backassed bragging

[firecat]

I think I'm pretty smart. And I did well in school.

But if—as is reported in the latest junkfoodscience post—"Jocks tend to be better students than couch potatoes," I can only imagine how much smarter I would have been if I'd had more enforced physical activity as a schoolkid (in the name of preventing obesity of course). Not only would I have been skinny, but I would have been so smart that I probably would have invented some superweapon and the Earth would now be a ring of ashes orbiting Venus.

Especially check out the part of the article that discusses the "activity pyramid." It has "schoolwork, homework, reading, computer games, TV, videos, eating, resting, and sleeping" in a tiny triangle at the top, the same triangle that contains "fats" on the food pyramid.

Comments

[jenk]

Homework for the sake of homework, especially for grade-school kids, isn't very useful at improving skills or knowledge. (Even if the kid does it and not the parents.)

It's in high school that homework begins to have some benefit, in terms of practicing skills, working independently, and so on.

All that said, I doubt that kids need to 3 or 4 times as much aerobic activity as sleep.

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

I think that the part that bothered me most was the whole idea that certain luxuries we might like to subscribe to (like seatwork of any kind) should of course go by the wayside right now because there's an epidemic on. It's like the War on Terror -- the idea being that whatever you might think about rights, certain concessions need to be made because it's "wartime". These sorts of arguments can be used to justify all sorts of ridiculous things.

[firecat]

Oh, really well said.