A Run For The Roses

It warms my heart to think there's a horse being born today that may soon win the Triple Crown. It's exciting to think that a business getting started today may have the highest valued IPO in history. But it's less hopeful for a movie coming out so soon after the Academy Awards; and it's a long shot for a child born today to ever achieve greatness, given our age-appropriate educational enrollment.

Statistically, children born in the few months after the new year will be the youngest in their classroom if there is a cut-off age for starting school. Apparently, the only way to not have your younger child disadvantaged, given the better chance that an older student-athlete has to excel, is to "red shirt". In horse racing parlance, it means holding your child back early in the race so as to be able to surge ahead by the end.

Hooray, it's no longer an embarassment to be left back a grade; it's giving your child a better shot at dominating, if not gaming, the system.

Don't think of it as out and out lying, but of being an outlier. There is, of course, no rigid mathematical definition of what constitutes an outlier; but teachers and coaches recognize and seem to favor the more confident, better adjusted and fluent students, to say nothing of stronger, faster and bolder performance.

Why shouldn't thinking outside of the box produce results that fall outside of the norm?

Malcolm Gladwell leads us out of the middle of the normal distribution, with a cut-off of three standard deviations from the mean average. With red-shirting, there can be entire classrooms of outliers and entire sports programs of standard deviations, so to speak. Don't pay attention to the statistical rule that the median average is robust, not the mean. Go for the "King Effect" even if it is pathological in nature.

C'mon people, it's a run for the roses and you want your child, horse and stock to finish strong, if not on top.

Just one caution: Outliers usually indicate a "heavy-tailed distribution" in the sample population. Heavy tails between legs, in turn, indicate the appearance of arrogant, cut throat and defiantly narcissistic "out and out lairs" in the principal's office or the Office of Community Corrections one day.

It breaks my heart to think that one day "Scooter Libby" will be the name of the racehorse that wins The Run For The Roses.