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Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.
Rule 12: Smoking does not make you look cool. It makes you look moronic. Next time you’re out cruising, watch an 11-year-old with a butt in his mouth. That’s what you look like to anyone over 20. Ditto for “expressing yourself” with purple hair and/or pierced body parts.
Rule 13: You are not immortal. (See Rule No. 12.) If you are under the impression that living fast, dying young, and leaving a beautiful corpse is romantic, you obviously haven’t seen one of your peers at room temperature lately.
Rule 14: Enjoy this while you can. Sure parents are a pain, school’s a bother, and life is depressing. But someday you’ll realize how wonderful it was to be a kid. Maybe you should start now. You’re welcome.
Before I continue relating this to youth sports I think it best to get some facts straight regarding when this material was written, where the pendulum is currently swinging, and where the implied emphasis of responsibility is placed for success.
Sykes’ book, “Dumbing Down our Kids,” was published in 1996, a good distance of time from our current year of 2009, and a lot can happen in 13 years. In contrast, “50 Rules Kids Won’t Learn in School” was published in 2007.
Presently, I have only read other individuals’ accounts of both of these pieces, but I would venture to guess that his “50 Rules” book expands on the concepts he presents in “Dumbing Down our Kids” just based on the titles alone and the list of some of his “rules” above.
With regard to that pendulum swinging, many of you would be surprised to learn that some schools are moving toward giving ½ credit to students for work (homework) that is either done poorly or not even turned in.
For example, I gave an 18-point assignment recently that approximately 50 percent of a class did not even bother to turn in. Under the stipulation above, I would have to give nine points minimum to everyone even if they made more mistakes than that, or did not turn in the worksheet.
The idea behind this is that if I actually gave them the score they “earned,” like say a 0, and they continued to do poorly on work, or didn’t bother to do it, they would put themselves so far behind they would not be able to pass the course in fairly short order.
That giving them more opportunity to right the ship, so to speak, is a better method for learning than is applying the natural consequences that exist based on the effort they put in (or based on what they really know at the time), thus keeping the student from digging themselves a hole they cannot get out of.
Taking it a step further, there is a good deal of talk about not counting any homework toward their grade, a step up from No. 8 on the list of letting students re-do work until they get it right and then counting it toward their grade. That as long as they do well on tests and other assessments, that is all that matters.
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