Good intentions is a post from: Sand in the Gears

Which we probably don’t need to measure, because we can rest assured that no matter how ill-served some athletes are by the schools that claim to care for them, they will always by given every possible opportunity to help their teams win.

The NCAA claims it wants a “real-time” measure like this, rather than graduation rates, which have a six-year lag. This is silly on its face, given that little has been done for years about coaches like Bob Huggins, for example, who rarely graduates players. Former NCAA coach Kelvin Sampson didn’t graduate a single University of Oklahoma player for six years and received no scrutiny until he got tripped up by rules governing what money players can receive.

The NCAA has plenty of historical data, in other words, to indicate that some coaches (and their schools, and the governing trustees of those schools) are taking advantage of young people who might have a chance of earning degrees in places where sports are not the only priority. But these coaches win games, and these schools are powerhouses, and so none of us should hold our breath waiting for the NCAA to start behaving as if it cares about student athletes more than it cares about revenue.

The NCAA’s hypocrisy is a post from: Sand in the Gears

Except, of course, the many parents who are so troubled by the hem-hiked mini-skirts you’re marketing to nine year-olds that they feel compelled to protest, just as they did when you tried to sell padded bikini tops to little girls.

So other than normal parents in possession of an ounce of common sense, nobody seems to be offended. To think, this was once the land of Winston Churchill and Maggie Thatcher.

Sample size matters is a post from: Sand in the Gears

Which I know is pretty skeptical. But still.

The thought behind the study is wise, it seems — rather than simply comparing small children in daycare to those who stay with their mothers, consider whether some children in the former camp in fact demonstrate no differences with the control group, and then assess whether they have commonalities. Doing so, the researchers claim, reveals that when mothers put their babies in very high-quality daycare centers, earn significantly high levels of income, and spend considerable time in their off hours engaging with their babies, there are no adverse effects.

“Babies don’t suffer when mothers return to work,” The Guardian all but shouts from the rooftops. “Millions of working mothers,” claims Motoko Rich at the New York Times blog, can breathe a sigh of relief.

Really?

Let me see if I’ve got this straight. Millions of harried working mothers should breathe easier about the heart-wrenching decision to give their babies over to daycare company employees, just so long as they take a considerable portion of whatever precious time they have left to cook and clean and manage the bills and pick up the dry cleaning and try to find a half-second to themselves, and spend it on deeply engaging their babies, to make up for the hours they’ve been apart.

Further, they should be sure to get the kinds of jobs held by women who are friends with women who write for The Guardian and The New York Times, which I’ll venture to say is not waitressing or bus driving or shoe selling, all so they can earn enough money to pay top-notch professionals to do with their children what most of them in their hearts would rather be doing themselves.

Breathe easier indeed. The people who can breathe easier are the ones for whom this question of daycare is not an open research endeavor, but an ideological commitment.

Breathe easier? is a post from: Sand in the Gears

is a post from: Sand in the Gears

Good work if you can get it is a post from: Sand in the Gears

George Orwell, call your office.

Careful, you might work yourself into a job is a post from: Sand in the Gears

It’s for the children is a post from: Sand in the Gears

Let’s not rest on our laurels. We should keep striving until every child has an equal opportunity to become a mouth-breathing, attention-span deprived, cultural illiterate with the quick-typing skills of a monkey on crack.

Couch potato world is a post from: Sand in the Gears

On the other hand, I suppose this dissonance is captured, for college basketball, in a single image: the spectacle of muscular, tattooed, seeming warriors strutting about in baggy silk culottes that might as well come with a matching man-purse.

But even if you dress like a sissy, need you act like one? I understand it’s an important game, and that you desperately want to win, and that you yearn for victory with all your precious, over-inflated heart. But man up. The other team was better. Or maybe just luckier. Or maybe you should have practiced your free throws harder last summer. Whatever the reason, the gods of basketball have found you wanting. So pull up your big-girl panties and get over it. And if you’re going to cry like a big overgrown sissy, at least have the self-respect to do it in the locker room.

Memo to the NCAA is a post from: Sand in the Gears