Gym Class Zeros

"Wouldn't you believe it
It's just my luck,

No recess"

     Contemporary Canadian society appears to be slowly splitting into two groups.  One group religiously watches what they eat,, has all sorts of gadgets to analyze, measure and provide digital bio-feedback about their workouts and they tend to share this info with all using the miracle of the Internet.  The other group, plainly put, is a group of fat slobs who need mechanized assistance in crossing the street and can often be found with a tank of oxygen close at hand.  While both groups have their pros and cons to join, this second group, less advertised and visible than the first, is worrying.  Not from a compassionate, sympathetic view point, but in a rather selfish way.  Gimme a break, I am an entitled self-absorbed Millennial after all.  

     

     This group of panting behemoths are, and will continue to be, an enormous strain on our socialized healthcare system.  And while I'll gladly reach into my pockets to help pay for a kid's leukaemia treatment or to help the victims of a late night parkour accident, I'm a little hesitant to do the same for a 350lb porker who doesn't have the good sense to pass on the 20th beer and the third helping of McCain's Deep and Delicious.  With the economy the way it is (read: shitty), I suspect I'm not the only one.  All those artificial hips, knee replacements and diabetic socks aren't going to pay for themselves.  Heck, it's already a strain on the system.

     So rather than spend billions trying to help these geriatric bundles of bad decisions stay alive just long enough to scare the grandkids when they come visit at the hospital, let's spend the money revamping Gym Class.  

     Yes, Gym Class.  Phys-Ed.  Along with lunch and grinding up on grade 9 hotties, at the after school dance, it's most hormone filled boys favourite class.  Too bad it's current state is a joke that sees most kids barely break a sweat, with ball room dancing, Capture the Flag and and other manner of bullshittery instead of true sport.

     

     Let's face it, most kids today can't afford to play competitive sports these days anyway, so why not turn Gym Class from playtime to something you actually have to try at.  Rather than have kids graded on knowing the differences between CFL and NFL rules, why not judge them based on the ability to learn new physical skills.  I can already hear the gasps from the parents of chubby kids saying that isn't fair!  The horror!  Well guess what, it's not fair that a kid can pass a gym class without the ability to run a mile or do 20 push ups either.  Instead of making gym class a session of intellectual masturbation on the rules of doubles badminton, let's encourage actual skill development.  If you had a unit on sprinting, then the fastest kid in the class gets the best mark.  Make passing the class contingent on actually learning a new skill, rather than reading about one.  

     If you have to study and work hard at calculus or chemistry, then why not also in Phys-Ed?  If you suck at physics, you go get extra help and balance a few more equations.  If you suck at gym and using your body, maybe you need to put in some more work there too.   To learn your multiplication tables it takes repetitive practise, same as nailing a baseline 3 pointer.

    Oh, and one more thing.  Make in mandatory throughout grades K-12, so the pudgy little kids who need it the most aren't allowed to skip it, lest their fragile egos be bruised.  No, not everyone will graduate with the manual dexterity of an Olympic calibre gymnast, but it might go a long way towards adding a certain level of shall we say, physicality to society that is sorely lacking.

     There are many types of intelligence and being able to sit in a desk and do long division is but one.  Implement a tougher, more skills based and competitive gym class, and I bet you dollars to gluten-free vegan donuts we end up spending less on health care in the long term./

     If that system proves successful, maybe it will lead to a work place recess program.  Wouldn't that be some fun?

(source)

     

      

      

Of Some Consequence

"You better think fast
Think fast
'Cause you never know
What's coming around the bend
You better not blink
The consequence is a bigger word than you think
It's bigger than you or me"

Ah, the sweet sounds, sights and smells of June.  The two major denominations of the One True Religion of Sport have dwindled to just a pair of teams each by the time school lets out, their numbers whittled away by the system of Natural Selection, otherwise known as the playoffs.  Lose and you go home, win and you earn yet another chance to prove your worthiness.  
     
     Final exams represent a similar mechanism that shapes young minds in our so called education system.  Pass your tests, ace your exams and you earn the right to continue to the next level.  Flunk your tests, stay up all night partying and forget to study and you'll most likely fail and be forced to re-do a course, a test or even a full year of school.  This process essentially works on the same principle as its sporting cousin, with the best and brightest moving on and the less bright and not so capable being left behind, in order to better themselves for the future.  
     
     Except the system is hardly being implemented as designed.  Rather than being rewarded for their lack of effort and academic mediocrity with litres of red ink and instruction to return to their desks to repeat their failed endeavour until they get it right, legions of dullards are now shuffled through the ranks, lest their fragile pride and self-esteem take a bruise.  I'm not sure where or when everyone started getting automatic passes, regardless of effort, but I know it this thinking has infected the hollowed grounds of academia from the lowly primary grades right up to the dog and pony show of graduate school.
     
     Grade schoolers can barely read the label on a can of soup, but the teachers and parents worry keeping the kids back will cause self-esteem issues, so on you go, you little illiterates.  High schoolers who don't hand in assignments, but due to school policy can't be given a zero and therefore pass and move up the ladder.  A former physics grad student I once knew told me as a teacher's assistant (TA), he was not allowed to mark with red ink because seeing the red was too traumatic for the would-be atom splitters.  I myself was scolded by a dinosaur of a prof for taking too many marks off a written assignment for spelling and grammar, forcing me to assign passing grades to illegible word salads.  Another tale of whoa(!) I've heard was about a student who didn't attend a single lecture all semester long, but as she had a doctor's note, was awarded the credit lest her depression worsen. Call me old fashioned, but I firmly believe you should have to actually show up to pass a course.  
     
     Personal anecdotes aside, the trend is clear and obvious.  The kids today are being taught that there are no negative consequences to their actions.  Everyone passes and gets credit, so why work hard when you can just make a bullshit excuse and get a rule change.  It's problematic, it's real and it's dangerous.  We're conditioning a generation of minds woefully prepared for reality.
     
     Would a hockey coach encourage his star forwards to carry the puck across the blue line, eyes firmly glued on their CCM Tacks?.  No, he wouldn't because the negative repercussion of such an act could be catastrophic.  Ask Eric Lindros or Paul Kariya. 
    
     Does an offensive coordinator tell his slot backs to run routes over the middle and not to worry about violence-loving middle linebackers and safeties who want to separate his head from his shoulders?  Highly doubt it, buddy.  
     
     By shuffling students though the Education Industrial Complex, we are doing an enormous disservice to all.  Kids are having their egos and self-esteem artificially inflated while simultaneously divorcing their little minds from the concept of negative consequences.  Let's do ourselves a real favour and start failing some people.  
     
     They'll be alright.   

(Source)

De-Sensitivity Training

"You find me offensive, I find you offensive

For finding me offensive

Hence, if I should draw the line on any fences

If so to what extent

If at any should I go

'Cause it's getting expensive"

      Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words, words will really cause people to lose their shit.  I'm not the first wanna-be blogger with a pen and a pad to point out that over the last decade or so, people are becoming more and more offended at seemingly less and less provocation.  Put bluntly, we are becoming more sensitive by the day, with people of all shape, size and colour wailing on about how they have been offended in all forms of media, print, TV, Internet, postcard, Etch-a-sketch.  I don't think I'm being alarmist when I write that the bar to being offended has been lowered so much, you are now at risk of stubbing your toe on it.  

    

     The cries of the offended come from all directions and have a common theme.  Something is said, typed or shown, and by golly some other group takes an offense, which is really being defensive, if you ask me.  Naturally, the offended wishes and often demands that the offensive group be silenced and censored, lest their poor little ears and eyes hear and see something of which they disapprove.  Which is akin to saying we don't like that, so don't say it. Ever. Again.  

     

     Now, don't get me wrong oh Internet warriors of justice, actions and deeds can be and often are offensive.  Acts and deeds that are abhorrent to our not-so-common sense of humanity.  But actual actions and doing deeds are a far cry from words and sounds and symbols.

     

     Much of the new found offensivism, if I may coin the term, is rooted in our ever growing sensitivities, and I'm not talking about peanut allergies here folks.  Since when did we all become so gosh darn sensitive about words and symbols?  I'm not too sure on this one, but if I had to venture a guess I'd say it has something to do with how certain words are banned from a young age.  You might be familiar with a few of these words yourself, you bunch of shitbirds.  By sealing off certain words and ideas, we only feed the power they have, heightening their impact.  Perhaps it is time we tore down the artificial walls built up around such words and emptied them of all meaning.  

     

     Maybe this will be a sort of cultural novocaine, numbing our sensitivities and encouraging true freedom of speech, rather than provoking waves of offended cries the minute someone doesn't take too kindly to an idea.  

     

     We need de-sensitivity training.  The polar fucking opposite of what we have now where sensitivities are not only encouraged, but reinforced every step of the way by ensuring everyone is hyper aware of how offensive words and symbols are by banning them at the first inkling of offensiveness.  

     

     Now how about this for a politically incorrect alternative, as soon as kids are old enough to understand, we rationally and calmly explain to them what words mean and that many words only hold the meaning you give them.  No words are out of bounds.  Encourage hurling different word combinations at each other until these words are stripped of any and all meaning and revert merely to the sounds and symbols they truly are.  Imagine, Lennon style, a world without 'bad words'.  If you weren't told words were bad and that you shouldn't say them, would you give them any meaning?  You're a nog-woddler.  What's that you ask?  It's a made up word I just thought of and it has zero meaning.  Now take this word, tell a group of impressionable kids that they should never call anyone that name and two things will happen.  1) They'll immediately start calling each either that name and 2) they'll associate it with negative emotions.  Don't believe me?  Get someone to chew you a new one (one being an asshole, the nerve!) in a language you don't understand, perhaps Arabic or Russian.  Bet you don't bat one eyelash, why?  Because you nog-woddler, you have no meanings attached to the sounds!  And without meaning, you can't be offended anymore than you can be offended at the sound of the wind blowing.  

     

     Listen, I'm not saying sit the kiddies in a circle and have them cuss each other out until the words lose all shock value, but wait, that is what I'm saying.  Maybe then we'd all be a little less sensitive about shit (gasp!).

     

     George Orwell, author of such hits as "1984", the year of my birth coincidentally, anticipated our current state of affairs when he said "First they take the words, then they take the meanings".

     Perhaps the anti-dote to having the list of approved sounds from shrinking is to realize that's all they are, just sounds.  And last I checked, sounds and symbols couldn't hurt anyone.  So maybe we can all agree the next time we think we are offended, to remember that although sticks and stones and RPG's and ICBM's can be very hurtful, words can never break us. 

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Contraction Pains

     "There's those thinking more or less, less is more
     But if less is more, how you keepin' score?
     Means for every point you make your level drops
     Kinda like you're startin' from the top"

     Our collective appetite for more of everything is bordering on insatiable.  More condos, more bandwidth, more home-runs and more choices.  This attitude has infected everything from fast-food portion sizes to sports franchises.  NHL czar Bettman's latest attempt to re brand hockey and put a team in Vegas could be the dumbest idea since I thought I could re-use coffee grinds to save money.  That plan ended badly and so will putting a hockey team in Sin City.
  
     Vegas thrives on gambling and offers society a badly needed outlet for it's degenerate tendencies.  A hot bed for an NHL expansion team it is not.  No other major league sports team calls Vegas its home and that is likely for a good reason.  People go to Vegas to drink and to gamble and they come back with good stories and less money than when they arrived.  Not to watch pro sports, much less hockey, a sport with a reputation for being a Canadian bush league display of on-ice thuggery in the minds of most Americans who live south of about Lincoln, Nebraska, save for a small pocket of LA.  The Thrashers were a joke, as are the Coyotes, the Hurricanes and the Panthers and anywhere else they have to rinse the Olympia tires free of sand before it goes on the ice.

     Oh no, brothers, expansion is hardly the answer.  More like expansion's reciprocal, contraction.  Axe a few teams and increase the quality of the on-ice product.  No, it wouldn't help with the league's bottom line, but it will help with overall competitiveness.  A couple dozen teams would probably be enough and even then, there would still be 8 teams that wouldn't make the playoffs.  Maybe that would stoke the fires under a few of the league's prima donnas who have a job simply by virtue of rosters needing to be filled. 

     Restrict supply to manage demand, OPEC-style.  In fact, that game plan could be applied elsewhere in society for the greater good.  Why not shutter some of the smaller, shall we say crappier universities in Canada as well?  Tighten up competition for those hallowed diplomas, which are quickly becoming a very expensive gold star.  Yes, contraction of the education system, in order to preserve the quality.  We've got too many uni's with too many seats to fill from the farm team feeder system of high school, and right now a ticket to The Show is just too easy to come by.  And when something is easy to get, its value goes down.  To stop the hemorrhaging of youngsters graduating with eye-ball deep debt and into a bleak job market, why not contract the number of seats by say 20% or 30% and let the market forces take over.  Restrict supply to preserve the value of a degree, because right now a university degree in Canada is roughly equivalent to owning a Toyota Corolla.  Everyone's got one, and it's not really something to boast about.  
  
    Admit it, the talent pool for university is already pretty watered down and things are likely going to get worse, with every politician promising to expand the number of available seats because we're a greedy, hoarding society and we really don't like anything being taken away from us.  If there were fewer universities, it would up the prestige of the remaining ivory towers and force true competition for fewer available seats, instead of admitting every 18 yr old with a hard-on and an OSAP loan.  Parents of course, would wail and gnash their teeth, crying out how their kid is really bright and deserves to be distracted by Facebook while sitting in a 400 seat lecture hall while listening to some prof with a strong accent go on about Useless Knowledge 101.  
     
     Yes, contraction would hurt for a bit, because rather than getting something new, something is taken away.  But is mindless expansion, whether in the NHL or for university students, really helping anyone or is it just a quick fix to make a quick buck?  Where does it end?  An NHL team in every city and a diploma on every wall?  

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