Or in any other country in the world, but still - if it’s school hours it’s a time when students in Spain would be expected to be in school, not bussing to another one. And games involve buses, not parents playing cabbie. The level of parental “volunteering” that’s apparently expected and taken for granted in many American schools is mind-boggling to any Spanish parent.
Amen to this. There ought to be a law.
I think the same is true here. School ends at 3 or 4 p.m. The game was scheduled for 7 p.m.
It’s mind-boggling to many of us Americans in this thread.
When I’ve worked in service jobs, we were usually required to work at least one weekend night. These were the busy periods, and they required all hands on deck. Theoretically you could swap shifts with someone, but since weekend nights were pretty much fully staffed, realistically it wasn’t usually possible to get rid of a weekend shift.
I’ve worked retail jobs where the standard response to wanting a night off (like, say, to attend a funeral or take a final exam) was to not assign you any hours for that entire week. That wreaks havocs on your ability to eat that week, let me tell you.
Some of our interschool sports competitions in the UK were in the middle of the day, though there were only one or two a year, and parents didn’t play a part in organising them. Actually, I’d be amazed if the parents of anyone but the kids involved actually even knew when they were on- I only occasionally found out when one of the kids involved mentioned it, or if they won.
I think I skipped as many classes as a choir member as anyone in the sports teams did for competitions.
No, I’ll continue to be surprised by unnecessary leaps like that. A reasonable person would consider suspending broad judgments like “What a sad childhood you had” based on very tiny bits of information. It wasn’t necessary to the conversation or the topic at hand. You took it upon yourself to draw broad conclusions from infinitesimal data. Which is exactly the problem that the OP exhibits. You’re two of a kind.
Of course it was unwarranted. You weren’t invited to draw such a conclusion; such a conclusion was not necessary to the conversation. And anyone could see that basing such a conclusion on such little evidence would be shaky.
That’s actually a lesson to learn from the OP and this thread: Given little information, suspend judgment.
It’s mad late, but I’m jumping in here to remind myself to post tomorrow. As a Texan who attended an inner city, low income high school, who then went on to teach at an inner city, low income middle school, I think I have some insight into what might have been going on…
Right. So I went to school in East Austin, in a prototypical inner city, low income high school. It’s since been closed due to not meeting AYP standards for 4 consecutive years. (The school is physically there, but it’s now two charter-type thingies.)
The OP mentioned the cost of games. $8 a head is no joke. You are not going to get people who are peripherally interested in the game to go at that rate. As others have noted, lots of people, students and parents, work Friday nights. They are giving up time where they could earn money and spending money - not to mention how difficult it is to get off on a Friday night if you’re scheduled to work then.
The other thing that’s not clear is what kind of game the OP attended. It sounds like a new matchup. Our stands were packed when we played our rival schools, but people were less likely to attend if we had an odd matchup or an unknown out of town school. We usually had two out of district games with some schools in San Antonio - the students came out, but not so much with parents.
How about tradition? At my high school, football, basketball, and girls’ volleyball were big. Baseball, which we were actually decent at, always had a pretty sparse crowd. The other sports typically were full on game nights. It’s also not clear if there might have been another school event that night (that’s fairly unusual, but occasionally it happens).
There’s a lack of understanding about what goes on at a Texas high school football game on a Friday night. For a lot of communities, it’s a town meeting. At my high school, the teachers, administrators, local business owners (many of whom were graduates of our school), and city council/school board members would be in the crowd. Last time I went to a game, about seven years ago, I saw an old friend, who took me over to his bleacher where the former mayor and school board president was sitting. It’s not necessarily people poring over every snap of the football - it’s a place to see and be seen, to make deals, etc.
So aside from the 40 or so kids on the football team, you had the cheerleaders, dance team (that sat in the bleachers until halftime), band, flag squad, and occasionally other athletes or student council types that were recognized at halftime. Tons of kids involved who didn’t play football.
Our school had a strong place in the community. I went to school with kids whose parents, and even grandparents, attended the school. That particular part of Austin had a very strong sense of community, and the local businesses - flower shops, dry cleaners, auto shops, and restaurants - were almost all owned or managed by alumni of the school. So we always had a pretty significant turnout, regardless of how the team performed. (Typically, we’d do well in the first quarter, then get progressively worse as the game continued.)
It should be noted in Austin, there were three district stadiums - your home stadium was the one closest to your school. Ours wasn’t near our school, so you had to figure out transportation to and from the game. We also had pretty cheap admissions - $3 or $4, and maybe $5-$7 for adults. So if the game was a distance from the school and the community, that might account for the lack of people in the stands. They would run a bus on occasion to the game for students but I’m not sure if adults could ride it too.
Anyway, just wanted to fight some ignorance about what actually goes on at a high school football game in the stands.
Not sure it’s “harmless” to cut class time short to herd everyone into the gym for a mandatory “fawn on the jocks” pep rally, forcing those who get bullied to join in adulating the worst bullies in the school.
I dealt by slipping out and going home early, since I lived in easy walking distance. 
They didn’t do this at my high school.
At my middle school, they did, but the process annoyed me enough that I… provoked senseless fights DURING the pep rally, and thus got excused from future rallies.
Yes. This. I went to a high school where the parents were very involved. Super-involved. Parents showed up for every single parent-teacher conference, and lots of other events. Fund-raisers (non-public, free school), you name it.
But athletic events? I played on the basketball team (we didn’t have a football team, probably because we didn’t have a football field). I don’t recall ever seeing any of my teammates’ parents there. I certainly never saw mine there.
The school really didn’t emphasize athletics. Athletics were for fun, that’s all. And I guess the parents took their cue from the schoo.
To address this and OP about interest in their child’s schooling, there was an interesting article in the Washington Post (last week, I think) that pointed out that most working poor are so *mentally *exhausted by trying to figure out where the next meal is coming from every fucking day and whether to see a doctor about that persistent cough and how to get to work tomorrow etc that they often make poor decisions. They are just too tired to think clearly.
(For parents out there, remember how hard it was to think when your kid was a newborn and up all night – the mental and physical exhaustion was crushing.)
If they had their butlers leave out their clothes and hire drives to get them around, they would have alot more time.
Why don’t they just tell their boss they are going to take off early on Friday to play some golf. That always works for me.
I am mean who really works at 7pm on a Friday other than healthcare workers, food industry people, store workers, gas station workers, hotel workers, customer service people, utility workers, entertainment industry people, etc, etc…
Long thread so I could have missed it, but I don’t think anyone mentioned this – not only are many of the kids from the innercity school from single-parent families, a lot of them are likely foster children, or kids being raised by grandparents, or otherwise in less than traditional or less than stable home situations. Not necessarily the recipe for a lot of rah-rah parents at football games.