Wake County Middle School Sports: Fill & Download for Free

As a high school teacher, I can answer from the perspective of teachers and our students.It has to do with school buses and sports.imageIn Central Florida, which I believe is pretty typical of most American high schools, class begins at 7:20. Teachers generally arrive at least a half hour before. This means getting up at 6:00 or earlier (some kids have an hour ride).There are 212,000+ students in Orange County, Florida. The county does not have enough buses to pick them all up at once, so the first run is for high school students, then elementary kids, for whom school starts at 8:45, then middle school, which starts at 9:30.Every study shows that high school students do not get enough sleep and that 7:20 is far too early to start the school day. Why not have the little kids start first, you might ask, since parents can more easily control their bedtimes?That is where high school sports come into play.Sports, especially football, basketball, and baseball, have become increasingly more professionalized in American high schools. College football has completely become a professional game, albeit the players are unpaid indentured servants. High school coaches want to start their hours long practices while there is still plenty of daylight.Parents and school administrators support them in this.imageSo, teenagers in America, and their teachers, rise much earlier than their counterparts in many other countries.AddendumAs the comments indicate, the United States is not the only country where student begin school at an unreasonably early hour.I am curious as to the explanation for early start times in countries without school buses or high school sports.

For the last three years that I’ve been in high school, and for I don’t know how long before (literally don’t know), my school started at 7:05 in the morning and ended at 1:35.This year, my school has made the courageous decision to take a step towards improving student health by changing the start time to a later time, allowing us healthier sleep schedules according to multitudes of studies about how teens need 8–10 hours, and operate on a biological schedule that, generally, calls for sleep from around 11 PM to 10 AM, ish. Waking up for school at 7:00 is the worst possible schedule for high school students, the science cries!So my school has answered.We now start at 7:20 and get out of school at 1:50.Y’know, a fifteen minute difference.I maybe could understand the change if it was a county decision to make sure all schools are starting and ending at the same time, but it’s not, because no one else has the same schedule we do.No, I’m pretty sure this minuscule change is supposed to be about letting teens get better sleep.Which I’m totally down for! I tailored my own schedule this year so I have two online classes, where I could get the bulk of the typically weekday work done over the weekend, and instead get two extra hours in the morning so I wake up at 7:00 instead of 5:00, because I felt absolutely miserable last year and attributed that largely to my sleep.I still feel miserable this year, but I think it’s because I, being the epitome of brains, decided to start a second job and accidentally got myself working hours that didn’t actually work super great with my schedule. I’m sorting it out. I also have commitment issues, which sounds like relationship drama, but it’s actually research topic drama.But, yeah, no. My school gets out at 1:50, which is just… annoying. My nannying job ended up working out, as the older kid gets out thirty minutes later now that she’s in high school, so I still have time to stop by my house and grab a snack before I go work there, and for my new job I just had to do a brief trial and error and now I’ve fixed my scheduling issues.But such a small change? If it was a larger change, I could get behind it. It would mess everyone’s schedules up, especially since so many high school students work and stack that on top of homework, free time, and sports—but if it legit had the possibility of improving student health, physically and mentally? I could support it.But a fifteen minute change has no benefits and only messes up those afternoon schedules that depend on those fifteen minutes. If that one kid that I nanny was still in middle school, I would barely have time to drop my brother off at home before I had to race back to start nannying. My friend who plays soccer for school and rec is out practicing for almost an hour later now because her school team schedule adjusted, and then her rec team had to adjust to compensate. Other classmates had to reorganize their work hours.And we all think the point was to get student health on track, but honestly? There was very little clear communication. Last year I thought it was about homogenization of high school schedules, but no one else is operating on the same hours as my school, so people assume it’s because of pressure to move start times later, but it’s fifteen minutes.Anyway.It’s not the time specifically that I have a problem with. After all, it’s a fifteen minute difference from 1:35—I barely care.It’s the change from 1:35 to 1:50 that really messes me up.Outside of that? I’m conflicted—on one hand, I really do wish we started later for health’s sake, but I also did have that later start time in middle school, and I didn’t like it. School started at 9:00, and there was no time after school—we got out at 3:30—no time after school to really do anything. If high school operated on a similar schedule, I don’t think students would like that, as this is when we get that level of freedom where we can have jobs and do things outside of school. A later start/end time could ruin that.Anyway part two.This has been Emily’s rant about her school’s weirdness, with an addendum about the troubles of high school schedules.My final answer is that I don’t know what I think about my school’s end time.

I’m a 50 year old man and I have an IQ in the range where your percentile (the percent of the population who score lower than you) isn’t measured in integers, but in decimal places — how many 9s are to the right of “99.”? The number of people on the planet estimated to be in my score range is only in the thousands.You’ll notice I’m posting anonymously. That’s because, for some reason, claiming an IQ range like that is considered arrogant. Which is odd, because if you ask Manute Bol if he’s extremely tall, nobody thinks he’s arrogant if he answers yes. I know I’m extremely smart, and so do my close friends who’ve known me since childhood, but I try to hide it from everyone else.Socially it sucks.I became aware at a very young age that other people’s minds don’t work like mine. Not only did I learn things much faster than other people, I simply thought about different stuff. I really couldn’t have a conversation with most other kids about anything that I thought was cool or important or interesting. I had no interest in sports or cars, for example, and still don’t. But I was very interested in physics and astronomy, for example.When I was in 6th grade my class took a multi-day trip to Washington, DC. I came back with a few rolls of film that I’d shot, of course. When we got them developed, I was looking through them with my mom — shots of the national zoo, the capitol, all the landmarks. After looking at a few, my mother started rifling through them, then looked at me and said, “There are no people here.”She was right. It hadn’t occurred to me to take a single picture with a human being in it.I have no clue how other people in my IQ range think, because I don’t meet them. Or if I ever do, I don’t know it, and neither do they. But my theory is that there’s only so much room in the brain, and if you’ve got the kind of brain that can score extremely high on IQ tests, you’re going to have some serious deficiencies to go along with it.I’ve never been married. I’ve had less than a dozen girlfriends in my life, and I’m including my teenage years. The few relationships I’ve had have lasted from a few days to a few months. I’ve never managed to get a relationship to the point where we’re waking up with one another. At some point, my partner realizes that I’m not fully developed emotionally and things start falling apart.My social blindspots are severe, and I’m not aware of what it is that I’m not aware of. Over the years, I’ve managed to piece some of it together, but I’ve become extremely shy for fear of doing foolish things or offending people. Looking back on my life often makes me cringe. I have no nostalgia for my childhood at all. I live alone, and do almost everything by myself, including going to movies and going out to eat. On a typical day, I have no physical contact with anyone beyond shaking hands.I have a small number of close friends, though. Most of them have known me since I was a boy. A couple of them met me in college. Only one met me after college, a co-worker whom I dated very briefly. Mostly we keep in touch electronically. Only one of them lives where I do.If you met me casually, you’d probably never suspect any of this. I’ve learned to appear more or less normal. But that’s why I limit my contact with people who don’t know me extremely well, so that they don’t notice how strange I am.I recall about 25 years ago, a college friend moved into the town where I was living and we reconnected. And one day, I don’t recall what we were talking about, but he said that he had heard about me before he met me, and what he’d heard was that I was “a genius, but very very strange.”About that same time I was hanging out with a clique of fellow co-workers. There was one — a very cool and very pretty woman — who I hung out with a lot. And one day we were talking about relationships and she told me that she thought I was “not someone that anyone could feel that way about”, meaning romantically. She said it very matter-of-factly, and I didn’t get angry because I also thought it was true, or suspected it might be.These days, I avoid my neighbors. Always have, really. I need social distance from people who are that physically close. I literally could not pick my neighbors in a lineup, and that’s true for the the last place I lived, as well, and I was there 10 years. I like to take daily walks, but I do it after dark so that I don’t run into anyone. Which, of course, reinforces my reputation for being odd. But that suits me now. It keeps people away.Intellectually it’s frustrating.I’ve always hated school, despite having spent 26 years in it (from K-12 through graduate studies). In grade school I was bored because everything was so easy. Middle school and high school were a daily walking nightmare because I was so geeky, and I failed to pursue my intellectual passions because I was trying so hard to cover up my intelligence. (I grew up in a small town in the rural South when the fortunes of that town’s one industry were declining — a profoundly anti-intellectual atmosphere.) In fact, I was in art class when they announced my name as valedictorian over the PA and one guy in the class refused to believe it. He said there must be another kid with the same name. (Schools there were county-wide so there were several hundred kids in my grade, so nobody knew everyone.)Because everything was easy, and because I had come to consider school something to get through while I pursued my personal interests on the side, I became intellectually lazy in class, and this slopped over into my college years. Yeah, I got the advanced degrees, but I was always just squeaking by. I got the As, but was constantly teetering on the edge of blowing my assignments.I never did anything with the physics because it requires so much math and I’m not into math. I’ve read as much as I can and learned as much as I can, but there’s a point at which I hit a wall because I can’t go there without the math and I don’t have time anymore to learn it even if I wanted to.I have other interests as well. There are graduate-level textbooks on my shelf devoted to topics I just wanted to know more about. What interests me are the big questions — how the mind works, how the universe works. All the other stuff is just fluff.In practical terms, it’s a mixed bag.There’s one high school teacher I’ve kept in touch with over the years, and I went to visit her a few months back. We got to talking about what I was doing and about the old days, and she recalled how I was an enigma to her. She said, “You knew all these things that no one your age had any business knowing, and yet you couldn’t figure out what to do with your own life over the next five minutes.” That was and is true.Because I separated my passions from my work, I’ve ended up drifting from job to job, doing all kinds of things. I’ve gone broke a couple of times. I have some savings, but not nearly enough. But while most other people I grew up with or went to college with have been working their way up in some sort of career, I keep hitting the reset button, and now that I’m 50 the chickens are starting to come home to roost. I have no idea if I’ll have a secure retirement or not. I may never be able to retire.The good thing is, I work my way up quickly. It usually takes me about a year to go from entry to being a manager or director. In the current job it took me 7 months to go from independent contractor to director.I keep thinking that my ideal job would be for an employer in my (rather vague) line of work to simply hire me and tell me to do whatever I want. I actually had that gig briefly a few years back and it worked out great! It was for a company looking to create a new venture in a related area they had no real experience in, and they hired me to research it and develop a plan. There was nobody there to guide me. So I came in to work every day and dived in with gusto.That’s because what I love is the learning curve itself. Once the curve flattens out, I get bored and I want the learn the next new thing. With that gig, I could walk away when I’d learned enough and conveyed that knowledge to the enterprise. Then I used what I’d learned to start my own business. But I didn’t enjoy being an entrepreneur because there are so many details that take you away from the actual work, so I ended up back in a salaried job, at about half what I was earning before I left the last one.I honestly believe that if the right company understood how I think and what I’m really good at, they’d get tremendous value out of hiring me and just setting me loose on research projects. Because I’m not just good at learning things, I’m also very good at explaining those things to other people and making complex ideas seem simple enough to grasp.But that’s not going to happen. The business world doesn’t work that way, and besides, if someone came up to me with that offer I’d say no. Why the hell should I believe someone who insists that they’ll produce ROI if I just set them loose?So what’s my experience of life like?Not all that bad, considering.Insomnia is my worst problem, and boy it’s a doozy! My brain will not shut up! So I ended up drinking and smoking myself to sleep every night until a drug was developed that calms the brain chatter and lets me sleep. I’ve stopped drinking and rarely use marijuana now.I don’t often get lonely. I have more to do than I can possibly accomplish. My job is quite hectic and I always bring work home nights and weekends. Since I live alone, I have to do every chore and task around the house. Which doesn’t take twice as long as it does for a couple, btw, but many times longer. And I have hobbies, of course. Over the past 20 years I’ve taught myself guitar and I write songs. I do a lot of reading about things that interest me, and I have animals to take care of.There is someone I go out with now from time to time. She’s a woman I first met when we were 11-year-old kids, and we were good friends all during high school, but then we both moved away. I saw her a couple of times during my college years, and then we were in different states after that. Didn’t keep in touch or anything. And then eventually we both moved to the same town.It’s a very comfortable relationship for me. She knows me. I don’t have to explain anything. We can laugh and joke, we enjoy lots of the same music and movies, she knows most of my other close friends. And this time, I’m not trying to overthink it. I just enjoy her company, and I’m not worried about where the relationship might or might not be going.My work is not particularly stimulating most of the time, but it has its moments. It’ll last another six to eighteen months and then… damned if I know what’s next.What’s a shame, though, is that I can’t really share my inner life. Nobody would understand it. And frankly, it bores people.I want to write a book, but I don’t have time. What I’ve decided, though, is that I need to make time. That’s because about 5 years ago I found the answer to a 400 year old question. And if I don’t get it out, I know I’ll profoundly regret it.Well, I say I “found” the answer, but that’s not correct. I studied the question for decades. The answer, it turned out, was highly counter-intuitive. But like many other questions which have remained unanswered until the modern era, once you understand the answer, you can see why it makes sense. It’s like when you’re a kid and someone explains to you that the earth is round and shows you how we know this — once you see it, you can’t unsee it anymore. That was my experience with the ideas of Einstein, for example, and this idea is similar in that way (although Einstein’s insights are much more profound than mine).I enjoy learning, and there’s no end to that. In fact, what pains me most about mortality is knowing how much remains to be discovered that I’ll never have the chance to hear about.And my moment to moment experience is often quite satisfying. I love observing and concluding. I notice patterns that other people ignore, such as how you can look at stains and patterns of wear in an empty space and deduce from that how people move inside that space and what they do there. When email first came out, back in the black-and-green console days, I was able to guess what a superior’s password was, and despite never having been inside a system like that — and consoles are not at all user friendly — I was able to create my own account and start using it to communicate with friends at universities. At that time, email was a special thing, and folks at my level were not authorized to have it.Sometimes it’s not so pleasant, though. I drive through cities and I don’t just see the city. I picture all the infrastructure inside the buildings and under the ground, and how it’s connected to the nation and the world. And when I see a city like that, it’s frightening, because it feels so unsustainable, so fragile and vulnerable.In fact, because of the answer to that 400 year old question among other things, the world I see when I wake up is profoundly different from the world you probably see. We’re looking at the same stuff, but still, what I see is as different from what you likely see as what you see is different from what someone a thousand years ago would see. For example, if you believe that right now you’re looking out at the world and perceiving qualities such as colors and sounds and odors which exist outside of you, then you and I don’t see the same world at all.Would I want to be different?It used to be, yes, I wanted to be “normal”. For many years I was profoundly depressed, and seriously considered suicide twice before eventually actually putting the gun in my mouth, and discovering I’m too much of a coward to pull the trigger.People say suicide is the coward’s way out. Those people have never actually tried murdering themselves. It’s not that easy. No coward could do it. Could you walk willingly a firing squad? Would you volunteer to shoot someone in a firing squad? No? Try doing both at the same time. Suicide takes more balls than I got.Since that time I have come to understand that my death would seriously hurt my family and my closest friends. I know it’s difficult to believe, but until I was in my 40s I didn’t think that my death would be that big a deal for my parents or the people who’ve been my friends since childhood. They’d get over it. Now I understand, at least to some extent, how wrong I was.My future is still uncertain. I may wind up broke again. I may work till I die. Who knows? Perhaps my current casual relationship will grow over the years and become more intimate. Then again, perhaps it’ll just stay in a holding pattern and we’ll simply be friends who do things together. I guess either of those options would be OK.Maybe I’ll write that book. Maybe I’ll die frustrated.But now that I’m past the depression, now that it doesn’t matter that much if I’m weird or uncool, now that I’m OK with being alone, I’ve come to appreciate what I have. I’ve got a house and a plot of land. I have friends and family who care about me. I have a job that pays the bills. I have my books and now the Internet so I can keep my eternal learning curve going. I’m physically healthy. And I find quite a bit of joy in sunrises and sunsets, my nightly walks, caring for my animals, and the changing of the seasons.I wish I’d made better choices along the way, but most people probably feel that way.The one big regret, really, is this chasm between me and other people that I can’t seem to bridge. Part of that is my social blindness. And part of it is that I’m rarely thinking about the same kinds of things that other humans are thinking about.Well, like the song says, it’s not that easy being green, but when that’s all there is to be, it’ll do.