'Why I'm raising my son to be a nerd'

This reply comes from a self-described nerd. One who longed to have a consistent jump shot or have a shorter baseball swing. One who encouraged his son to start playing sports way earlier than he did as a kid.

I get and agree we need to celebrate academics more, but I don't think the problem is bad grades or test scores. That might be a symptom, but not the actual problem. I think the biggest problem is how our educational system (like most of our systems) is set up.

Our current educational system in most places provides children with near-constant education over a 9.5-month span. Then, they get a 2.5-month vacation. Take that much time away from anything and it takes a while to recover when you go back to school, work or sports. We spend quite a bit of time refreshing what we were taught in the year past. Not to mention, we seem to teach to test and not teach to learn.

But knowledge itself is only part of the equation for success. You have to know how to apply that knowledge and then share it with others. Like Lee Iacocca said, you can have brilliant ideas, but if you can't get them across, your ideas won't get you anywhere.

That's where I think sports comes into play. Sports doesn't just provide a level of social interaction, it shows how people can accomplish more when they work together. Yeah, teachers may put kids in groups or teams for certain projects, but at the end of the day, each kid is graded individually. If I had to choose between two bookish nerds with 4.0s who rarely interacted with others and two sociable kids with B averages, then I'll take the B students.

 

Tell that to all of the professional athletes I covered who read at a second-grade level.

 

Okay, I will. And then what?

 

Obviously, the ideal situation is to be good at both.

Go to a class reunion and find the 10 biggest meathead jocks and find out how they're doing 10-20 years later.

Then go find the the biggest nerds and see how they're doing now.

I'm betting on the nerds.

 

Take the 10 most successful athletes in the school and 10 random kids, I'll bet on the athletes at the reunion.

 

Stumbled across the homecoming king/QB from my high school on FB the other day. Still a good-looking guy. Runs a business selling ball caps. Trying to break into the PGA market. Seems like the biz is doing well.

Thought it would make an interesting story -- what happens when the HS QB and homecoming king turns out to be charming and successful 25 years later?

 

I have a son who is a nerd. I encouraged him to play football.

He needed to learn how to work within a team and even learn to take crap from other kids.

In the classroom he would argue with his math teacher about how do to certain problems and big-time other kids.

For two years, he didn't like football because he was new and the other kids would get on him if he acted like he knew everything.

He likes football now (and school), and I think the team environment has been real valuable for him.

 

I think the better comparison would be to take the football and basketball teams and take the honor students.

Eliminate all of those who were both. Now, compare the rest.

That was the debate here, jocks vs. nerds?

 

Do you know of a study that bears this out? I have wondered about that often, and my guess is that kids who play sports (but not necessarily excel) benefit from the discipline and other life lessons, while the superstars have a hard time adjusting to life in the cubicle when their jump shot doesn't matter.

I also think sports has changed pretty radically from the way we viewed it, and a pre-teen to teen-age kid nowadays is playing with almost a professional-level time commitment and the sense of entitlement that often goes along with it.

 

Jocks aren't the only meatheads out there. Looking back, I'd say I was pretty meatheaded for a kid with a 3.4/4.0.

I thought I was going to be better off than pretty much everybody else in my class. Nearly 20 years later, I'd argue that I'm probably just in the top 20 percentile. Not bad, but not what I thought I was going to be.

Would I have done better if I was a jock? Dunno. But I do seem to rely (or want to rely) more on myself than involve my colleagues. Might be ego. Might be because I didn't do a lot of team sports growing up. If I learned to rely/help others growing up, I might have been better off.

 

My high school required that all freshmen play one sport. It was a great rule that of course was overturned over a decade ago. You'd be surprised how many kids who had never played an organized sport discovered that they liked it and continued all four years.

Although the same school has about half the sports that it did in 1988, so maybe it's understandable that they got rid of it.

 

Eh, that seems like a relatively minor thing to quibble about. Example: The big state U I went to had a centennial scholarship program, which would pay all your room and board and tuition fees for four years. Unlike an athletic scholarship, you didn't have any qualifiers on it - you didn't have to be an honor student in college, you just needed the HS GPA (3.5+ unweighted) and 1200+ on the SATs (when it was out of 1600). There were more of these scholarship floating around than athletic scholarships.

If you're really smart, there are a lot of really good academic scholarships floating out there. However, it's just unlikely that they're going to be at the Ivys of the world, and you might have to be OK with being at Central State U.