Newcomer Wisdom
November 20, 2012
A group I work with in my spare time, the Refugee Development Center, sponsored a team in a local youth soccer league. Appropriately, the team’s nickname is “Newcomers.”
It took the team most of the season to score a goal; and it was in its final game of the season that the team earned its first victory.
After one game, I was enlisted to transport three players to their residences. All three were Napali. I used this time to ask their opinions about the education they were receiving in the local public school.
They had no objection to the content of the courses, but criticized the conduct of their classmates. They cited a lack of respect for teachers, and a lack of discipline. They had experienced the discipline of the stick in their homeland, and believed it would be helpful to classrooms in the US.
These young newcomers also noted that their instructional day in Nepal was almost two hours longer, plus they were in school a half-day on Saturdays.
From this conversation I was once again impressed that much of what has been done in attempts to improve public education has overlooked the obvious: stronger discipline and longer days. Most of what we do in US public education is the envy of the world. What people from other countries wonder about is the lack of discipline and time on task.
Empowering and supporting teachers’ discipline and increasing the length of the school day and year are not sexy solutions to what ails public education. They are just simpler answers mostly overlooked.
Double Win Practice Policies
February 22, 2013
The MHSAA’s third health and safety thrust for the next four years focuses on practice rules, especially early in the fall season.
Here we will be especially interested in finding “double wins,” that is, policies that simultaneously enhance acclimatization and reduce head contact.
In football, for example, this could mean increasing the number of days without protective pads before the first practice in full pads. Michigan requires three days, but there’s a trend toward four or five days in other states.
Football might also limit any day to a single practice in pads, following the lead of colleges and a growing number of state high school associations that are restricting two-a-day practices in pads on the same day or on consecutive days.
Both of these changes could make acclimatization more gradual and healthy, and reduce the occurrences for contact to the head: two priorities as practice policies are reviewed and revised.
The MHSAA’s sport committees, sometimes with their work augmented by that of special task forces, are being charged with these responsibilities.