Players in the NCAA tournament were no doubt eager to read about the discussions regarding academics, and tournament eligibility based on graduation rates.
They’d have read about them when the debates started, but what with travel and practice, they didn’t have any time.
Here we are in the most travel-heavy month of the college sports season – other than, well, all of college baseball – and there’s talk on one hand of expanding the tournament and talk on the other hand of basing eligibility on academics on the other.
Man, those hands must be tired.
Graduation rates are a nice talking point, and it’s a nice thought, but it’s also little misguided.
A degree isn’t as relevant as education, as desire, as attention spans, as integrity, as wanting to go to bed at least a wee bit more knowledgeable than when you got up.
Look around. People who own business have degrees, are running them into the ground. Our “public servants” have degrees, and that does us what?
You can talk to degree-holders that you wouldn’t hire, and talk to the degree-free who you’d promote over yourself.
A degree seems as much a certificate of attendance and memorization as it is a measure of any actual learning. In more cases than people want to admit, a degree doesn’t indicate a true level of education and learning and knowledge.
Way back when, after linotype but before the Web, I worked at my hometown’s morning newspaper while in high school, and took an interest in photography.
Our chief photographer was superb, and he started teaching a photo class at the YMCA.
Me: “Should I take that class?”
Photographer Bil Bowden: “The class can show you how to do it, but I can show you how to get it done.”
That’s stuck with me since my junior year of high school as a metaphor, in part, for what’s wrong with education and educating.
The best learning often comes from listening and watching and paying attention to good examples, which educators overlook.
Of course, the biggest problem with education isn’t state governments or misspent SPLOSTS or three dozen bickering city council members or arguing school boards or stagnating superintendents.
And the biggest problem with education is parents.
Period.
When Carror Wright came back to Bibb County, to Southwest, as head football coach, I thought about putting on a helmet and head-butt him and ask him what in the name of fun on Friday nights was he thinking?
Forget arguments or interpretations. Facts are facts and stats speak for themselves, and I wondered why he’d want a job at a school with a bad reputation – despite those working hard at changing it – and bad winning percentage.
Bibb County public school athletics aren’t in sorry shape because of administration or coaches or facilities or a lack of athletic ability.
Bibb County public school athletics are in sorry shape because of sorry parents.
This isn’t news, except to the sorry parents. Those who show up at games are socializing or whining, not supporting. They grumble about coaches and winning, but give coaches no work ethic to instruct.
They don’t see that most of these great Bibb County athletes who are so poorly coached – note sarcasm - aren’t getting in college or aren’t staying in college.
Careful about directing the blame. Schools and teachers try to inspire. Do parents? And students have to want to learn, have to aspire to being more than an idiot or statistic, must aspire to a life and relevance.
The most mediocre school and barely competent teachers are still better than what way too many Bibb County kids deal with at home.
Whatever a school and teachers accomplish – if the kid is actually in school – in seven hours is erased in 15 minutes at a home where knowledge is dismissed, where intellectual laziness is acceptable.
When parents demand more – OK, in many cases, anything – from their kids, schools will get better. Scores will rise. Depressing statistics will improve.
Academic progress is huge. It’s just that: progress. And that standard that might be better for this college sports argument, since so many things can happen to fog a graduation rate.
Sure, the college athletics and admissions process can use some tweaking and upgrading.
But having students more prepared for higher education would help all those figures and improve perceptions immeasurably, and that preparation starts at home long before anybody thinks about college.
Well, it’s supposed to.
LOUGHDMOUTHINGS
I'd imagine Dave Braine has long ago disabled whatever e-mail account many Georgia Tech fans might have gotten ahold of.
The former Tech AD - who has at least one degree - is the one who authored that absurd contract for current Tech men's basketball coach Paul Hewitt.
A $7 million buyout rollover? Really? That was remotely good business how?
Sure, it was massively premature, as are so many contract tweaks. If one good year gets you big money, shouldn't one bad year get you fired?
Here's the rub for Tech fans, who increasingly want Hewitt gone: He may stay just to prove something, to not let the naysayers win.
Coaches are nothing if not stubborn. ...
Mercer is one of only three Division I college baseball teams in Georgia with a winning record. Georgia Tech and Georgia State are the others.
Everybody's record, entering Wednesday's play: Georgia Tech, 17-2; Mercer, 14-8; Georgia State, 11-9; Georgia Southern, 11-11; Georgia, 8-12; Kennesaw State, 9-13; Savannah State, 4-11. ...
Obama and his inner circle have, for the past several months, been holding brief prayer meetings weekly in the White House chapel.
"Please, Tiger, don't come out for health care reform. Please, Tiger, don't come out for health care reform. Please, Tiger, don't come out for health care reform." ...
Go open an e-mail window and send something to your local state legislator as well as caseycagle@ltgov.ga.gov about the halls of fame.
Taxes pay for scores of things that are not self-sufficient, like parks, schools, roads, lights, cops, firemen, medical people, to say the least.
Ask them to work like the halls were in their district.
And this crap about constituencies is silly. Have you met most constituents? They're called "people" and more are increasingly poster children for medication and muzzles.
If the actions of "public servants" affected only their constituents, that'd be another story. But they affect us all.
Why don't people get that? ...
I'm a huge South Park fan, but the Tiger Woods episode, well, found the rough.
I wondered if it was too early and if we were still overloaded on Tigerbait, and maybe at least I was.
No matter. South Park is more than forgiven for the occasionally imperfection. ...
And from Dwight Perry of the Seattle Times:
"A 19-year-old man faces a possible 90 days in jail in Winona, Minn., for violating an obscure 1887 city code prohibiting cursing in public, the Winona Daily News reported.
"In a related story, White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen has been sentenced in absentia to 23 life terms."
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