidden where?)

Transportation for all 24 teams for every away game. (Hidden in transportation budget?)

Training in CPR and concussion protocols for all coaches. (Hidden where?)

The care of the football field and stadium, the soccer fields, the baseball and softball fields, the track and field facilities, for all varsity and JV and modified programs. This includes cutting grass, lining fields, clean up, etc. (Hidden in Building and Grounds budget?).

Uniforms and equipment for all 24 teams.  (For example, the cost for just one football player is between $800-1200 per person. You can do the math). An aside: As a classroom teacher I was given less than $200 a year for all supplies for all my classes. Total.

I have taught in schools when there are “budget crunches”. Which is just about every school every year. I have watched schools drop social studies, math, science and English teaching positions to “save money.” I have seen a district drop programs for gifted and talented students. I have seen yearly teacher contract battles over health care costs. But in all these districts and all these “crunched budgets” I have never, NEVER, seen a district drop a varsity sports program. Cut teaching? Yes. Cut sports? Never.

This current school crisis is an opportunity. Do we really need to spend resources on interscholastic sports programs? Do we need to take the time and expense for these programs? A district could run a very good intramural sports program for a fraction of the cost. In a time when we need to prioritize should we be prioritizing athletics over basic or innovative educational programs?

But. But. But. Kids love sports. And so do parents, a few of whom live vicariously through the imaginary exploits of their progeny. I love sports. But I don’t think taxpayers should be funding them. There are other options.

As in many things, we should look to Europe. European schools do not have sports teams. Some places, like Germany, do have a few schools specifically devoted to athletics, but those are exceptions. In Europe athletics are privately funded by clubs. Professional soccer teams have their own youth academies, paid for by the teams, not the tax payers.

So, let us use this crisis to rethink how we spend very limited school resources. It is not a matter of ending sports for kids, but rather a rethinking of who should pay for those sports and how they should be organized. Should tax dollars for education continue to be funneled to sports programs ? I think not.

Heresy!

(See the eftours link for an interesting look at European schools and how they are organized.)

Focus On: The European high school experience

https://www.genevacsd.org/Page/2419

https://www.genevacsd.org/domain/41

Forget About It

When I taught high school, like almost all high school teachers, I needed to supplement my income. Like many teachers I volunteered to coach a variety of sports. I say “volunteered” because often the hourly wage was pretty minimal. But, still, it helped pay the bills.

One of the key ideas I tried to impart to the kids was that we all make mistakes. You will hit the rim and miss the shot. You will take a third strike instead of swinging the bat. You will commit a foul in the penalty area. You will simply do the wrong thing. Sometimes physically. Sometimes mentally.

Micheal Jordan, perhaps the best basketball player ever to walk onto a court, missed about 50% of his shots. He seemed to make the shot at the crucial time, but he missed plenty as well. He failed half the time.

I saw the major icon of soccer, the great Pele, in person in Rochester, New York in the 1970s. He was playing for the New York Cosmos. Pele had his shot stopped by the Rochester Lancers keeper on the modified penalty kick. He walked up to the keeper and shook his hand.

Bottom line. Everyone fails sometimes. The point is not the failure, but what happens next.

I tried to impress on my teams that they needed to forget, immediately forget, any mistake they had made. Forget about it. Then go on and do what you are supposed to do. Get back on track. We can analyze later. In the middle of the game is no time to feel bad or become dislodged from the task at hand.

Maria Jones (not her real name) was my best goal scorer. On Tuesday she missed a penalty kick that would have tied the match. We lost. As fate would have it, on Friday, the next match, we were again awarded a penalty kick. The team looked over to the bench. Who should take the kick? I yelled out that Maria should. She put it in the back of the net and we won the game (I think we won 2 that year). I knew her mental state. I knew that she was able to forget about it and get the job done.

Which brings us to May 25, month number 5 of the Covid-19 pandemic. A lot of people have screwed up. Made mistakes. Done the wrong thing. Governor Cuomo waited too long to institute stay at home orders. Lives were lost. Mayor DeBlasio of New York city was even slower to respond. The Trump administration was unprepared and waited way too long to close borders. And coordinate a national response.

We could go on and on and second guess what SHOULD have happened. A recent study shows that over 30,000 lives could have been saved if the USA had just acted one week earlier to shut down non-essential services. Mistakes were made. Mistakes are always made.

As Judge Judy says: Coulda, shoulda, woulda.

It matters not. What does matter is the now. What are we doing now? It’s never too late to act. The game is hardly over.

We need a national response. We need states to coordinate. We have Texas and Florida and Georgia and California all going their own way. The team, which should be working together, is breaking apart. Where is the coach?We need national, enforceable guidelines for essential and non-essential services. We need help for the 40,000,000 plus unemployed. We need testing. The lack of focus is causing us to make the same mistakes again. And again.

We need to move on. Ignore what happened in January of March or early May. Where are we now? Where do we need to go. What comes next? What’s the plan?

Mr. Trump, you missed the penalty kick. But the game is not over. Place the ball carefully on the penalty spot. Take a deep breath. You missed it last time. Forget about it. Step up and blast it into the back of the net.

Clear and Obvious

Today I will watch 2 NFL championship games. I don’t care who wins. The Bears are long gone. And the team I love to hate, New England, is also long gone. (Hurray)  So, I will watch just to be entertained. As it should be. Football is, after all, just entertainment. Right?

I can’t predict the winners of the contests but I can predict one thing. In each game, one of the teams will get screwed. There will be a play, maybe two, in which a ref’s decision will be overturned by video review. Video review. I hate it. Nothing has done more to take the entertainment out of sports than video review.

Let me explain. In theory (THEORY) video review is supposed to right egregious wrongs. To take the missed calls by the officials out of the mixture. To make sure that the game is fair to all. That is the theory. And sometimes it does just that. But just as often it is simply a waste of time. Well, maybe it does allow more time for commercial breaks, so there is that.

I am not against a fair game. Nor am I against overturning an obviously awful call. But therein lies the rub. Initially, in football, video review was intended to overturn calls when there was a “clear and obvious error”. Clear and obvious.

Now to me clear and obvious means, well, clear and obvious. But the video technology has gotten out of hand. Frame by frame replays. Can you see a blade of grass under the ball? Was he bobbling the ball after his butt hit the turf? Did his elbow hit the ground a millisecond before the ball broke the plane of the goal line? Where do we place the ball ? (I especially like this one, after a bunch of refs throw the ball around and one of them sets it on the turf roughly where he thinks it ought to go. Then they bring out the chains. Oops. Missed a first down by half a link!)

Anyone who watches football knows that IF they wanted to the refs could call holding on every single play. Not to mention unnecessary roughness! But if a possible penalty is questionable or does not influence the play they let it go. Common sense. And they will make mistakes. That is part of the game. So, back to video review.

My rule change. Video review should only be used on placement of the ball. Did he step out of bounds? OK. Did the ball break the plane of the goal line? OK. Otherwise, dump it. It slows down the game.  Often it interferes with the flow of the game. One team has momentum, then, we have a 5 minute break while some guy in a studio decides if a bobble is a bobble or a fumble is a fumble. We used to call those “tough breaks” and they usually evened out .

OK, if you MUST have your FAKE precision of video review in football, do it this way. If a call is made on the field that has been challenged, here is the process. The ref goes into his little booth and has 30 seconds to review the play. Within 30 seconds ANYONE should be able to tell if a “clear and obvious” error was made. If it is not OBVIOUS….duh…it should stand.

OK. Now that I have solved football, lets look at my favorite sport, soccer. A few years ago soccer implemented goal line technology. The idea was simple. Because the ref and linesman are not is a position to clearly see if a ball has crossed the plane of a goal line, let the technology decide. So, we have VAR (Video Assisted Referee).  That technology is very good and the implementation makes sense.

So, of course, the technophiles had to go further  (or did they go farther? anyway, they went too far). So now the technology is used to overturn any CLEAR and OBVIOUS errors on offsides calls. And possible handballs. And other stuff. So, the offsides rule. For anyone who is ignorant of the rules of soccer (in other words, an American) let me explain. If a player is RECEIVING a pass from another player on his team, there must be at least TWO opponents between him and the goal WHEN the pass is made. Not when he receives the pass, but when it is first kicked to him. Since the goal keeper is almost always between every player and the goal, that really means there must be ONE field player between him and the goal. Clear enough? I thought so.

Now, this is difficult for a linesman to call because he or she must keep one eye on the last defender and one eye on when the pass is made. So mistakes are sometimes made. PART OF THE GAME. Now, however, we have VAR.

So, if there is any question about an offsides call we stop the game. The VAR official (not on the field) will use precise stop action video. Now, was the player level, which is OK, or was he behind the last defender. But “behind” can mean he has part of his head just a teeny bit behind. Or he had a knee extended an inch behind. So, we stop the game and spend a few minutes checking. Lines are drawn on the screen. AHA!. His left elbow WAS just a teeny bit behind the last defender when the ball was played. But when was the ball “played” really? When it leaves the foot? When it starts the motion of the pass connected to the foot? Who knows.

My solution. If there is any doubt about a goal or an offside (forget about handball, don’t even include it) the VAR official has 30 seconds to make a decision No decision means the call stands. Clear and obvious.

Ok. Basketball. Pro basketball. I have to say I stopped watching pro basketball years ago. See one game, you’ve seen them all. We have teams of men whose body size and type are well out of the range of anything approximating “normal” for a human being. And two things happen. Someone who can jump 23 feet in the air dunks a ball and then acts like he cured cancer. Or a small guy (only 6’7″) shoots a three pointer because he can’t possibly get closer to the basket without being mauled. But I digress.

I have tried officiating basketball. It has to be the hardest sport to officiate, especially at the pro level. So I empathize. What really grinds my turtles is the clock watching. A typical game is about 2 hours long for the first 46 minutes, then another half of an hour for the last 2 minutes. Time out. Stop the clock. Check the clock. Is there .5 seconds left on the clock? Or .2 seconds? False precision.

It takes a human being an average of .25 seconds to respond to visual stimuli. So, if I am timing the game and I see the inbounds pass tipped, by the time I start the clock .25 seconds has already gone by. FALSE PRECISION. Oh, but wait, you say. NBA has precision timing whereby the ref can use his whistle to start the clock. Of course, the problem is the same. The ref still will have a lag of .25 seconds before he blows his whistle. False precision.

Which brings me to baseball, professional level. There is no sport that could be hurt less than baseball when it comes to slowing the game down. What’s a couple more hours at the ball park. Unlike football or basketball which demand some attention, or soccer which demands complete attention (hey, I just figured out why soccer is so unpopular in the USA), baseball demands non-attention. Talk with your friends. Grab a hot dog. Relax. Don’t worry. Be happy. A nice way to spend an afternoon.

But now the insidious replay has invaded baseball as well. So be it. Let em replay, just pass the mustard.

However, there is one thing I fear for baseball. The strike zone. On TV we see the strike zone, as decided by whomever decides these things on TV. A little box going roughly from a players armpits to his knees. Or thereabouts. So we can see every bad call made by an umpire. And there are plenty. It’s called “tough break”. But in reality each umpire has his own strike zone. Some give low strikes, some high strikes, some inside, some outside. Which is fine. The players all know how the ump calls strikes and balls and they adjust accordingly. Which is how it should be. But someday……

In all sports. The false precision of technology is taking a lot of the “entertainment” out of “entertainment”. As I used to tell the kids I coached in soccer, baseball, basketball and softball. “Don’t let me hear you criticize an official. They will make mistakes. Its part of the game. When you play a perfect game then you can criticize”.

I know. I know. Once you introduce technology into any arena it does not go away. And for some reason people pay homage to technology over human decision making (forgetting that technology is created by human decision making). So, I have no illusions that video review and VAR and Strike Zone Purity  (it’s coming) will only get more and more intrusive in the future.

I guess by now that should be clear and obvious.