Thoughts about National Honor Society

I've been an NHS adviser for eight years, and it's really changed my life and the lives of the kids.

Perhaps the most difficult thing is dealing with parents of kids who have not been selected.

On one of the NHS message board, a mother wrote, at length, about her anger about her son not being selected for National Junior Honor Society last year.

I thought I would share my response.

Comments appreciated

( Comments are here )

Anyone doing this one??

I'm trying to get all my Livejournal friends' locations plotted on a map - please add your location starting with this form. Username: (Then get your friends to!)

Two more sports books

13. Every Second Counts," by Lance Armstrong

If you read, "It's Not About The Bike," then you need to read the followup in which Armstrong keeps winning Tours de France.

If you didn't read the first book, this one's quite readable on its own, but I think you are going to want to read the first one eventually anyway.

If you're not familiar with him, Armstrong was a great bicycle racer, had testicular cancer, and came back as an ever better bicycle racer. He has won the last five Tour de France titles. (What was really cool was that we were in France during part of this year's Tour, so I remember some of the things he wrote about.

I love the writing "voice" that Armstrong and co-author Sally Jenkins give us. Johnson is straight-forward and talks about his foibles, his frustrations with religion, his uneasiness with being a "Cancer Hero," his despair when folks he knows die of cancer, the break-up (and at the end, it seems, reconciliation) of his marriage and his even anger at doping allegations that were untrue. He rings so true in his writing.

But it's an update book, too. He shares his joys of success and is very, very quick to hand compliments to the guys he rides with.

Neither of his books are at all technical in nature. They are easily readable by non-cyclists.


14. "We Own This Game: A Season in the Adult World of Youth Football," by Robert Andrew Powell

There is so much I want to write about this book.

I want to quote passages.

But I will start with a very simple opinion:

"This book is better than Friday Night Lights."

If you believe, as many of us -- including Sports Illustrated -- do, that "Friday Night Lights," by H.S. Bissinger is the best book ever written about sports below the college level, then you need to go to the bookstore or library right now and get this one.

Reporter Robert Andrew Powell, a white reporter from Illinois, spent the better part of a decade getting to know Miami, then spent an entire season following Miami's allmost entirely Black Pop Warner Football teams (ages 6 to 13 or so).

Powell is a great reporter in that he lets the people in his books tell their stories. He's not judgmental. He lets them say what they think, and sometimes it's not pretty. He quotes in dialect. He talks to drug dealers. His eye for descriptions of what people look like and what they wear are also quite telling.

While you're not paying attention he weaves in an amazing amount of history about Miami. He talks about how it was a backwater 50 years ago, a place populated mostly by Blacks. He talks openly about the huge disparities in the socioeconomic areas of Miami and details the conflict between the Blacks and the Cubans in Miami. He was working at the Herald during the Elian Gonzalez issue. He also offers a fascinating look at the almost complete lack of response among the poor Black community in Miami to Sept. 11.

That all sneaks in there among stories about men who put their entire lives into building your football programs into powerhouses that regularly win in the Pop Warner Super Bowls in Orlando. (In fact, at least one of the teams featured in the book did it this year).

He thought his focus would be on the kids, and while he does write about them, he discovered the real story was in the adults. It's just amazing to see high-stakes games being played with 8-year-olds.

Great book!