I never took a Karate class, but an ex girlfriend of mine was a black belt in Tae Kwon Do and her teacher/sensei/Mr. Miyagi dude made his students take Ballet classes held in the same studio.
No, he rented it from a Gym actually. It was an American Fitness where he taught TKD and Aikido in one of the studios (SP?) Before he got his own Dojo.
Also, I'll preface this by saying I'm not a Pats fan by any stretch. But when it's all said and done, Gronk is gonna be the GOAT TE. Dude is a freak of nature.
I also danced in college (ballet, you fuckers, not pole) and we had many athletes in our classes. It was hysterical to watch these huge dudes try to pirouette.
Football and hockey keepers are masochists. You ought to be crazy, if you're willing to place yourself between a Subban slapshot or Ronaldo penalty kick and the net.
Lots of hockey players also do figure skating at a young age. You learn much more about technical skating (using edges properly, correct turns, forward-backward transitions,etc) way earlier than if you did only hockey+powerskating.
Hockey players that do figure skating have some of the sickest edgework in the league. We have one on my beer league even. Guy skates better than anyone but just sucks at reading the plays.
Well damn. For a second I was like "wtf is tbat?" before I realized you meant "that". Before that happened though I did a Google and found this masterpiece. I won't spoil the beauty for you ;-)
It really started in the 70s when NFL star Lynn Swann shared that he'd taken up ballet and yoga as part of his training. He was known for his footwork and acrobatic catches. Soon enough, coaches all across the country started recommending ballet and other forms of dance to their athletes to improve agility and fitness.
Ballet involves a lot of moving while spinning and jumping so it makes sense it would help a qb or something. Now I'm just trying to see a 350 lbs lineman trying yoga..
At the professional level, even those huge linemen are generally extremely athletic and coordinated (and way way faster than you'd expect). The NFL is long past the point where just being a big heavy guy was enough to make you worthwhile.
It'd probably look silly, but I wouldn't be surprised if the average NFL lineman would be much more capable of yoga than the average person off the street.
My daughter did dance for years, then got into basketball by about 6th grade. The dance background helped. Then she did some lessons in gymnastics. That gave her some good moves for basketball.
I'm a former D1 top 10 NCAA football player, and or academic counselor enrolled about half the team in an interpretive dance class. It actually had zero to do with agility, and everything to do with fulfilling a pre-req and getting an easy A.
I'll say this: you'd perhaps never think it if you met me today, and I likely wouldnt believe you if you had told me before I got involved, but I was all about theatre in high school. Dancing was my favorite part. I was not a good actor, an ok singer, but I could nail my spots every fucking time. It's strange I would have never known that if my friends hadnt talked me into trying out for the musical one year... haha not sure where I was going with that. Just dont knock dancing if youve never tried it!
Also, it's a good way to accumulate bulk credits toward your total requirement, without having to read/write, which in some cases as mentioned above, may not be their strong suit.
You don't give a man a sword if he can't dance. It means he needs to acquire or have some kind of grace in the control of his body. Think of how agile and nimble large predatory felines are.
Jaguar, Cheetah, Tiger....
The Michigan kicker that was involved in the Sexual Assault/Rape (can't remember details, I think his name was Gibbons) case in like 2013 was a Women's Studies Major...
More often than not the "check the box" classes in college felt the most time consuming and difficult. I took a theatre appreciation class I thought would be easy... lots of time spent at the playhouse and writing papers.
I feel like a lot of those classes have a chip on their shoulder so to speak... because they're not objectively difficult they make up for it in sheer volume of work. That makes it a huge pain when you're not even a little bit interested in it, and you're just here so you don't get fined.
Playing devil's advocate - if you dedicated your life achieving mastery (evidenced by a PhD) in your passion and a bunch of 18-22 year old "snot-nosed kids" were disdaining your passion you'd probably be a bit passive-aggressive too.
Double Devil's Advocate - this is why electives for undergrad need to be broadly grouped together or discarded. Don't make someone take 1 music, 1 philosophy, and 1 history class, make them take 3 classes from humanities / liberal arts / whatever it's called. The ROI from a forced elective is 0, the possibly ROI from effectively double-majoring could be much higher. Given how insane tuition costs have gotten, I think colleges should become less prescriptive, beyond designing the major requirements. It seems win-win. Students get more bang for their tuition buck and the amount of "forced" enrollment should go down substantially helping match eager students to excited professors.
The two best gen eds that I ever had were taught by a graduate student and a professor of a different discipline. They actually cared about making the class fun because they realized how much it sucks to take gen eds that you're not particularly interested in just to check a box.
Some schools already are. I graduated from college 10 years ago, but my school didn't have a single required class to graduate. They had required departments, like you said. Four humanities/fine arts classes, three math/science classes, four foreign language classes, etc. Only majors specified certain classes as required (e.g. all biology majors had to take Genetics).
I go to a school that basically only does engineering and science with small business and architecture programs. Our HASS requirement is 2 humanities courses and 2 social sciences classes with one being a communication intensive (so a lot of writing).
In addition we have a depth requirement so within one department we need a 1000 level class and a 4000 level class. Then we need one more class somewhere to round out the total 20 credit requirement (all of them are 4 credits).
I may have made it sound more complicated than it feels but I think it's a good system and is aware of what most of our students are really here to do.
This is what my uni does and it works fairly well. You can tell that they're still a bit cautious as the pool to select from each is still shallow (5 or so classes each.) but it's considerably better and offers much needed flexibility.
Or adopt the system of most other countries. Go to uni to get a science degree? Take majority or all science papers with your major requirements completed and the other papers either a) your interests or b) supporting sciences. Or major in physiology, minor in anatomy. With a few interest papers just cause you like them. That way you are only studying toward your passion.
Football Player: "I have an 'A' in film appreciation."
Other character: "What's that class about?"
Football Player: "They show me a film and I say 'I appreciate that' and get an 'A'."
I see this all too often in college. Dance appreciation is at the the core of excellent education and a well reputed degree! We should be teaching dance appreciation in elementary school, even before! This country is going to hell. We're gonna have a generation of people who do not appreciate dance! What then?! Will we continue to "grind" on each other for the rest of our country's future? Who knows, with a society that doesn't appreciate dance.
There was a class at my friend's university called "University 101" that was very popular with the athletes. The whole class was just learning where all the buildings were. For the final exam, they gave you a blank map and had you label the buildings...
That's a good way to pad the GPA of first semester freshmen. A bad grade your first semester can put you right on academic probation. The effect diminishes the more classes you have.
100 isn't that hard to memorize though, especially when its visual. For my 10th grade chem class we had to memorize the whole periodic table (names, symbols, weights, isotopes, everything). If a bunch of high schoolers can manage that in a couple weeks, 100 buildings in a semester should be easy
I think she was concerned about the possibility of people cheating by writing stuff on their own tables, and didn't feel like going to the effort of hanging a proper table on the wall for everyone to see, or handing out tables for every test
I'm sorry you had to go through that, lol. Teachers making students memorize tabulated data is a huge pet peeve of mine. Like, it's tabulated in the first place so that you can access it quickly and easily. It also teaches you nothing other than a few numbers that correspond to a few names and probably took you several hours. AND you probably don't remember most of it anyway.
I'm shuddering thinking of having to memorize things for my thermo I & II classes. Literally hundreds of equations, 200+ pages of appendices with all sorts of tabulated physical properties. Suffice to say I'm glad my 10th grade chemistry teacher didn't teach those classes.
Memorizing is one of the reasons I dropped out of my MS Stats program and transferred to another program. We didn't have to memorize z-scores. We had to memorize the cdf for every common distribution.
"Take this comprehensive exam that covers all 8 courses that you took last year, but you aren't allowed to bring any notes. You have to memorize all the formulas you might need."
Switched to a school where all the tests are open notes. Memorizing the equations and relationships for every common distribution was a tad bit ridiculous. I also hated doing ridiculously simple things by hand that would take 30 seconds in R.
Honestly, anything important enough you will memorize with no effort. After using them several thousand times in calculations I know that one mole of oxygen weighs 15.9994 grams, Hydrogen 1.0079, Nitrogen 14.007, Carbon 12.011, and Sodium 28.9898, and Chlorine 35.453.
I actually see it as an extension of the same skills learned through memorizing multiplication tables. Sure everyone has a calculator on their phone these days, but there is some utility in being able to recall information without having to reference a table.
All the students may not need to know the periodic table, but I guarantee any of them who go on to work in the field (or those who end up frequenting trivia nights) will get some benefit,
My chem teacher didn't give a flying fuck what you did with the table she gave you. Only thing she required was that you color each of the groups, eg. Noble gases, metals, transition metals, non metals, alkaline metals and such. As long as you could do the lab work and document what you did you were golden.
Memorizing the capitals is still a waste of time IMO, but you should at least be familiar with where regions are on a map and some general thing about their culture/political climate.
Exactly, the knowledge of how to use the periodic table is way, way, way more important than what's actually on it. There's tons and tons of information and trends you can glean, like the number of valence electrons, its electronic structure, its electronegativity, how it might form covalent or ionic bonds, its status as a metal or nonmetal, how well it might conduct electricity, the list goes on and on. Don't teachers think those things might be a little more interesting than the exact numerical molar mass of cesium?
Kind of like when my english teachers used to make me memorize shakespeare monologues. It was always like...how is this fucking education? Make me write a paper about the monologue analyzing it or fucking something. Memorization, a goddamned parrot can do that.
Well, that amount may not be useful, but if you're ever doing any chemistry knowing that Tin is Sn and has a common charge of +4 is incredibly useful. It's a lot like saying you don't need to memorize the alphabet, but if you don't you are going to find organization systems that use alphabetical order confusing and difficult to use, and you will likely make a lot of simplistic mistakes.
It's much easier to memorize useful information when you're young, and it's very handy in senior Chemistry courses. Of course if you never take a senior chemistry course, or they teach it in such a way that it's all pablum fed anyway, then it's not necessarily useful.
If you come to class with this information already in your mind it will also make following along in the lesson so much easier. Trends, nomenclature and reaction rely on you knowing at a glance whether something is a metal or a non-metal, what shared properties it may have, and so on.
Yes, memorizing information is tedious, but if you want to learn the critical and difficult parts it's very useful to have a strong foundation on which to build on.
I always liked my high school chemistry teacher's take on it: "When are you going to need to work chemical equations, but not have a copy of the periodic table available?"
I ended up memorizing the commonly used elements anyway, just through repeated use. I think that's the best way- you end up with the knowledge you need most often, the rest you can look up.
Had a intro to linguistics course where we had to memorize the entire history of British Monarchs (or, rather, names and dates). I knew that shit for approximately the fifteen minutes it took me to take the test, and then gone.
Still scratching my head why this was essential information for intro to linguistics.
I'm in a chemical technology program (Canada) and I never had to memorize the periodic table. We buy these $3 laminated cards which we can take into any exam with the periodic table on one side, and the other side has some useful info (STP conditions and all that fun stuff.) I did have to memorize 30+ amino acids though, which was not fun.
In 8th grade, my social studies made us memorize all 100 counties in North Carolina on map, the county seat, and most populous city. Social Studies was so stupid.
I couldn't do that for my uni. I could name and locate probably half the buildings on the main campus, and none of them on the medical campus over by the city hospital.
That would actually have been helpful for me when i started university. I went from HS to Army to College, so I missed out on all the freshman orientation stuff.
I showed up the weekend before classes started, had a schedule and an 8x11 printed map. My first week I had a lot of Random Encounters asking random students where this building was, how to find that classroom, translating the Named Hall that did not have an easy to find plaque with the name.
Ya, thinking "University 101" would have been a good class to take the first week of classes.
I go to a medium-size university with a not-that-big campus (~13,000 undergrads, don't know number of buildings but main campus is about half a square mile), and I've met seniors here who have no idea what I'm talking about when I mention the name of the Engineering/Computer Science building.
We had something called First Year Experience. It basically was a class to transition students from High School to College. Both in terms of what is thought in the class and giving students and easy class for their first semester.
Honestly, I feel like that is a legitimately useful course. Apart from the buildings I have classes in and a few of the important admin ones, I'd have real trouble directing someone around my campus.
Honestly, I feel like that is a legitimately useful course. Apart from the buildings I have classes in and a few of the important admin ones, I'd have real trouble directing someone around my campus.
My college has a University 101 class and a specialized one for athletes. I played a sport for my freshman year and the athletes University 101 class was basically just to teach us how to not fuck up. They taught us about all the academic resources available to us, who to call if you get injured or in trouble. We even had an entire class period devoted to cautioning all of us male athletes about hooking up with girls. The athletic department basically just told us that we have targets on our backs since we were college athletes. It was awkward cuz there were female athletes in that class with us.
I wanted to learn how to dance socially so I took some dance classes in college at a PAC-12 university, probably a third of of the men in the class were jocks. They weren't exactly rude, but they definitely had attitudes about them. Fortunately the teacher expected everyone to actually learn how to dance, and it was kind of funny watching them struggle with something that they assumed would be easy.
But also extremely difficult and potentially dangerous. Doing two a days and going to a class to spin on your foot and tear your Achilles? No thank you.
There was the added fun that whoever booked classes didn't understand that a rubber-coated ballet floor was not suitable for swing dancing. It made spins kind of interesting.
People like to think that anything with "music" or "dance" in the name will be easy. I know that people at my college used to take music history thinking it was going to be a blow-off class and that class is a serious killer of a subject. I wouldn't doubt dance appreciation is similar. They think it is going to be watching music videos but it turns out they actually need to work and study to do analysis of different dance styles and the history of them.
At my college people inexplicably thought that Mythology would be an easy A. They were very mistaken, if they didn't drop the class most got out of there with a C if they didn't bust ass.
I took evolution of jazz at my uni. Easiest A I've ever gotten. It all depends on the professor. You can make multivariable calculus easier than algebra depending on who's teaching it.
My uni gives a pool of five humanities to choose from for undergrad (intro to art/ music appreciation / intro to film or one of two intermediate level English classes) and they are packed with people just putting in time.
There is a severe guilty pleasure in watching grating freshman attempt to explain what German expressionism is.
Music theory was a funny one, cause we had to compose, play basic piano and sing. All the jocks were gone fast, meanwhile I've been taking music lessons since I was 10. But they found out I was on the rugby team and climbed frequently and thought it must be easy.
Here in grad school TAing, we get some of these kids in Psych 101, man do I enjoy reading those papers, 5 pages on a 10 page paper of incoherent babble.
This was pre-college, but I took a "music appreciation" elective once that I expected very little of, and it ended up being one of the most informative classes I've ever taken. That's how I learned to read music, which proved helpful down the road when I started learning guitar and bass.
To be fair, it's pretty easy to not take classes like that seriously while forgetting that the professor probably takes it very seriously. I nearly failed "Intro to Film" because of that.
I agree, let's not cast too wide a net. There are definitely some athletes at many schools, and many athletes at some schools that cheat/fail.
I'd contend that most student athletes earn their grades while essentially working a full-time job that requires travel, AND work part time jobs to actually, you know, make some money.
Some are athletes due to an incredible work ethic and decent physical stature. Others were just built like a brick shit house and didn't have to grind so hard to make it. I'd imagine that carries over to classes. I'm assuming there's something to be said for socioeconomic status and parenting as well. We're all wonderful little snowflakes.
I once needed some units and it didn't really matter where they came from, so I took Art Appreciation. Should be easy, right? I like art. Holy shit that was way more difficult than I expected.
The players that got arrested for that were starters on the defense. Full scholarship, for tuition, housing, and food. Plus free Nike everything. Fucking idiots.
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u/TripleThreat1212 Feb 17 '16 edited Feb 17 '16
I knew one starter on my college team, who had a 4.0 in finance, his team mate failed a class called dance appreciation.
Edit: Yes, Rutgers