Fade to Gray: Removing excellence
It’s high school graduation season, time for the kids who are almost adults to cross the stage, give momand dad a wink and jet off into the next chapter of their lives.
I don’t know who the valedictorian and salutatorians are at Mason City high school in Ohio but I hope they take a thousand photos after receiving their much deserved awards. Why so many? Because those students will be the last students at Mason City to ever get those awards.
The school officials have decided that handing out awards to the top two students puts unfair pressure on the rest of the kids in school and is mentally unhealthy.
So here we are. It started with giving every child in sports a trophy, to telling the children competing on the field, “we’re not keeping score today” and now we are telling 17-year-olds we don’t’ think they can handle a child at the desk next to them getting better grades.
I know I run the risk of sounding like a dinosaur when I say this but there is virtue in losing. There is virtue in getting your butt kicked and coming in last. There is virtue in not winning when someone else worked harder and performed better than you.
Before I get the flood of emails let me say this first. I don’t care if you want to give every five-yearold who plays on the soccer team a pretty blue ribbon when the season is done. They are very young, nobody really cares what the score is and what they are doing on the field rarely resembles soccer anyway.
It’s more like 20 bunny rabbits all chasing around the same carrot.
But as we get older the sports become real, the teams have tryouts and not everyone gets chosen. I think at that point we have to say it is OK to keep score and hand out awards to the actual winners.
Some of the most valuable lesson’s you will ever learn in this world will come from sitting on the bench and watching someone else raise the trophy over their head. It is in those moments, no matter your age, you decide how you want to react to that feeling of dread that sits in your gut like a bad bowl of stew.
Will you quit now? Will you work harder now? Will you look around at your teammates and realize they don’t work nearly as hard as you or care as much, so you need to get the heck out of there and go join a team that does?
It’s fashionable for people my age to pick on today’s kids and call them soft. It’s not fair and more importantly it’s not true. Kids are kids are kids. If you had a time machine and went back two-thousand years you’d find children are not that much different. When much is expected of us, much is usually given in the way of effort.
I come from a middle class neighborhood in South Troy. Kids from my block don’t generally grow up and get to be the main anchor on a TV station. The only way that happens is because I was challenged at an early age and felt the sting of defeat.
Sometimes it didn’t come by way of a team with fancy uniforms but a kid who was bigger than me and decided to “clothesline” me in a tackle football game without the luxury of pads or helmets. A painful but useful lesson in how the world works.
I went to St. Joseph’s elementary school where the nuns were tough. Not mean, tough. There’s a difference. If I screwed something up I was kept after class until I understood the mistake and fixed it.
I went to LaSalle where giving a mediocre effort wasn’t accepted. All of us, every boy in that school, were told we were better than what we showing and they expected us to work and show them more; to be our better self. Not just in the classroom but the community.
Show me anyone who runs a successful business and I’ll bet you all the money in my pocket they can tell you about every bad beat they ever had. by that i mean ever time things didn’t work out and they lost, sometimes a lot. Put another way, the potholes of life may wreck a few tires but they make us better drivers; certainly more attentive.
The school superintendent in Ohio says he supports the elimination of the top honors at the high school because teenage suicide rates have been growing and kids are putting too much pressure on themselves. I amsympathetic to that position and school pressure certainly may be a factor in that. I just wonder if they are looking at, oh I don’t know, how children are being raised by smartphones, the push by big pharma to medicate kids from cradle to grave, the desire to remove God and faith from, well, everything.
To think taking away someone else’s award will stop it strikes me as naive.
I was never the best athlete nor was I the smartest student. I was OK with that. I am smart enough to know taking someone down from the podium, someone who earned their spot up there, won’t raise a single child up. Life simply doesn’t work that way.