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In Reply to: Friday Night Lights posted by jamesgarvin on February 16, 2005 at 08:23:15:
I am from Northwest Louisiana and have relatives in Oklahoma and Arkansas. Dallas is a few hours away. It is weird driving past small towns and you see the brand-new large football stadium...big enough to hold the entire town's population.At the university that I attend, I was walking past a kid in a wheelchair talking to someone. I overheard him say, "They were great to me after the injury. I get tutoring, everything." Then he paused and added, "I never realized before how much schooling I DIDN'T get. When I could play I could coast through and it was okay. Now I'm really getting an education and all it costs me is this chair. I'll never get out of it."
In one of my classes, I am supposed to tutor kids individually and in small groups. Monday I reviewed basic economics with a student. His teacher told me that the kid was not a bad student, he was just behind. He had been a good athlete in elementary and middle school and everyone had just passed him through. But in high school the kid turned out to not be such a good athlete. Suddenly, no one was "just passing him through" anymore. The student was taking his situation with more grace than you would expect, but he was way, way behind his peers in everything and was aware of it and his complicity in it.
The book is better than the movie, but the movie isn't bad. It is strange, though, to read the previous posts in this thread. It's one thing to live in this part of the country where football is so important, another to read others talk about our obsessions here. It's like what one sports writer here wrote: "LSU could win a dozen national titles in baseball and it wouldn't mean anything compared to the championship Saban won in football."
Follow Ups:
...a real basketball coach in a low income area on the other side of my county in CA. He realized the kids on his winning team had no future if they didn't get an education, too. So he locked the gym and the team suffered their first loss by a forfeit until they got their grades up. Aparently, it worked.If it were a small town in Texas and he was the football coach, he would have been shot.
Interesting comments - I have had similar experiences. One summer during college I worked at a good sized University in my home town. (The University is part of the Big East conference.) Among the summer help were a handful of recently-recruited football players who had to work in order to satisfiy their athletic scholarships. These kids were just out of high school, but displayed peaking and comprehension skills of (about) a 7th grader. It was quite clear that their athletic prowess had allowed them to breeze through school without doing much academically. And if they panned out as solid football players, they would most likely skate through college as well. Then if they don't make it to the NFL (which only a couple do annually at this school,) they are in for a huge shock when they graduate and have to find employment.
And what is really sad is, if they do make it in the NFL, very few think about putting away their money and saving it and investing some of it for the future. There is a better chance of making and keeping really big money if one makes it in the NBA or baseball, but as your numbers show, how many students can realistically count on that happening? Not many.I am in a political science class where last night the instructor reminded the students that "the one thing that can never be taken away from you is your education." For probably a third of the students, that instructor might as well have been talking to the wall. Youth and invulnerablity and all that. Oh well, I shouldn't point fingers. I felt the same way at 19 or 20. It's part of why I am back in school today!
Take care and have fun!
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