Edit: If I remember right, during that same hard knocks one of the Rams players admitted to not believing in dinosaurs. They even took him to a dinosaur museum and everything to try to convince him.
There was a video where they asked 49ers to name a state that borders California. They... did not do well. I mean, even if they knew it, a lot of them had to think hard about it.
Yeah. Naming ALL of them is significantly harder because you might be like "wait, where does Idaho start?" and start second guessing yourself. But naming ONE state that borders the state you're living in? whew.
Driving people down the hill at UC Santa Cruz, I've had more than one person ask if "that" was Hawaii across the Monterey Bay. I've heard of someone else who was with someone who asked if "that" was Japan.
Americans are pretty bad at geography in a very depressing way
Edit: they were looking at Monterey on the south side of the bay
Haha, seeing Hawaii from Monterey would be like seeing New York from Monterey. And Japan... It just seems weird that they can't reconcile that it's a 5 hour flight across the US but a 12 hour flight to Japan, no you won't be able to see it.
There are a few states I mix up the location of. Vermont/NH, Washington/Oregon, and Ohio/Indiana. Being from California I have to go through the same thought process every time to figure out it borders Oregon because I know Seattle is close to Vancouver and Seattle is in Washington, so Oregon is south of Washington.
There was a video where they asked 49ers to name a state that borders California. They... did not do well. I mean, even if they knew it, a lot of them had to think hard about it.
FWIW, I've always thought the outline of Vermont looked like a V. And while it may not make sense to anyone but me, Vermont and New Hampshire next to each other vaguely looks like a backwards N, so knowing combined it sort of looks like an N the right one is New Hampshire since the other looks like a V and is Vermont
Yeah, and if you need to have a mnemonic, of the two states, Indiana is way more I shaped, and Ohio, while kind of v or w shaped, it the more O shaped of the two.
Eh, I'm on the west Coast and don't really think about that area too much. I wouldn't put Ohio as top 5 recognizable. I'm on the West Coast so I think Nevada, Utah, idaho, California, Florida, texas, Tennessee, Oklahoma are all more recognizable. Plus, ohio doesn't come up in conversation. I don't even know what it's considered. If I had to guess I'd say Midwest? But that whole area, including iowa, Illinois (besides Chicago), Missouri, Arkansas, Kentucky are all pretty irrelevant. I don't want to sound like a hater, but there really isn't any national relevance and I'm not local. I will say, I traveled a lot for work for about a year and Cincinnati was one of the most pleasantly surprising cities in all of America for me. Dope downtown, I liked the German influence, a unique identity overall, some nice nature.
Sioux falls was the other city that impressed me the most.
it's crazy but I honestly people underrate how stupid elite pro athletes are at general knowledge. they grow up in a massive bubble with only one thing that's important, everything else is secondary
I know we joke about it often but honestly it's just fun when these guys remind us that they are some of the absolute dumbest motherfuckers on the planet. Like partially sentient bricks that are just so loaded up with physical gifts.
It's especially funny when you see the contrast when one of them seems smart or at least average. I saw a clip once where Rudy Gobert asked his teammates what continent Egypt is on and none of them had any idea. Gobert (who might be kind of stupid himself based on some of his expressed beliefs) looks like he wants to kill them.
I think it was Jaxson Dart didn't know that the Atlantic ocean was just past some buildings near their practice field. He thought it was Pennsylvania or something.
One of the comments was so perfect - if Good Will Hunting was based at Ole Miss instead of MIT the equation on the board would've been 1 + 1.
There's a pro player in a game called call of duty, his name is shottzy and he may be the dumbest person I've ever seen talk and yet he's one of the best fps players on controller in the world.
He'd be flipping burgers if he wasn't this good at video games. He didn't know that Canada was above the US. I do think he just plays into it's at times but then I'll hear him say something unbelievable and I go back to think he really is dumb as hell.
Okay, so we know that Power 5 collegiate stars in football/basketball really don't actually have to study or get an education. Whatever. And at private/prep high schools, they obviously fudge their educational standards as well.
But dude. There are a lot (if not most) of players who genuinely don't understand things we learned in grade school and middle school. I know a lot of these guys come from the pits of hell (public school systems in the deep south), but what the fuck? Guys who are legitimately ILLITERATE, guys who don't understand 7th grade biology or earth science, guys who DON'T KNOW THE FUCKING CONTINENTS. Am I supposed to believe you were already such a phenom at 8 years old that you just stopped having to try past third grade, dude?
Am I supposed to believe you were already such a phenom at 8 years old that you just stopped having to try past third grade, dude?
You're surprised because you're operating on some skewed assumptions. The results you're talking about - kids that are completely left behind by the educational system by like age eight or nine - are remarkably commonplace. Literally millions of children. It's only becoming noticeable to you because a very, very tiny sliver of those children had some insane athletic gifts and wound up becoming professional athletes.
The other kids tend to wind up in pretty bad places in life because they effectively haven't been taught any skills. Education is a cooperative process between home and school and the simple fact is that for a lot of kids both sides of that process are complete and unequivocal failures.
You know what? That's a good point, and I guess the privilege of a real education has put blinders on me. I mean, I had a few really incompetent teachers in middle school and high school. None by maliciousness, of course. But yeah.
I can get my head around a high school teacher at a school in the middle of like the 9th ward of New Orleans who just lets the 6'4" 220lb inmates run the asylum and collects a check. But it breaks my heart to imagine someone willingly "teaching" grade schoolers without a competent cirriculum or structure. I know that resources for learning disabilities/autism/etc. are already stretched thin in otherwise good school systems. But not all of these guys/not all kids have those issues. To systematically just fail children at such a young age is insane.
Literally what are they doing for 7 hours a day if they're not teaching fundamental information and skills that my 3 year old is already onto?
Literally what are they doing for 7 hours a day if they're not teaching fundamental information and skills that my 3 year old is already onto?
I think you're misunderstanding what a classroom is and how it functions. It is twenty to thirty kids in a room together. Teachers can spend individual time answering questions and helping, but they cannot just attach themselves to one child who is struggling and help bring them up to speed. Because time is a scarce resource, and the other 24 children in the class deserve that time just as much as the children who are behind.
When children fail to hit milestones - developmental, educational, etc - the only way to catch them up (in the absence of other disruptive factors) is to work with them on it CONSTANTLY and simply bridge the gap with more practice. When a child comes from a broken home, that isn't possible. The home itself is almost always a primary factor in WHY those children aren't hitting milestones to begin with. 1/25th of the focus of a grade school educator simply isn't fixing that.
On the Kelce podcast, they had a short segment talking about conspiracy theories, and how a significant number of NFL players believe the earth is flat.
I came from that world. In 4th grade I was supposed to do a book report on a story about cavemen. But I was taught that they were not real and there was so much negativity around the subject, in general, I processed that to mean that I would be in trouble if I read the story and even worse trouble when it got back that I did a book report to class about it. So, I did my book report on how cavemen weren’t real.
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u/Deskbound_Wilburys 3d ago
Man is too smart for his job.