A Bit of Wisdom From Two Grandfathers at a Baseball Game
and a new cowboy hat
As many of you know, I write a monthly column in my local paper that I often share here too since so many of you live far away and won’t be picking up our free weekly paper at the grocery store or coffee shop. The original column ran in The Valley Breeze here.
(Note: I had no idea when I wrote it that the US History and Civics scores for 8th graders on the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP) would be coming out a week later. Now that we know that only 13 percent of 8th graders are considered proficient in US History, my timing seems perfect though in a sad kind of way. I spoke a bit about the big downturn in scores on The National Desk last week and will share that link at the bottom of this post.)
Grandparents make great sports fans for their grandchildren. At a recent high school baseball game, my dad got into a conversation with another player on the team’s grandfather and oh my, did they get to talking. Both had been college baseball players and now, here they were more than fifty years later, watching their grandsons play on a cloudy Saturday in Providence, Rhode Island. My dad was an outfielder at Boston College on a team that went to the college world series in 1965. His new pal had been a star pitcher at Providence College back when PC had a baseball team and then went on to play in the major leagues with the Washington Senators.
While the septuagenarian and octogenarian reminisced about the days of yore out on the diamond, they also hit on a crucially important topic that applies far beyond baseball: the shift away from the fundamentals of the game. Their conversation got me thinking that this modern tendency to undervalue the fundamentals is a problem that plagues us in many areas beyond sports. The first to come to mind was K-12 education.
Two defining characteristics of something being fundamental is that it is “basic” and “essential.” I suspect that if we polled every Rhode Islander, they’d agree that reading is fundamental, that teaching reading is a basic and essential responsibility of a school system. Students need to learn to decode, students need to build their vocabulary, students need to acquire background knowledge so that they can comprehend what they are reading. We are failing at this. Two thirds of students in the Ocean State are not proficient readers and despite massive efforts by literacy advocates and parents of children with dyslexia, teacher preparation programs continue to graduate teachers without the proper training in how to effectively teach children to read.
Students are not learning grammar in public schools anymore. Most students today only hear the word “pronoun” in the context of gender identity and “preferred pronouns,” but often have no idea what purpose they serve in language more broadly. We hear more debates about whether students see their racial, sexual and gender identities reflected in their assigned texts than about whether or not those same students can actually read those texts. An exasperated middle school teacher told me about how much basic knowledge his students lack and how little we are doing to address it. One example he shared was that a large proportion of his students did not know which ocean they were swimming in at the Rhode Island beaches. This is how far we have drifted.
Geography, grammar, arithmetic, civics—knowledge we once took for granted is disappearing and instead we are building our educational house on the weak foundation of electronic devices and passing fads.
We used to teach kindness and the golden rule, to treat others the way we’d like to be treated. Now, high priced consultants who specialize in diversity, equity and inclusion are considered a necessary expenditure, an essential part of delivering a robust education. And so are contracts with outside vendors who administer highly intrusive surveys about gender fluidity, suicide and race that suck up time and budgets and are rarely, if ever, shown to have made a positive difference.
We have taken our eye so far off the ball. We would be wise to listen to those old-timers at the high school baseball game and get back to basics. It’s high time to focus on the fundamentals of the game, whatever game that may be.
On the fun front, I found out yesterday that the weight limit for a jockey in the Kentucky Derby is 125 pounds so in that moment, my dreams of becoming a racer of thoroughbreds immediately went up in flames. (Their average height is 5’3”, by the way.) BUT, it was finally the perfect occasion to wear the cowboy hat that my husband got me for Christmas in Nashville.
Talk soon,
Erika