Monkey Business
August 24, 2012
I hesitate to assert that my wife and I are hikers, but we certainly are avid walkers. Walking is a routine of our daily life; and it’s a highlight when we travel. Walking is the means by which we absorb the sights, sounds and smells of each locale, while faster modes of tourism pass us by.
One of my wife’s delights as we travel is to discover monkeys in the wild; so sometimes monkey sighting has been the goal of walks, for example, in Costa Rica and Panama. This has made us familiar with howler monkeys; and I’m sorry to say, it’s caused me to see parallels between howler monkeys and modern media.
The growls of the howler monkeys send messages through the treetops. One howler begins, and others forward the message for miles. I’ve been told by locals (I’m no expert) that the monkey culture doesn’t reward creativity and that there’s an expectation that the message at the end of the line is the same as it began.
Sort of like forwarding an email, photo or video; or sharing a posting on Facebook. Or like the wire services’ distribution of news through traditional media. It’s rare that anyone vets the information; and retractions or corrections are even rarer.
I read in Barbara Kingsolver’s novel The Lacuna that the most important thing about a story, and about a person, is what you don’t know, which gets to the heart of the weakness of much of modern media. Yes, because of the volume of information in today’s 24/7/365 “news” cycle with thousands of channels and the universal access to reporting news through social media, we’re likely to get most of the facts, eventually; but the salient and true facts are likely to be lost in the rush and the clutter.
Set at a time before television, Kingsolver’s protagonist in The Lacuna writes in 1946: “The newsmen leap on anything . . . The radio is the root of the evil, their rule is: No silence, ever. When anything happens, the commentator has to speak without a moment’s pause for gathering wisdom. Falsehood and inanity are preferable to silence. You can’t imagine the effect of this. The talkers are rising above the thinkers.”
However real that observation would have been then, it’s clear today that cable television, talk radio and the Internet have raised the talking-without-thinking effect to heights that would have been unimaginable in the 1940s.
Tracking the Transfer Rule
September 19, 2017
We are not the first generation of school leaders to be concerned about athletic transfers in secondary school sports.
Lewis L. Forsythe, in his 1950 book Athletics in Michigan High Schools, described his era and earlier this way: “... there were enough who transferred for advantage, as they thought, in athletic opportunities to give wide currency to the term ‘tramp athletes.’ These were usually students who became ineligible in schools in which they had first enrolled, or became otherwise disaffected in their home situation and went elsewhere to continue school. It was possible, for example, for a boy to play football at Ann Arbor one season, drop out of school until the next March first, and then enter Jackson High school. Here he could make himself eligible for baseball and track by merely ‘passing’ in ten hours (later twelve hours) of work from time to time according to the reporting methods of the school, and then leave without taking final examinations. The next semester he might enroll in Detroit High School, and, by satisfying eligibility requirements for the current semester, play football in that school. With no age limit and no required check-up on eligibility in another school, this could go on for at least five years.”
Mr. Forsythe, writing in 1950, cited concerns as early as 1901, which led the state athletic committee to adopt the first transfer rule for school sports in Michigan. It required a student going from one secondary school to another to present a certificate from administrators of the school left that the student was eligible under the athletic rules of the time. The issue of the time was that students who were performing poorly in the classroom of one school would attempt to escape ineligibility due to academic deficiencies by transferring to another school
Two years later, a rule was adopted to address undue influence (recruiting) that required all schools to sever all relationships with a school that attempts to influence any athlete to change schools.
A year later (1904), this proposal was debated: “A student who has played on a football team, or on a baseball team, or who has taken part in any track events, going from one school to another, shall be ineligible to enter any secondary athletic contest for one year, unless the parents of such student move from one school district to another ...”
It took 20 years for a rule change to actually be made in this direction: “No student who has been enrolled as a high school student in any high school shall be permitted to participate in any interscholastic contest as a member of any other high school until he has been enrolled in such school for one full semester, unless the parents of such student actually change their residence to the second school district. In the latter case, the student will be as eligible as he was in the school from which he withdrew.”
There, in the first code of rules promulgated by the Michigan High School Athletic Association in 1924, is the core of our 2017 rule ... ineligible for one semester, with the exception for an actual change of residence.
Today we debate that the period of ineligibility is too short and the residency exception is too lenient.
As for the period of ineligibility, across the U.S., one year is more common than one semester. As for the residency exception, it exists everywhere. In fact, in some places the “transfer” rule is referred to as the “residency” rule.