This is an interesting essay I first read in a newspaper op-ed page, and later tracked down online. The author makes some insightful points about the emphasis of athletics in our schools (particularly in rural eastern Oklahoma), sometimes to the detriment of academics. He then discusses the feasibility of incorporating some of the techniques and attitudes of coaches into classroom teaching, including an emphasis on "drilling" and repetition. This of course brings up an interesting potential conflict, in my opinion, with the philosophy of the Learning Cycle.
Bibliographic Note:
Jason R. Edwards, The Center for Vision and Values at Grove City College, "Fewer Teachers; More Coaches", http://gcc.savvior.com/Edwards_Coach.php?view_all=1 , 9/22/05.
3 comments:
This article is a interesting to me because I am in a similar position as the author (former athlete working on a Ph.D), and I think the author makes some valid points. I do feel however that he overlooks one important human factor that has the potential to bring down the entire premise of his argument. Desire. In the athletic setting, young athletes have a very strong desire to succeed. Everybody wants to be the guy that hits the game winning home run. Kids come into athletics, voluntarily, with that desire already there, and that is the one big factor that make "coaching" techniques successful. The kids that don't have that desire to be the best quickly leave athletics entirely.
In the classroom, especially in the case of the basic subjects that we expect all children to learn, that desire simply does not exist as an initial condition. It may well exist for some of the better students, but certainly every classroom will have some fraction of the students that just have no desire to excel in a given subject. Just as in the case with athletics, these students will quickly "give up" when subjected to coaching techniques.
However, his point is well taken though that in the case where student motivation is an initial condition, a competitive atmosphere in the classroom can likely be very effective, and take students farther than they often go in public school classrooms. However, for the students that are not already motivated to learn, such an atmosphere won't even take them as far as they are currently going in class.
Excellent points, Ike, thanks for reading, and then sharing them. My response would be two-pronged; why do children (and society in general) respond more emotionally to and place more value on athletic as opposed to academic success, and furthermore, what if anything can be done to reverse it? Is it cultural or genetic or some of both? I attended some training recently at the Cherokee Heritage Center in Tahlequah, learning more about the traditional Cherokee games of stickball and marbles. Before removal, there were roughly sixty Cherokee communities or towns in the Eastern states. They did not settle disputes with actual warfare, including bloodshed and death, and instead the winning team in a game of stickball was also the victor in the dispute that prompted it. The Cherokee in fact refer to stickball as "the little brother to war".
My point is that sports as ritualized warfare remain paramount in our collective genetic, psychological, and cultural makeup. We still value our tribal "warriors" over our thinkers and even our healers and food-producers. So, how then, can we address this? My response would be to deemphasize sports by making them strictly an after-school club system, and focus on promoting academic success and rewarding such excellence as much as possible.
I meant to also add that ultimately, as some of my earlier readings indicated, what happens or doesn't happen at home in the student's formative years is most critical. If the parents emphasize sports over academics, the child will also, and vice versa. Ike's comments, and this essay has prompted me to look a little deeper into this area, and I will post some more related references and thoughts soon.
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