Hear me out.
As long as I’ve been teaching French, the rhetoric has always been that learning a language should be taught similarly to how we teach sports to children: You aren’t going to be Michael Jordan the first time you pick up a ball, utter a French sentence, play an instrument, or try to solve a difficult problem.
These skills require honing through lots and lots of practice, dedication, repetition, encouragement, and passion from the instructor/coach. I’ve always tried to instill this mantra in the minds of my students, but it never hurts to keep coming back to it.
So when I opened my browser while lounging over a cup of coffee this morning, I was delighted to see an NPR interview with former-NFL player-turned mathematics Ph.D. candidate John Urschel (
From The Gridiron To Multigrid Algorithms In ‘Mind And Matter’) touting his new book
Mind and Matter. Then I fell into a rabbit hole, reading all I could about how Urschel is trying to change the way we talk about teaching and learning in American education. Then I stumbled upon his
NY Times Opinion column “
Math Teachers Should Be More Like Football Coaches,” and despite not teaching math, I greatly identified with much of what he’s saying. I ventured even further into the rabbit hole by perusing his
Twitter account and had to share his story with some of my math teacher friends.
I feel so empowered to keep doing what we’re doing with role models like Urschel in both our and our students’ lives. He is giving students of all different walks of life access to an educational outlook they might not have otherwise held. And these lines really spoke to me, reaffirming my own goals as an educator of both young men and women from so many different backgrounds, social milieus, religions, family structures, political beliefs, mother tongues, home countries, you name it:
I recognize that because I’m a mathematician at MIT and I play professional football, I’m in the spotlight. And I have a responsibility to use this platform to show people the beauty of mathematics. To show people playing in the NFL, this isn’t your way out. You can do something mathematics. You can do something in STEM, even if you don’t necessarily look like what the majority of people in that field look like.
And I have to say, okay, if you look at the field of mathematics, if you look at elite American mathematicians, there’s almost no African Americans. There aren’t many of us in PhD programs, there’s not many of us as undergrads, and what you’re sort of left with is the sad realization that there are brilliant young minds being born into this country that are somehow being lost — either because of the household they’re born into, or their socioeconomic situations, or sort of the social culture in their community. And this isn’t just a disservice to them, this is a disservice to us as a country.
Even at the end of the school year when I feel completely out of sorts, exhausted, and at times even ineffective as an educator, I needed this bit of reaffirmation to help me refocus and guide the students into the final stretch, the fourth quarter, the bottom of the ninth, or any other applicable sports metaphor you’d like to insert here:
A growing body of research shows that students are affected by more than just the quality of a lesson plan. They also respond to the passion of their teachers and the engagement of their peers, and they seek a sense of purpose. They benefit from specific instructions, constant feedback and a culture of learning that encourages resilience in the face of failure — not unlike a football practice. There are many ways to be an effective teacher, just as there are many ways to be an effective coach. But all good teachers, like good coaches, communicate that they care about your goals.
This speaks to what so many of us have been doing all year. And I wanted to end the year on a note of appreciation and gratitude for being part of such an innovative and supportive community of passionate educators!
