To which I answer, who the hell cares?

Has the testing culture in high school gotten so bad that educated people really think the average number of college level tests per kid is a meaningful rating of anything other than how much time is wasted on tests? If local kids from our apparently downtrodden schools are just as happy in 10 years as the kids from the test factories, does that not mean that our local schools in fact did a better job providing education? I don’t know how you would ever measure that, but that is the actual thing that matters. Does your high school produce well adjusted law abiding citizens? If the answer is yes, your high school wins; no matter how many AP Tests it administered while you were there.

Maybe more importantly, the book is a lesson in leading a bitter free life. Buck was denied a high school diploma until he was in his 80s, was denied the opportunity to play in the major leagues, and was ultimately denied a spot in Cooperstown by one vote. Yet through it all, he manages to live a life completely devoid of anything resembling bitterness.

1. The kid is going to be an enlisted grunt in the Marine Corp. He probably needs to get over this thing about questioning authority sooner rather than later.

2. He hasn’t accomplished anything at all. He signed a piece of a paper. He could be deferred, he could wash out of Basic due to medical issues, he could get scared and go AWOL. So he wants special recognition for signing his name? Graduating from Basic is an accomplishment. Serving out your term honorably is an accomplishment. Serving 20+ years and retiring is a huge accomplishment. Signing the paper is not an accomplishment.

3. The kid has joined the United States Marine Corp. Maybe it’s time for Mommy to stop fighting his battles for him? (Hat tip to Nance for that snark.)

4. If the special tassel is that important, he can carry it in his pocket and put it on his cap after graduation for pictures. This obsession with individual recognition is sort of unbecoming for a future Marine. This is something that the good guys at Parris Island will get to teach him in a few months.

High school graduation is about high school achievements. Period. I totally support the principal’s decision here. It’s not high school related, and it’s not even an accomplishment. I respect his decision to serve the country, but I suspect when he gets to Parris Island the friendly guys there will make it quite evident that he hasn’t accomplished squat; until he walks out as an United States Marine.

We follow the kids through the games, their part time jobs, living with host families, partying, girls. and all the usual stuff you would expect of a group of Type A jocks thrown together on Cape Cod for a summer. The author does a good job making the kids (all real-life people) more than caricatures.

If you are a baseball fan you’ll enjoy the book. If you are not a baseball fan you might enjoy this book. It’s a look into one of the last bastions of community supported high-level amateur baseball in the US. It reads at the pace of a baseball game. It’s relaxing and interesting, but most of the time, not exciting.

The book follows the 2002 season. About 15 of the 23 kids from the A’s were drafted by major league teams. I looked each one up to see if any made it. A few had a cup of coffee in The Show, but not one stuck. One guy is playing in Japan. The other 14, as far as I can tell, are out of baseball.

I started working before I was 10. My father would get me odd jobs doing yard work and pet sitting for his friends. Later on, I would simply go door to door with a lawn mower in the summer. I got a “real job” at 16 and worked all through college too. Pretty much everybody I knew in high school had a part time job. You turned 16 and you found a job. It was standard operating procedure. Most of the employees at my local pizza joint appear to be my age. Granted, there are several factors at work here, none of them under the control of a teenager.

1. The economy. Duh! Adults are taking the jobs that used to go to teenagers.
2. The general decline of retail. Between automated checkout lines and Amazon, the local retail establishments just don’t support as many jobs as they used to.
3. Competition for college. Especially among upper-middle class kids, doing something that looks more impressive on a college application that “McDonalds” takes priority. Given that a full ride to a private school is worth $200,000 that isn’t necessarily a bad strategy.

How does this play out when the kids are 21 or 22 though? Not having the 5-6 years of work experience that we had upon college graduation could make the next generation a slower ramp into the full-time work world, as they have to learn the lessons we learned at 17. OTOH, maybe they’ll be more likely to go an entrepreneurial route, with I think would be a net benefit to the country. With health care reform,recent college grads will be able to stay on their parents insurance until they are 26. They can write a check to their parents each month for their part of the insurance premium, and have 4-5 years to try to make it on their own without needing the health care security blanket that may come with a corporate job.

Teenagers today need to be thinking about the long game years before we ever worried about it. They should be lining up internships and volunteer opportunities so that the graduate not only with a degree, but with 3-5 years of applicable work experience, and not just 3-5 years of work experience. It kind of sucks that kids have to worry about this stuff. Most 18 years old don’t really know what they want to be when they grow up. That adds a certain level of difficulty to lining up the right part time and summer jobs.

This might be a rare instance when I’m happy I’m not 18 again.

The Toyota Corolla is surprisingly comfortable on long drives. It was 10 hours there and 9.5 hours coming home, and my back felt fine the next day both ways.

If you are headed south from DC (away from the coast) there is a better route than I-85. Follow US 29 South through Lynchburg and Danville VA to Greensboro NC, where it intersects with I-85. US 29 is four lane the entire way, sparsely populated, and much more interesting than the interstate highway route. It’s 50 miles shorter via 29 too.

When in Danville, eat at Short Sugar’s BBQ. It might be as far north as you can find real NC BBQ.

The Hair Metal station on XM Radio doesn’t have enough music to go 24 hours without repeating songs.

Ozzy’s Boneyard might be the coolest station on XM Radio. Where else where you hear Ratt, Led Zepplin, and Celtic Frost in succession? They also play a lot of Queen, which is cool, even if it doesn’t really fit in well.

They still drive like maniacs on GA 400. Some things don’t change.

Our first house and neighborhood still looks pretty good, although I had forgotten just how hilly the neighborhood was.

The white rail porch is gone, and our shutters were darker, otherwise pretty much the same.

There is a Varsity Jr. in Dawsonville. The food tastes the same, but the ambiance isn’t even close.

My son has gotten pretty damn good at this fencing thing.

I kind of miss Atlanta.

1. Start keeping records when they start “9th grade.” We had to take an archaeological approach and dig up what our son had worked on for the previous 3 years, because we weren’t tracking it closely. It turned out that by the time he started his “senior” year, he had already completed all the requirements for a VA High School Diploma. Of course, he’ll never actually have that piece of paper.

2. Think outside the box. All those hours your kid spends writing Minecraft add-ons? That is a course in computer programming. All those hours playing guitar are music class.

3. Take advantage of volunteer opportunities. Your homeschooled teen has free time during the day with no competition from the hordes that are in school. Use it! Find opportunities to volunteer doing stuff related to career interests, or just doing good works. My son the soon-to-be History major did volunteer primary source research for a NPS Historian that resulted in co-author credit on a published article when he was 16. Do you think that looked good on college applications?

4. Take the SAT in the junior year so that you have time to address any deficiencies. However, don’t be surprised when the SAT score exceeds your wildest expectation and your homeschooled teen decides that he won’t be taking the test again. You can get into school without taking the SAT or ACT. We didn’t go that route so I don’t have much to offer if you take that road.

5. A high SAT score plus a homeschooled background = lots of interest from colleges, especially small liberal arts schools. High verbal scores will lead to many colleges waiving the application fee and essay requirements. Take advantage and do the 5 minute application anywhere that offers it. We made a mistake here. We got picky, and quite frankly, a little lazy. High verbal scores may also get you free credit hours by exempting the student from Freshman English. (I assume a really high math score comes with similar benefits.) At a public school, getting to skip a 4 credit hour English class is worth about $1200. Seemingly very expensive private schools have lots of money available to hand out, so don’t dismiss them when they send the glossy brochures to the house.

6. Some colleges will insist on grades. Don’t fight it. Just assign grades. Your assessment is no more arbitrary than what a teacher puts on a school report card. If your kid is 95th percentile on the SAT math section you can quite legitimately assign an A for every math course you are claiming. No school will question it. In our local public schools “SAT Prep” is an actual class. If the school kids can claim it, you can too.

7. Make a transcript that looks familiar to college admissions folks. Make sure the admissions committee can look at the transcript and relate it the high school graduation requirements for your state. Supplement it with a written description of what each course covered. For more traditional subjects where you may have used a textbook or curriculum, you can probably cut and paste what you need from the publisher’s website. Off the beaten path or unschooled stuff is limited only by your ability to put into writing what you did. Writing these descriptions is a job for the homeschooled student, not the parent! My son’s supplement was 14 pages. Also, apply early action or early decision to your top choice schools. Those kids often get priority for scholarships.

8. Check out the online or book form AP Test study guides for any subject that you think is possible. Again, it can be free college credits. You have to register for the AP by early March of senior year, usually through the public schools. So check the web for dates and don’t miss it. AP scores are not used for admissions – only for credit. So there is no reason to take the AP tests early.

9. Think about utilizing the local community college during the junior and senior years. It can be a great way to take foreign language or lab science courses that aren’t as easy to handle on your own. In some states, high school age kids can attend for free. Even if you have to pay, you will be banking college credits at 50-75% off the price of the same credits at a public 4-year school. Between community college, AP tests, and SAT exemptions, your kid can start college as a sophomore. At $25k a year for a public school in-state, that is some serious savings.

10. Above all else, don’t stress. Don’t believe the horror stories about colleges being hard to work with when you are a homeschooler. Among small private schools, I found the opposite. They went out of their way to be sure my son qualified for available scholarships. I think just about every Division I school has a process in place for homeschoolers. So check the web sites, they will tell you exactly what you need to provide. The entire process was actually much easier than I expected. Colleges really do like homeschooled kids.

Buck shook his head and looked me in the eyes. And very slowly, with a teacher’s edge in his voice, Buck said this: “Son, in this life, you don’t ever walk by a red dress.”

Buck was answering a question about why he (a 94 year old) was flirting with a 20 something – but I think the point he was making goes beyond attractive women in red dresses.

Ferris Bueller said it as, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” Of course Ferris is fake, Buck O’Neil is real.

The Buddha talked about the importance of mindfulness- of fully experiencing each moment we have on this earth.

It’s all the same point. We can go through life on auto-pilot, checking things off our to-do list without really experiencing what we just completed, in a rush to just get through the list. Or we can slow down, realizing that 80% of our to-do list probably doesn’t actually have to get done, and fully experience the 20% that matters. If we do that, I think we all find a lot more red dresses in our lives.

I think it’s common knowledge that clothing store dressing rooms do this. But the bathroom mirror at the movie theater seems to be a stretch. I’d love to know if they have hard data showing that the mirror does increase concession sales. I’d also love to know if any female executives at Paragon Theaters objected to the mirrors when the idea was originally pitched.

Then again, movies are the land of make-believe, so maybe this shouldn’t really be a surprise to me

Then this week while reading The Soul of Baseball I found the quote that nails it. It says exactly what I was thinking. However, coming from a 94 year old ex-Negro League star who was married for 51 years, it carries a little more weight.

That’s how it goes in this world. Life doesn’t turn out the way you think. You just hold on to each other. That’s the trick.

I agree. It really is that simple.

Expect more on Buck O’Neil here this week. I loved this book. Buck O’Neil was a truly exceptional human being.