Hockey has become very, very popular amongst folks from South Asia here in the Toronto area, which is kind of amazing given the shitty hockey they’re forced to watch.
I’m struggling to understand any of this. What’s sad about knowing that poem? I know it off by heart and can tell you who Tinker, Evers and Chance were and lots of stuff about them. Baseball is more into its history than any other sport, in part because, of course, it has more of it.
We had several coaches like this at my Georgia high school. But on the other hand, three of the best teachers I ever had - the ones who made such an impact that I still remember them three decades later - were coaches. One was a Southern football coach right out of Central Casting: redneck accent, pickup truck, coach pants. Yet he was excellent at conveying algebraic concepts to a classroom of sleepy seniors. Another was a former Marine DI who taught civics. And I mean, really taught civics; he would get a classroom subscription to Newsweek for everyone, and our assignments were to read the whole magazine, then discuss the stories. He was a conservative Republican in a class full of passionate young liberals, and he would challenge us to defend our viewpoints; but he was respectful of our ideas, and deeply engaged in the conversation. I heard later that he had left teaching after being unable to make a living, and started managing a Domino’s; which was a serious loss to the teaching profession.
So “coach” doesn’t always equal “bad teacher”.
It’s not sad. But it is the saddest of possible words.
I have tons of South Asian friends. Very few of them care about hockey at all. It’s a bubble sample - but they know everything about cricket and basketball. Maybe they speak Gujarati, Hindi or Urdu.
What is the typical United States setup? Is it that a high school will have a football, etc. team, and the kids who are interested or talented will join, practice, and compete against other schools? That’s my second hand impression based on my wife’s rural Georgia high school. I was struck by how “into it” the local town was, with the high school team and it’s branding being a fairly common sight out in the community.
That was very different from my suburban South African high school. Sports were mandatory: I had to be on a cricket team and a rugby or field hockey team, depending on the season. For each age division you’d have the “A” team, which essentially would be the same sorts who would make a United States football team I assume. Then you’d have “B” all the way down to however big your school was. I think I played cricket and field hockey on something like the “F” team, which was essentially mostly players actively trying to be as far away from the ball as possible.
It was the setup that you’d advocate for if you felt that sports, and active team sports in particular, were an important part of development and you wanted to ensure that almost everyone got to participate. At the time I thought it was awful. I’ve mellowed a bit now on that; I’m a far more naturally active adult than kid. If sports are the answer to encouraging physical activity then it doesn’t really make sense dedicate so many resources to an “elite” small subset of players as in the United States model. Interestingly enough, despite sports being compulsory at my school, it had almost no cultural impact. Very few people at school, and no-one out in the community, could care less about high school level sports. My impression was that university level sports was a niche interest too.
So I’m not sure. I hated compulsory sports at the time. On the other hand, I do worry about the generally more sedentary lifestyle that seems common these days. We’re pretty strict about screen time with our kids and want them to be moving around. I think we’re fortunate that both are naturally inclined to be active.
People who live in Toronto never have any opportunity to watch hockey that isn’t shitty? That seems hardly possible. Or are you just taking a cheap shot at the Maple Leafs?
Nobody said that “coach always equals bad teacher,” nor do they have to. But on average, my teachers who were coaches tended to be bad teachers, and at the very least were worse teachers than my non-coach teachers.
You don’t have to prove an absolute to show that a policy is bad.
Coach doesn’t always equal bad teacher- but I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that the three teachers you are talking about were hired for their teaching ability and their coaching was just a bonus. Nothing wrong with that. The problem is when it’s the other way around ( and it sometimes is) when they’re hiring for their coaching ability and if they can teach, that’s a bonus.
Yes, that’s pretty much the gist of it. For most sports in U.S. high schools, it’s “interscholastic” (i.e., your school’s team plays against other schools’ teams), and students typically have to “try out” (audition) to make the team. In popular sports, like football in many areas, more kids try out than make the team (or, even if they technically make the team, they are so far down the depth chart that they rarely, if ever, play).
In most states, physical education, as a class, is mandatory for high school students, but it’s not typically mandatory for a U.S. high school student to participate in an organized sport.
And, yes, in many areas of the U.S., particularly in smaller towns, one or more high school sports is followed religiously by residents of that town. In the Southeast (like Georgia, where your wife grew up), it’s football (as it also is in much of Texas), but in other regions, it might be basketball (like in Indiana), wrestling (Iowa), hockey (Minnesota), lacrosse (portions of the Northeast), etc.
Could very well be. The ex-Marine and the algebra teacher were football coaches, but the third, who also taught math, coached the tennis team. Which, in the unofficial hierarchy of my high school, ranked well below football, basketball, baseball, track, band, and cross country. He may have coached for the love of the sport, or the extra bux on the paycheck.
In Georgia, head football coaches are unquestionably hired for their coaching rather than teaching abilities (although, for what it’s worth - anecdote ≠ data - the head coach at my high school, who took the team to the state championship when I was a freshman, was reputed to be a good history teacher. I never took a class with him, so I can’t say). Higher-level assistants, too. But I’m not sure that a school would hire a coach for, say, the 8th grade football, or cross country, or junior cheerleader teams, and hope that she can teach, as opposed to hiring a teacher and offering her extra money to coach. That may be my naivete speaking, but while we definitely had some coaches who were deadweight in the classroom, we also had a few noncoach teachers who weren’t any great shakes, either. At least three of the football coaches taught math, and I don’t think that’s a subject where you’d stick a useless coach just to keep him on the team’s staff.
The issue really isn’t one of character or talent, but time. Good teaching and good coaching both require an extraordinary time commitment. Coachong isn’t just practices, skirmishes, and games. It’s everything from set up and tear down, equipment maintenance, planning, community outreach, counseling individuals . . .the expectations on coaches-- especially of high profile sports–are often insane. Especially when you are in season, it’s not a job, It’s a lifestyle.
Teaching also requires a lot of time to do right, and coaches often just don’t have that. The coach who doesn’t stay to review tape after practice, who isn’t available to talk to parents, who comes to practice without a plan, is going to get fired, eventually. If that same person is a mess as a teacher, they won’t. So they do what they were hired to do.
Now, in a sport that is less high profile, that’s a lot less true. So I can believe a tennis coach is a teachers-coach . That certainly happens. But not in football (5 coaches) or baseball (2-3 coaches), and depending on the school, likely not in several other sports as well.
And yeah, the volume of community outrage over a bad coach is at least an order of magnitude higher than the volume of community outrage over a bad math teacher. Especially if the math teacher isn’t teaching the advanced classes, where the children of involved parents already are. Firing a beloved coach because he’s bad at teaching on-level geometry just isn’t happening.
I also want to emphasize that the focus on sports is largely community driven. A vocal minority are highly, highly committed to perpetuating this super sports focused paradigm of what a high school is even about. The rest go along. I truly think they are unaware of the opportunity cost of that focus, of how prioritizing the concerns and priorities of the sports program depriotitzes other concerns.
If you told me that 20% of administrative manpower (principals, assistant principals, etc) was dedicated to the sports program, i wouldn’t be surprised. It might be higher. Just having someone at every game is 10-15 hours a week.
Well, with the pandemic in place this fall, most (not all) sports programs are on hiatus or heavily modified. It will be a while before we see the effects of no/less sports on high schools, adjusting for other parts of the HS experience being changed as well.
This sounds very like what happens in British schools - the teams are voluntary and you have to try out for them, the PE lessons are mandatory (and may, sometimes, include team sports).
I guess the big difference, it sounds like, is the level of support the school teams gather. Very few people outside the school take any interest in school sports, we don’t go in for heavy branding or ticketed events, and watching a game on a Saturday morning will usually involve a few cold, bored parents on the touchline and not much else.
Our high school football team was generally mediocre - lost in the city finals one year. One of the coaches was a very educated phys. ed. teacher who was very progressive and probably would have preferred to be called a kinesiologist. He was also assistant coach of one of the winningest university football programs in Canada. In short, he knew his stuff. But you can’t make Ming vases from mud.
The other coach taught drama and English. A very pleasant and educated fellow. I don’t know how much he knew about football. One had the sense he probably knew a great deal about old musicals and the finer points of hairdressing. Perhaps that comment is unfair. But it would be hard to imagine two more different coaches or a less stereotypical one.
Yes. I don’t recall any parental involvement (including just spectating) at any of our interscholastic games. We had to periodically play against other schools, even at our “F” team level. Maybe some parents were more into it at the “A” level, but I don’t think that was largely true either.
I remember the school attempted to enforce showing support by making attendance at a certain number of Saturday interscholastic games as spectators mandatory. You’d get detention if you didn’t make the quota. It was obvious to me and others that sitting indoors for an hour detention every so often was vastly preferable than wasting a Saturday morning milling around a boring field. If I recall correctly that scheme got cancelled pretty quickly.
Five hole!
I don’t see anything wrong with making all kids play a sport at a commensurate level. It would be better if they had a choice of activity. It would be best if they didn’t call those not at the highest tier with a label which is patronizing and even self-fulfilling.
Almost anyone can get better at fitness. Where you are at time A and B can differ. Studies taking children at random and telling them how good they were at (say) math compared to others, have shown it makes a significant difference in their attitude, effort and degree of success.
Did any British schools have mascots or names like Bears, Lions, Pirates, Eagles, Blue Devils? Did parents where clothing branded with the school name and colors? Was their school rivalry?
A significant difference in improving them, or a significant difference as in making them worse?
And did they separate out results from children who were told they were doing much worse than others, versus those from children told they were doing much better?
– links would be useful here.
The idiot high school director here did Xanadu with skates and ramps on stage. He did a show where they all wore stilts on stage. And he did Wizard of Oz with fly gear. It was NUTS. There were only a couple injuries - two broken bones, a concussion - over the three years our youngest participated. Theatre can be physical, and it can be dangerous.
I think teenagers need something to do after school and somewhere to do it. In a lot of communities, it makes sense for that to be attached to the school system - its easy, and the school system has mechanisms to address income inequality (free and reduced lunch kids have their fees waived, for instance). The ratcheting up of high school sports into some sort of competitive caste system isn’t good. Making compromises to a high schools core purposes of education for the benefit of sports isn’t good. As to the physical fitness part - the kids get PE course, and the ones in sports are fit (sometimes) and the ones that aren’t in sports are fit (sometimes) and the ones who aren’t fit aren’t getting there because they stand around while other kids kick a soccer ball around the field - in PE or on a team.