Generally speaking, in U.S. public schools, the position of “drama teacher” is rare. The drama club is run by a teacher who teaches something else, generally English literature.
Similarly, athletics coaches are generally teachers of some other subject, usually health (hygiene), industrial arts (shop), or, especially, social studies (history, government/civics , etc.) In smaller schools they might be volunteers. In larger schools they might get some extra wages for coaching. I have never seen a P.E. teacher coaching a “major” schools sport.
In large schools where sports are important, the stipend for coaching might outweigh the teacher salary, and the teacher’s performance rating might be dependent more upon his or her coaching skills.
I had a few history teachers who were complete morons and essentially taught by rote. They were kept on staff because of their coaching roles. My Western Civilization/Ancient Civilization teacher insisted on being addressed as “coach” by all his students, not just the ones who played on his team.
One of my friends asked him for a recommendation letter. It was so poorly written that it was unusable. No university could believe that a teacher. would write so badly.
At my school, the major requirement is to have competed at the high school and/or college level or be currently participating/competing. Most of the coaches are not teachers or staff (Small school, not many on staff are interested or qualify). Also required: Background check/fingerprints through the DOJ, First Aid/CPR/AED, separate modules on Concussion, Heat Illness, Sudden Cardiac Arrest. I have to do Mandated Reporter training every year. TB test. My stipend is 2300 per season, cross country 4 months, track is 5 months.
I think this marks a major difference with US school sports. In the UK, sports is just another subject, wrapped up in PE, so the PE teachers coach the teams. Sometimes we would get specialist part-time coaches in for certain sports, such as tennis, but I think my school was unusual in that - it was a private school, so had the funds to do so.
It would be very unusual for a history teacher to coach the football/soccer team, unless the school was so small that it had no PE teachers (junior schools (under age 11/12) excepted, as in those teachers tend to teach all subjects, including sport).
For example, my sons high school has an EXCELLENT drama program where they produce about 5 plays and musicals a year with a dedicated drama teacher who also directs plays outside of school. Anyways the drama program is supported by a drama booster club and you can bet if you want your kid to get a good spot in a play you WILL be donating alot of time and money to the booster club.
Same way with band. I remember one girl made head conductor because her mother ran the band booster club.
Now granted. The kid also has to have talent. But when it comes down to 2 candidates and both are equally good the parents role can win out.
At some US schools sometimes a sport will totally be run thru booster clubs. They pay for things like uniforms, coaches and such and make the money thru fees, selling merchandise, running concession stands, ticket sales, and fundraisers like car washes.
A kid getting a role in the play because they have connections is bad. It’s also nowhere near equivalent to a coach wanting a bunch of children to burn to death. I never said that there was no toxicity at all in other extracurriculars, only that it was at a much lower level than in sports.
A huge variety of organisations, such as local amateur sports clubs (eg rugby or tennis clubs will have junior teams and ‘summer camp’ style programmes, where the parents will pay membership fees or one off fees). A lot of these - and professional clubs - will also use corporate sponsorship to fund grassroots sport.
Then we also have the national bodies for each sport, who will put funding towards junior development (eg, the England & Wales Cricket board)
There’s no doubt private companies that will run training programmes, bit like your ‘Brit Soccer’.
Then at the lowest level, there will be junior sports teams set up by parents - there’s a bunch of ‘little league’ style soccer teams who play every Sunday in my local park. They don’t need much money for that, just enough to buy the kit. I suspect the parents pay nominal fees for this (and do the coaching for free).
Public swimming baths are usually owned and run by the local council (ie publicly funding), or perhaps a not-for-profit trust, and many will have swimming and diving clubs - again, you’d pay a fee to attend these.
From a sports perspective, Freshman centers and 9-10 schools make no difference in classification. UIL counts the 9-12 grade kids in a feeder pattern. I don’t know what Plano does when they have a talented 9th grader: do the let him play varsity for the senior hs?
The shenanigans are schools like HP, which has stayed the largest school in its conference in perpetuity (one year, they got bumped up, and went from a laundry list of state titles to none). We joke that UIL defines the cut off as HP + 1.
[quote=“Dark_Sponge, post:111, topic:921037”]
Don’t be silly; of course there are people like in drama and chess clubs. There are jerks in all walks of life. [/quote]
The difference is that the toxicity in the sports program is often explicitly endorsed or at the very least tacitly supported by the administration.
This has not been my experience. Most schools have a fine arts requirement, and drama is one of the classes that satisfies it. In a small school, the drama teacher may also teach something else, but Theater 1 at the very least is much more common than not. And full blown drama programs (like, 3 sections of theater 1, 2 sections of Theater 2, one section of tech theater) are common enough that I would generally expect a good size school to have one.
Yes. High school sports in Canada aren’t usually as intense as the most extreme US cases, but that is a thing that happens.
In Canada, youth sports development generally happens outside school. Hockey is an absolutely gigantic organization on its own, with far greater reach than any high school organization; hockey is more important to Canadians than ANY sport is to Americans. Baseball cannot practically be run through high schools because it can only be played from early May to October in most of Canada, and high schools are out for half that time. Soccer has a similar problem.
Highland Park has an interesting position; since their district is more or less contiguous with the park cities which are totally surrounded by Dallas/Dallas ISD, and the zoning isn’t changing there, it’s probably a fair bet that the number of students isn’t going to fluctuate too much, as there’s no change in housing, and nowhere for the cities to grow geographically. What does change is where the UIL sets the categories, and I’d be willing to bet that HP doesn’t really play into that.
But it does mean that you often have a SUPER wealthy high school in a categorization that’s usually reserved for shrinking inner-city schools or near-rural schools, while the adjoining schools are a category or two larger.
There are absolutely shenanigans with HP. I know people that taught there and they unenrolled kids right before census day–and they knew the target number. There is absolutely no doubt that HP exerts a great deal of influence on UIL.
I played soccer through much of high school and the mismatch with the hot Canadian summer was never a concern. Hockey is huge and important to Canadians, but might be becoming less so due to high costs, some old attitudes, the popularity of the Raptors and recent Canadian “successes” in the NHL playoffs. It’s huge. But I don’t know if it is bigger than any US sport? @RickJay ain’t often wrong, but I’d still like to see the cites.
It’s a hard thing to cite, but it seems obvious to me. Hockey is a part of Canadian culture. We had kids playing hockey on our MONEY. Hockey dominance is an important part of Canadian identity to many people. It’s a sport that transcends our vast and often nasty geographic differences. It’s the most popular sport in both English and French Canada and quickly becomes the most popular sport with any ethnic minority. (That is distinctly not the case in the USA, where basketball is #1 by far with African Americans, and Hispanics are more inclined towards baseball.)
The United States doesn’t value one major team sport above all others. Currently football is the #1 sport in terms of viewership but that hasn’t always been so, and it’s not the most common participation sport, because it’s pricey and dangerous. (According to most sources it’s either soccer or basketball.)
Baseball used to have the same position in the USA that hockey does in Canada; it is difficult to overstate what an obsession Americans had with baseball. That has not been the case for a long time, though.
I don’t disagree, exactly, but you are really just saying the American vote is more divided. Still, when they show hockey on CBC in Punjabi I wonder if anyone actually watches it - like when they trot out the Inuit national anthem every time Canada hosts the Olympics. The acid test, does the average Canadian know more useless sports trivia than the average American? Clue from the New York Times Saturday crossword last week - “Playmakers of old”. Answer: “Tinker to Evers to Chance”. How old? 113 years or so. Very sad.
Did you play soccer on a high school team in the summer , though? I think what @RickJay was talking about is something that matches my own experience - high school teams and leagues typically don’t operate during summer vacation. The only exception I’ve seen is high school football teams starting practice a couple of weeks before school begins.
Baseball season is maybe a little longer where I live - they start practice in March and have games in April , May and June. Maybe a day or two of playoffs in July. And there’s no point in starting up again after school starts in September since they can only realistically play for 4-6 weeks. On the other hand, leagues and teams that are not connected with schools can and do operate either from March straight through until September or October or they start when the high school season ends and go through the summer and into the fall.
I understand it was meant we didn’t play high school soccer during the summer (rather on other teams). But it never felt like a problem that we played in April or September. The weather was good enough - and the season did not seem unduly short.