He'd Forget His Head if it Wasn't Attached

This week’s meeting of the “Bar Tab Brain Trust “ brought up many good points about our children , their education, youth sports and their social development.

Our insightful instigator of the evening’s festivities brought up the fact that his son, might be failing “GYM” because of his lack of preparedness for the class.  We collectively wondered what our parents would have done to us, if we were in a similar situation at his age and surprisingly enough each one of us mentioned some sort of corporal punishment and indentured servitude.  

Something now, that would now have CPS knocking at your door.  The man calling the shots and pouring the shots said,  “just look at the leaders of this country – Obama finally found his birth certificate, finally found Bin Laden and finally found his way to Ground Zero, but he could find any gasoline in NY for under $4.25 a gallon. 

Hardy har har! There was time when government leader were like boys scouts- always prepared! Now that's a role model!!"  Now I realize that Forrest Gump probably thought, “Middle school is like a box of granola, what ain’t fruits and nuts, is flakes,” but there is no excuse for coming to any class repeatedly unprepared unless you are trying to fail.

But parents can be partially at fault too.  You see these days some people suffer from “Accelerated Metamorphosis.” Accelerated Metamorphosis is when your child wants to take a year off after 5th grade to find themselves. Between each week being chock full of, reality TV, video games, 3D movies ,ELA pre-tests, constant texting, religious instruction and three different youth sports simultaneously, they get overloaded at a very young age. They just want to I-Tune you out!

I recently had a sixth grader show up late for lacrosse practice because of a Martial Arts class and need to leave early to get to baseball practice. Now that is a bit much. Being involved with different sports can be great teachers of many life skills. But if you do them all at once, you grow up to become the person who screws up a union retirement plan by creating new errors for the pension algorithm. Or grow up to be a health insurance gatekeeper that decides that “affordable healthcare “ means  “what treatable ailments are in your price range!" 

Instead, with proper adult supervision and guidance, you can grow up like recent Hofstra grad and frequent visitor to the East Meadow Colony Diner- Christine Miserandino. You see Ms. Miserandino, a well rounded youth athlete (not an overwhelmed one) who almost always came prepared to Gym class, created  her famous “ Lupus Suffers Spoon Theory” (Google -Lupus Spoon Theory  if you don’t believe me).

One night there while  trying to match her “freshman 15”  before graduation, with a plate or two of extra yummy fries and gravy. I guess we are all lucky that she grabbed spoons instead of salt shakers at the diner or now we would be discussing  her “Night A Salt on Lupus”  plan. Kudos to you Christine! So please, start treating youth sports like the line at the bank, one at a time please- or we are bound to screw something up, big time .