The general decline in standards today

[jamespowers]

I still think PE should be an elective, not a requirement.

Agreed.

 

[HudsonHawk]

Same thing around here with the hat on backward crowd. However, I do see waning interest in the big three sports (The mug and thugs). Baseball is really losing it the most. I suppose in today’s fast paced society, baseball is just oo slow paced---at least that is what I have read lately….

And yet baseball attendance has doubled since 1980...

 

[jamespowers]

How much of it were you required in high school? We were only required to take one year. After that, it was elective.

And you don't end every conversation with "ROLL TIDE!!"?

One year?! Geez, when was that?! 1910? We had it every year from the beginning until the end (K-12)----no electives. I have done everything from archery to wrestling to square dancing to golf in that time and didn’t miss much in between. Well, I still do golf but no one forces me but me.
I wish I had just one year. :doh:

 

[LizzieMaine]

They've been digging baseball's grave since the sixties. The game itself is greater than all the damage that can be done to it by venal, incompetent owners, doped-up jackass players, and stupid rock music in the ballparks.

 

[jamespowers]

And yet baseball attendance has doubled since 1980...

So has the population and the number of franchises. Where are you getting this figure from?
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/29/opinion/sunday/is-the-game-over.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

 

[HudsonHawk]

One year?! Geez, when was that?! 1910? We had it every year from the beginning until the end (K-12)----no electives. I have done everything from archery to wrestling to square dancing to golf in that time and didn’t miss much in between. Well, I still do golf but no one forces me but me.
I wish I had just one year. :doh:

We had "recess" 1st-6th grades, and one year required in high school, and you could elect to take that whenever you wanted. The only time a real "PE" class was mandatory was 7th-9th grades.

 

[Matt Crunk]

How much of it were you required in high school? We were only required to take one year. After that, it was elective.

And you don't end every conversation with "ROLL TIDE!!"?

I managed to get out of PE in high school by spending the latter half of my day in vocational school studying graphic arts and architecture. Tech school students were exempt from PE because of their limited hours of regular school. I would have normally had PE in the mornings, but took a study hall in the art department instead. By my senior year, my school day consisted of one government/history class first thing in the morning, and the rest of the day split between the art classes at both my regular high school and trade school.

 

[jamespowers]

They've been digging baseball's grave since the sixties. The game itself is greater than all the damage that can be done to it by venal, incompetent owners, doped-up jackass players, and stupid rock music in the ballparks.

Basketball and football are also not immune from the thugocracy that has hit those sports either though. Between idiot owners and criminal players, they have their problems too.
To think that once upon a time sports figures were heroes and someone to look up to. Now you have a better chance looking down. L

 

[HudsonHawk]

So has the population and the number of franchises. Where are you getting this figure from?
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/29/opinion/sunday/is-the-game-over.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Average attendance per game, independant of the number of teams, which is more a function of stadium size than anything else. Still, the idea that baseball is losing popularity is simply factually incorrect.

http://www.beyondtheboxscore.com/2014/2/10/5390172/major-league-attendance-trends-1950-2013

 

[jamespowers]

We had "recess" 1st-6th grades, and one year required in high school, and you could elect to take that whenever you wanted. The only time a real "PE" class was mandatory was 7th-9th grades.

We had recess AND PE all the way through. No wonder you aren't burnt out with it all. lol lol

 

[jamespowers]

Average attendance per game, independant of the number of teams, which is more a function of stadium size than anything else. Still, the idea that baseball is losing popularity is simply factually incorrect.

http://www.beyondtheboxscore.com/2014/2/10/5390172/major-league-attendance-trends-1950-2013

Doing that in raw numbers without taking into account population growth and the growth of franchises might be misleading. When you consider the last five or six World Series games on TV have been getting steadily declining ratings while football and basketball have been getting steady increases, you find there is a function which is hurting them worse---revenues from the game.

 

[LizzieMaine]

We had phys-ed as a compulsory subject right thru, but never had recess after junior high. If you didn't want to play team sports -- indoor hockey, volleyball, fleeceball, etc -- you had to run the entire 45 minute period. I loved fleeceball -- the only home run I ever hit in an organized game came in one of these classes. Hit it right over the curtain and into the boys' side of the gym. Nobody was more surprised than me, because my eyes were so bad at that point I couldn't see the ball at all.

We had no gym until I was in the second grade, so during the first grade we had it in an empty classroom with a hard wooden floor, and did mostly Jack LaLanne-type calisthenics. There was one gym mat, but it was moldy and you had to wait your turn for it.

 

[jamespowers]

I managed to get out of PE in high school by spending the latter half of my day in vocational school studying graphic arts and architecture. Tech school students were exempt from PE because of their limited hours of regular school. I would have normally had PE in the mornings, but took a study hall in the art department instead. By my senior year, my school day consisted of one government/history class first thing in the morning, and the rest of the day split between the art classes at both my regular high school and trade school.

You were very lucky.

 

[jamespowers]

We had phys-ed as a compulsory subject right thru, but never had recess after junior high.

We had no gym until I was in the second grade, so during the first grade we had it in an empty classroom with a hard wooden floor, and did mostly Jack LaLanne-type calisthenics. There was one gym mat, but it was moldy and you had to wait your turn for it.

lol lol Moldy mats. lol lol

 

[HudsonHawk]

Doing that in raw numbers without taking into account population growth and the growth of franchises might be misleading. When you consider the last five or six World Series games on TV have been getting steadily declining ratings while football and basketball have been getting steady increases, you find there is a function which is hurting them worse---revenues from the game.

Did you read the article? It *is* taking population growth into it. A greater percentage of the population is attending games now than back in the day. Again, that's more related to number of tickets available, but the point remains...there is simply no evidence whatsoever that baseball's popularity is declining.

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

Barnes & Barnes (Billy Mumy and Robert Haimer) -- High School Gym
Yes, the same Billy Mumy of Twilight Zone and Lost in Space fame

[video=youtube;Mv5RRcuq3vA]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mv5RRcuq3vA[/video]

 

[jamespowers]

Did you read the article? It *is* taking population growth into it. A greater percentage of the population is attending games now than back in the day. Again, that's more related to number of tickets available, but the point remains...there is simply no evidence whatsoever that baseball's popularity is declining.

Then why do less people actually watch it on TV? Why are the ratings falling?

 

[Edward]

That's because you refused to learn anything in them. One could just as easily say "I hate math, refuse to learn it; therefore, it has zero value to me and is simply wasting time I could be doing something productive." As we say in my neck of the woods, "it ain't the arrow, it's the Indian." I guess if you want to indict any kind of compulsory education, you're off to a good start, but that's a different discussion.

There we must respectfully disagree. The only thing anyone could ever have honestly claimed to have learned from our games classes was how many push-ups they could do in a minute, or the rules of a given sport. There was absolutely zero attempt to teach us anything about health or physical fitness. It was widely accepted to be a joke class - great for those who given half an hour out from lessons would want to go and play football/soccer, no fun for those of us who had no interest in that. I suppose you could say I learned from it that sometimes in life you're forced to do things you hate, but I got more than enough of that in Physics.

How much of it were you required in high school? We were only required to take one year. After that, it was elective.

At secondary level (11-18), a lot. Mandatory whole-year-group "Games" for an hour a week, plus mandatory smaller-class "PE" for an hour a week 11-16 (a legal requirement at the time, no idea if that's changed); at seventeen it was an hour's compulsory games and half an hour's compulsory PE; final year, that was shrunk to just the one hour a week of compulsory games.

They've been digging baseball's grave since the sixties. The game itself is greater than all the damage that can be done to it by venal, incompetent owners, doped-up jackass players, and stupid rock music in the ballparks.

My brother and his wife were big on the ice hockey when it moved into Belfast at the end of the 20th century. Popular "family" spectator sport over there as there's only one team and no obvious political slant to the game, so it's never been tainted by tribal bigotries. I went to a couple of games with them to be social, way back - one in Belfast, one in London. I found both of them very hard to watch because it was all go for less than a minute, then all stop, then all go... what really emphasised it, though was the music. Nothing wrong with what they played (a lot of it stuff I like), but they would play the music as soon as play stopped, then stop it while play was on, then start it up again... Always a different song, so you just got thisconstant, broken stream of fragments of songs. It felt like listening to an ipod being controlled by someone with serious ADHD.

 

[HudsonHawk]

We had no gym until I was in the second grade, so during the first grade we had it in an empty classroom with a hard wooden floor, and did mostly Jack LaLanne-type calisthenics. There was one gym mat, but it was moldy and you had to wait your turn for it.

We never had a gym until I was in high school, and even then we weren't allowed to use it for PE.

 

[HudsonHawk]

Then why do less people actually watch it on TV? Why are the ratings falling?

1. More people are attending games in person.
2. More games are on TV. Each game has fewer people watching, but more people overall.
3. Baseball has never been a "television" sport like football.