Too Good to Pitch?
“The right-hander (Jericho Scott) has a fastball that tops out at about 40 mph. He throws so hard that the Youth Baseball League of New Haven told his coach that the boy could not pitch any more. When Jericho took the mound anyway last week, the opposing team forfeited the game, packed its gear and left, his coach said.”
I think this is a case where the promotion of mediocrity is working to stifle Jericho’s talents. It seems that over the past few decades America has been working really hard to ‘level the playing field’, if you will, with parents doing their best to ensure their children never have to face any sort of challenges. This stellar parenting style has already resulted in a generation of useless, unmotivated, zombie-people, whom I refer to as my contemporaries, that somehow feel they are entitled to office jobs that pay $50+/hour.
Instead of lying to our kids and helping to foster the belief that they can be successful in everything without much effort, we need to let them know that it is alright to LOSE, and show them the virtues of learning from loss. Letting your kid leave a game because they do not want to face a skilled pitcher teaches them nothing, and enabling them to act in this sort of manner is an unacceptable behavior for a parent. Parents with this mentality might as well preface their playground visits with, “Don’t worry Charlie, if there are some kids that can run faster than you, or climb the slide better than you at the park today, we will just go home and play Wii”.
What kinds of things do parents think they are setting their kids up for later in life by always leading them down the easy road? How do you think they will react when they actually do fail at something you could not protect them from? It’s any wonder China is going to be taking us over in the next few years. Our kids are in public schools where teachers teach to the test, where no child is being left behind because we are catering the curriculum to the slowest kid, where the games have no score, and every child is presented with a trophy at the end of the year just for showing up.
I am hopeful that some of the more intelligent parents in New Haven will stand up to protest the disbanding of Jericho’s team, although judging by their past behavior, it does not seem very likely. The parents that supported the removal of Jericho from the mound are citing “safety reasons” behind their decision, but judging by Jericho’s accuracy and the fact that any sport could be considered dangerous, it would seem that “safety reasons” actually translates into “the preservation of our children’s egos”.
I agree. As a parent I never thought it was a good idea to protect my kids from every “hurt” they may encounter. Becoming a successful adult means learning to overcome adversity, recognizing your strengths and talents and learning to rise above.
Seeing as I’m going to be mom in about a week, this kind of stuff really resonates. It drives me NUTS that it’s come down to things like this. I can’t stand that parents now call the schools and yell at teachers if their kids get a D on a test — your kid got a D, THEY screwed up, not the teacher! Mediocrity has become ok, and that’s not ok, and while we can raise our daughter in a way that does not promote mediocrity, that won’t change the fact that she’s in a society and peer group that isn’t motivated to thrive and succeed. ARGH!
As an instructor in a diploma-based nursing program, I am told by students in my evaluations that I am too difficult.
They also think that I teach them what I want them to know, not what is in their packaged study modules that they use to study for the licensure exam…speaking of teaching to the test…
So what I have learned is that students have been conditioned to expect mediocrity. Many of them, who are adults, cannot spell, write a complete sentence, or stay alert for 50 minutes to listen to content that has taken me 8 hours to prepare. It is completely demoralizing.
You really should rent the DVD “Declining by Degrees” which is all about the higher education system.
So why do college sports coaches earn ten times the salary of a doctorally-prepared professor? I am sure we all know the answer to that, but what this practice indicates for our society is that higher EDUCATION is really not valued.
And what party preaches this equality?
Here we go I coach a nine year old team and we have faced other teams where their pitcher was throwing in the high 40’s not topping out at 40 and we never complained we took our lumps and moved on. In our town a pitcher at this age can only pitch 2 innings a game and 6 innings in a week so I don’t understand what the problem is with the other teams the last time I checked a game was 6 innings.
AMEN!!!!
HMMMM……If I remember correctly this is a topic that we have ventured on before, and you aready know my stance on this.