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Comment by rossdavidh | Hacker News Reader

So, I like to think of myself as not overly protective, but fairly early on in the pandemic, during the actual shelter-in-place part, my teenage daughter said, "It's not like anything has really changed for me all that much". Ouch. She watched more TV, and via Zoom got to see what everybody else's living rooms looked like, but in the U.S. most professional class kids don't get a lot of free-roaming time anyway, so the only difference is you're trading school time (never their favorite part) for house time. So I'm not sure this means quarantine isn't so bad, more like we have kids in quarantine all the time nowadays compared to a generation ago so it wasn't much of a change.

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I went to school in Germany and famously a majority of schools in Germany are half-day. My classes started at 7:30 and ended at 12:45 pm.

I had the afternoon to myself, did a lot of reading and rode my bike around town and into the fields. I still know a lot about topics I just was curious about (alphabets and writing systems across the globe, must have spent hours reading books on those). All that I wouldn't have been able to do with a whole-day school. Although now as a parent, I have to admit that it surely is easier to have your kid in school all day while you are at work.

"rode my bike around town and into the fields"

To be honest I would be terrified to let my kids do this, maybe because I grew up in a place where drivers are the leading cause of dead kids (the US).

This is very interesting regarding half day schools in Germany. We've considered moving to Germany for a while so our kids could learn German while they're young (also we just quite like the place). A half day school sounds enticing as well.

Do it. I'm an American who studied in Germany in college. My host family kids were so well adjusted and the education they received in public schools was a whole level above anything in any US school.

Oh emigration goes without saying! We moved to Ireland. Should be naturalized in the next year which would make things a lot easier.

Thanks for sharing your experience, it's helpful to hear from someone who did it.

Speed limit in our neighborhood is 30kmh (18 mph). And driving the bike into the fields meant like down the Road onto ways that were only open to farmers‘ cars.

Isn’t sport massively important in US schools, and for getting into college? That must have been a big change not being able to go to ‘practice’ and all their clubs?

> Isn’t sport massively important in US schools?

For the kids involved in sports, sure. That's not all kids.

Ah kind of assumed it was mandatory for all children to have a sport or club in the US - films and articles about college admission make it look so.

In my experience it was a minority of kids. My parents pushed me into it, but I still only spent about half the years in any sport. Of my friend group, only one other person was in formal extracurriculars (jazz band) and the situation was roughly similar across the board, and many clubs are only seasonal.

Sports/clubs aren't typically required for graduation, but kids who are college bound will be highly encouraged to join one or more.

Back when I was in (US) high school, the only mandatory physical requirement to graduate was one semester of PE (Physical Education). I took mine over the summer, where it was too hot in my state to go outside, so we played volleyball and ping-pong in the air-conditioned gym all summer. I was not a very physical kid, so that was like winning the lottery for me, since those that took it the rest of the year had to run around the track, and do other outdoor activities in the sun.

My experience:

Before high school, we had a physical education/"gym" class as part of our normal schedule where we would do various althletic things.

In high school, we needed a certain amount athletic credits in order to graduate. This worked out to be either 1 season each year on an actual team (competing against other schools); or 2 "seasons" each year of non competative play (e.g. pick-up games of ultimate frisbee, or joining the cross country team for training runs). They would take attendence each day, and you get credit based on how many times you show up (with no requirement that the days you show up are even in the same year; the only time a teacher would complain about you missing a day is if you need the credit to graduate).

You could also get credit for sports you do outside of the school.

Athletics is one way high schoolers with less than stellar academic records can navigate past college admissions departments and get accepted at a school where they might not otherwise be qualified. Most people already knew this about scholarship athletes, but the recent college admissions scandal involved non-athletes being listed by college coaches as recruited athletes. It's basically the coach telling the admissions department that this student might play on their team and therefore should get preferential treatment with admissions.

This is such a tiny portion of the high school athletics community that is barely worth mentioning. For the vast majority of students participating in sports the only value a sport provides to college admission is as a extracurricular activity. It is no more valuable than being in the school band, acting in the school play, or being a member of the chess club.

In my opinion, I'd say being in a "varsity" sport is more valuable than being in an arbitrary club but being in a "club" sport is similar to being in an arbitrary club.

Varsity football in a state like Texas or Florida where football is king? Definitely a huge value add even if you are not going to play football in college.

Sports can sometimes show a lot of character, in a different way than things like band or school play do. Think about the amount of hard training it takes to become, for example, a state champion distance runner, or wrestler. It takes more internal strength to run 10 miles every day than to practice the flute.

Ah. "Working hard breeds character". I wish my parents hadn't been such blind working class people to understand that that's merely the way to stay working class.

> It takes more internal strength to run 10 miles every day than to practice the flute.

That’s utter nonsense. It takes more physical prowess to run 10 miles, sure, but there’s nothing mentally easy about playing the same damn four bars until you have the passage completely locked in, to put in the effort to go from ok to good to excellent.

I won’t argue that both take mental prowess. But there’s a difference between overcoming physical hardship and mental tedium.

Almost no one goes to college in the US to play a sport. Even a lot of people who go to college to play a sport (D3 athletes) don't get any kind of tangible benefit from it(e.g. salary, tuition reduction, course credits, etc).

> Almost no one goes to college in the US to play a sport.

I didn't mean that - I mean people applying for I don't know engineering or whatever having to compete by showing how good their extra-curriculars were.

Ah. That's more common, but also not required. Usually colleges will be looking for extra curriculars, of which sports might be one. But it would be just as well or maybe even better to be part of a debate club, the school newspaper, etc.

Consider that a typical suburban U.S. high school might have 10,000+ kids, not everyone will make the soccer team.

> Consider that a typical suburban U.S. high school might have 10,000+ kids

Not only is that not typical, there seems to be no US in-person high school in the US that has 10,000+ kids (there are a few online/distance-learning high schools that big or bigger.) It looks like the largest in-person is Brooklyn Technical High School, which has ~6,000.

It was hyperbole, but the point still stands. 3000 kids, not everyone is making the soccer team.

> It was hyperbole, but the point still stands. 3000 kids, not everyone is making the soccer team.

The national “top 100” lists of biggest high schools start in the low 3,000s; that's not typical, suburban or otherwise, either.

A better way to think about it is that grades and test scores are probably not enough if you want to get into an elite school. Universities want interesting people who will enrich the campus and their fellow students.

One easy way to demonstrate this is through extracurricular activity. If you founded a club, excelled in a sport, engaged in charity, won contests, etc., that's a sign that you're somebody who does things in a community and not just a test taker.

(There is room at even top schools for test takers—but you're going to need extremely uncommon scores to stand out that way.)

I call this, dictatorship of the masses. Masses define « normal » as doing specific things, and normality is enforced for uni, and we don’t select enough for skills. As a person who couldn’t understand social expectations (=Asperger) this is extremely stressful, but now I just read it as the first installment of normal people’s revenge over the work-minded. For what, I don’t know, it’s not like we’ll end up with their loving wife or recognition, but I assure it takes many forms.

Meanwhile Asian countries select for skills and don’t hesitate to give 14hrs per day of courses at high school in China depending on provinces. Not that it is enjoyable, but we won’t enjoy much when we have to acknowledge their superiority.

A few spots for IQ160 people still excludes a lot of good workers. Perhaps we shouldn’t suppress our hard workers, perhaps we should even acknowledge them, even if they seem boring for normal people.

Meanwhile if those could actually help us socially, that would be a big win-win, if only because socially-excluded people are harmful to others, maybe also because most tax dollars comes from hard workers.

I'm not too worried about those Chinese kids who have done nothing but hit the books with their lives.

This seems like an good way to get people to contrive as many experiences as possible for this relatively arbitrary metric. To me it seems totally irrelevant, but it seems like American universities are more of a packaged 'experience' than for specialized training specifically.

Most kids don’t get into the colleges that require those things.

there wouldn't be a childhood obesity epidemic if that were actually the case.

When I was a teacher, most of my obese male students were on the football team. It was not a great football team.

If you are aiming for elite (or semi-elite) schools you need sports or clubs to appear well rounded. 95% of students aren't really trying to get into those colleges.

A lot of public colleges essentially create a formula (GPA and SAT/ACT) and the "soft factors" likes clubs and sports only decide when you are in the gray area.

Sports are very divided.. in rural/suburban areas they are important, but still not to everyone.

It’s important to the schools to generate income and whatever weird rivalry keeps people going. If you aren’t in a rural town sports players are probably a tiny, tiny percentage of your class and I think it’s better today but they weren’t exactly the most inclusive group of people when I was in school in the late 90s/2000s.

I think this varies a lot, depending on town, gender, area of country, what college you're trying to get in, etc. Also, if everybody is not getting to do their sports, it's not as if that puts you at a disadvantage in regards getting into college.

Not that this would be the impact on kids' mental health, anyway, that would depend on whether they found sports to be satisfying and rewarding, or just one more stressful opportunity to be declared a failure. That, in turn, probably depends on the parents and the coaches.

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