It’s World Cup Week in the middle school that my son attends. Where previously the last week or so of “instructional time” was devoted to the WALL–E Film Festival, this year students are dozing while they watch soccer.
This is the culmination of a year where school system educrats decided to add an additional 10 minutes to the school day to make up for the time missed due to “global warming” last winter.
That decision accomplished two goals: one, our schools were back in compliance with state law mandating a minimum number of hours of instruction each year (who would have thought time spent walking in the hall didn’t count?) and two, no students has to miss yet another aimless kick toward goal by some unknown foreigner.
Narrow–minded taxpayers may be wondering why students are watching TV instead of working. But your calendar–based thinking is passé. School doesn’t end Friday, it ends when the last Standards of Learning (SOL) test is complete the week before.
The final week of “instructional” time is the victory lap.
The logical question to ask here is why can’t all those highly paid wizards in the school superintendent’s office check the calendar before choosing the SOL date?
Moving the SOLs to the end of the year would add effective teaching time to the year and let the school year have a natural end, rather than the current anti–climactic grind to a halt.
Sure, some of the students would miss their annual June exposure to WALL–E, but they would still have the pre–Christmas week showing. It’s obvious the kids know the year ended with the SOL tests. That’s the reason teachers opt for the film festival instead of attempting to instruct the inmates. Why is this so difficult for the education PhDs to understand?
But I don’t want to let the teachers off the hook completely. It is possible to add a mild educational component to the World Cup. Students could learn the capitals of all the nations participating in the Cup. Or they could compute the average annual tonnage of illegal drugs smuggled to the US by gangs from participating countries. They could even estimate the number of players who would apply for asylum if the Cup were being played in the US.
Besides, being forced to watch a soccer game is very close to child abuse. I remember when the World Cup used to pass quietly with a few wire service mentions in the back of the sports page and a brief summary of the lives lost in stampedes and drinking games.
Now, coverage is wall–to–wall. Why can’t broadcasters leave soccer coverage to Univision and resume normal programming for the rest of us? The vast majority of those countries hate us, at least until time to fill out the application for a green card, so why boost their TV ratings?
Pretending to be excited about soccer is the latest affection sophisticates are trying to jam down our middle–American throats. Now Soccer is the culturally correct pastime that smart people must adopt, like flossing or reading the operator’s manual for a bidet.
You can make a feeble case for watching the US team play, since making the final 32 is newsworthy, but why waste time watching games between other teams? I’ve seen two soccer games in my life (Moscow Dynamo Vs. A Bunch of Ringers in Dallas and the Sylvester Stallone movie “Victory”) and I know why soccer fans have a reputation for violence. Some people will do anything to relieve the tedium.
Besides, soccer is never going to be more than a minor sport in the US. By my count at least two generations of Americans have been marinated in soccer during their youth, yet the game just never seems to catch on.
Yes the county is filled with youth soccer fields and housewives in vans will run you off the road in their eagerness to get Brittany to soccer practice, but when Brittany grows up she goes to NFL games.
And please spare me attacks on my sporting chauvinism. As a retired Rugby player I know all about minor European sports. In many ways Rugby resembles soccer: Rugby is played around the world, it has a world championship and the US rarely makes the finals.
But Rugby players don’t try to make watching the game an index of your cultural literacy. On the contrary, during most of my career we would have settled for a single Port–a–John within 20 meters of the field.
Michael R. Shannon (The Whole Shebang (mostly)) is a Virginia-based public relations and media consultant with MANDATE: Message, Media & Public Relations who has worked in over 75 elections on three continents and a handful of islands.
