Inner Education for Inward Educators

InnerEd makes its debut at the 14th edition (2.2.2010) at the Carnival of Educators hosted by Notes from a Homeschooling Mom.  Go read some Edugoodness!

While you can read this below, they are hosting the 1st part of the School Sports Series.  If you are just joining us from the Carnival, Parts 1-3 are now up.  Part IV should post sometime this weekend.

And don’t forget to subscribe with the RSS feeder or subscribe by e-mail (top right) or visit the InnerEd Facebook page!

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Part III of the series looking at Shirl James Hoffman’s piece in Christianity Today continues today.

In Part I we looked at Hoffman’s basic claims about sports.  In Part II we looked at possible signs that a school has overemphasized sports fanaticism in its daily practice.  Those were, however, easy targets.  Most educators I know would assign the practices I listed in Part II to the “bad practices” pile.  That isn’t to say those problems don’t exist; I made most of them from personal experience across the many stops of my career and the rest from anecdotes that I trust.

But today I wish to look at the nature of competition in schools itself.  Hoffman asserts:

As poetry adds zest to language and music adds zest to sound, so competition can add zest to play. At the same time, it is worth asking whether spending our leisure moments comparing talents, plotting self-advancing agendas, and, temporarily at least, stifling feelings of sympathy might foster mindsets that negatively frame our thinking in other endeavors.

One of Hoffman’s main problems with sports culture is that according to him, it forces participants (and the like-minded) to not consider another side or another’s well-being.  He argues that intense competition, especially on an elite level, is an overly self-absorbed activity.

I do like competition in the classroom.  I use it often–review games, the recent school design project that my classroom, and other lesson plans.  I can personally testify that well-planned competition can increase learning by giving teachers the student-attentiveness we need to drive instruction.  This sort of competition doesn’t seem to be Hoffman’s target, but I’m sure main of us have seen the pressures in our students from excessive competition that doesn’t involve athletics:

• ACT/SAT test anxiety [mainy people forget that these are competitive exam and your score is determined by your national percentile ranking]
• College admissions craziness [we all understand competitive admissions, and we all know the ones that get a little too crazy about it]
• Helicopter parents insane to get every point that they can get
• Students comparing themselves to other students in every capacity [I recently had one girl who got a 93 on an essay argue that she should get a 95 that another girl got because she was just as good a student as she was]
• Scholarship applications that focus on class rank
• Competitive entry for honors courses
• The Texas University system’s recent “class rank” admission policies (which I grant had both good and bad effects)
• Poorly motivated school decisions based on desire to get on U.S. News and World Report’s or Newsweek’s top US High Schools Lists.
• Same as above for colleges/universities
• To a lesser extent, lottery admissions for charter schools

But is this evidence that competition in itself is bad?  Certainly not, and I will continue to use competition in my classroom for learning, but when is too much too much?  Hoffman suggests that this is when sport causes intellectual neglect:

Lacking a collective Christian imagination of sports, [Christians] have settled for a host of other imaginations: consumer imaginations, which value sport only as it advances financial or public relations interests; military imaginations, which conceive of sport as a partisan encounter where success is measured by victory; and therapeutic and propaganda imaginations, which value sports only as a tool to achieve some material end.

Hoffman presents the problem of sports in a Christian context, which I have some obvious sympathies with, but for now, I want to frame this statement in a broad educational context.  The problem with some sports (and competition) may be what we expect from it.  Hoffman assigns sports to a ritual practice, and he isn’t surprised that sports originally arises from a religious tradition.  But I think we need to answer the following question:

What Should We Expect From School Sports?

Comment and talk amongst yourselves here, and I’ll give you may take in Part IV.

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Last part of the series, I looked at a Christianity Today article by Shirl James Hoffman that among other things alleged that professional sports culture was having a negative influence on youth sports.  I argued that the underlying premise was true, but that his solutions were less so.  I plan to return to Hoffman in Part III, but as he is mostly focusing on Christian institutions as transformational institutions (which bears a post by itselff) and seems to have little or no expectations for the public schooling, I think it bears InnerEd pointing to some signs that indicate that sports fanaticism is encroaching too much on our public schools.

I wish to focus mainly here on Part II that behaviors or aspects that some schools create to overemphasize sports.  I am not focusing so much in this post on problems that are created by exterior influences in the classroom–for example, attitudes about sports from students or parents.  Those are certainly relevant but are not as controllable by the inward-thinking educator or administator.

Some signs that athletic fanaticism may be overcrowding the classroom:

1. Recognition of athletic achievement dominates recognition of other forms of student achievement in school publications–newsletters, daily announcements, public remarks by administrators at parent gatherings, press releases, etc.  This doesn’t include non-school publications like community newspapers as that’s a whole different issue that I feel is motivated more by parent attitude than just the school attitude.
2. There are detailed mechanisms/procedures for recognizing or gathering information on athletic achievement (banquets, announcements, ease of access to publications) but far less detailed procedures for recognizing non-athletic achievement (more paperwork, slower response from power-holders, more detailed justification of importance needed).
3. Athletic achievement is used as consideration for awards where it is not necessarily germane (student-of-the-week, certain youth leadership awards, academic societies, etc.).
4. Athletes are more often than not nominated for leadership posts/awards by teachers/administrators.

These are the “silent problems.”  These are the problems of recognition.  But, sadly, too many teachers know the following all too well:

1. Coaches are allowed to pull students out of classes for team meetings or team duties that are deemed “emergency” or “mandatory.”
2. Coaches are excused from some teaching duties or given extra planning or “administrative periods” in lieu of teaching for  coaching responsibilities.
3. Student-athletes are given exaggerated time to complete make-up work due to team absences beyond that given to all students.
4. Student-athletes receive deferred school discipline or reprieves, so school discipline does not interfere with athletic availability or eligibility or all discipline issues are passed onto the coach to “handle.”
5. Teachers are pressured to pass athletes who are not completing work.
6. Coaches are held to less rigorous teaching standards.
7. Lesser qualified teachers are hired over more qualified teachers due to abilities to coach [this is, admittedly, a problem that can be more exacerbated by a district policy than a school by itself].
8. Coaches receive stipends under district policies; teachers who also spend mandatory hours outside of the school day on activities (newspaper sponsors, yearbook sponsors, certain club sponsors) receive no stipends or even the ability to recoup some expenses.
9. Coaches are given copious amounts of free school-purchased school-logo clothing every year while regular teachers must purchase school clothing out-of-pocket or have none available to them for use.
10. Non-coaching teachers are forced to follow a closely prescribed school dress code while coaches are excused from this because they wear “coach attire.”
11. Coaching ability is a factor in license renewal or layoff decisions.

I’ve seen over half of these personally somewhere (and I’ve been many places).  These are serious problems in a school’s culture.  More on this in Part III.

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I should really do this more–point out great sites to go visit for education reading.

The Carnival of Education is a network of education blogs that post regularly.  Each week different blogs host the carnival.  You can go to one page and see all the links and read what seems interesting to you.

This week is up at the blog, I Want To Teach Forever.  For those looking for some edureading, it’s a good place to go.

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There are few topics I have both a love/hate relationship in regards to teaching than school sports.  I love that it keeps some kids engaged with school, encourages school spirit, and forces some students to be accountable for their actions.  It bothers me how much sports can some time take priority over learning, monopolize administrator’s attention and affection, and take the place of a community’s view of a school (i.e., the school is seen as successful when its football team is a winner).

I was recently reminded of this when reading this Christianity Today article by Shirl James Hoffman:  “Sports Fanatics:   How Christians have succumbed to the sports culture—and what might be done about it.” It’s a lengthy piece in which Hoffman criticizes several aspects of modern sports culture (steroids, recruiting scandals, hockey fights, coaches salaries, etc.) with several less than relevant elegant comparisons to Roman gladiatorial contests.   He also makes suggestions for improving evangelicals’ relationships with sports.

While that has some interesting points which I have no doubt will keep the Christian blogosphere humming for some time, I will focus on a certain passage from Hoffman’s piece:

Lower-level sports tend to mimic those seen on television; thus, it shouldn’t surprise us when they mimic the ethos of televised sports. Youth sports programs certainly provide worthy experiences for young people, but with increasing frequency they seem to spin out of control. When a father in California is sentenced to jail for beating and berating a coach for taking his son out of a baseball game, or when a dentist sharpens the face guard on his son’s football helmet so that he can slash opposing players, or when the father of a 12-year-old hockey player beats his son’s coach to death outside the rink—because, ironically, he thought the coach was encouraging rough play—it’s fair to conclude that in many cases youth sports, like those played on a higher level, have lost their way.

Hoffman’s main evidence for his assertion that “youth sports”  [a term to which I include high schools] have gone awry are mainly anecdotal.  He spends far more time citing problems in collegiate and professional sports, but I don’t think we have to go too far as educators to find examples where sports in our schools can be carried on a little too far.

I wish to first say that I like sports.  I like sports very much; I follow an NFL Team (The Tennessee Titans) with great interest, enjoy Tennessee Volunteers athletics when I have the time, and have even played fantasy football for several years. I have lead ministries for athletes through Fellowship of Christian Athletes in college.   I have never been particularly good at playing sports, but I appreciate and recognize many of its positive aspects. I agree, though, that many people take sports too far.  For this, I cite the recent reactions among UT Knoxville students (my hometown) when Lane Kiffin broke his contract to go to become the new head coach at USC.  The move was handled extremely poorly by Kiffin, but the vitriol against him in the local media pushed the first day of the Haiti earthquake off the front page in the local paper.  The amount of hate he has generated I would imagine exceeds the local discussion of offenses by Iranian dictators, Kim Jon Il, or Sudanese genocide.

I dispute several of Hoffman’s solutions, though I agree with him on many of his arguments that we have a sports fanaticism problem in this country. His call for Christians to shun football, hockey, and boxing  in favor of “non-violent” sports like track, golf, and swimming  (I also wryly note that as he classified sports he declines to classify where baseball or basketball fit) is a tad non-realistic.  Likewise, he fails to cite data that connects these sports with the increased violence he says that they promote–a glaring problem since he goes to great length to cite examples regarding sports culture.

But does the professional sports culture affect our high-school athletes?  The obvious answer to any teacher is , “Duh.”  Most of my young men are hooked on sports, including those who do not play.  High school social scenes revolve around Friday night football games.  NFL games are the topic of choice on Mondays, and I know that I can increase my coolness factor as a teacher (if I cared to, which I usually don’t) by mentioning an amazing play that I saw in detail.  The female teachers in my department that I eat lunch with (I’m the only male at my lunch period–and usually the quietest person) talk football all week.

So, I’m going to take a few posts to look at how school and sports work together.  And if necessary, how much is too much?

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Krizia at the Sup Teach blog has posted a nice exchange with her inner city students and a financial lesson plan:

Sup Teach?: Financial Literacy.  She writes about exposing her inner city students to financial literacy material in her English class:

Let me tell you. I knew my kids were bright, creative, motivated, and passionate. BUT MAN. I’ve now got to the gumption to say, “My kids are brighter, more creative, more motivated, more passionate, smarter, and will be more successful than yours.” Hmph, take that prep school punks.

I can add a bit to this.  When I taught English III in the projects, I did an opening unit on the American Dream.  When I surveyed my kids about what they wanted in life, over half of them had the dream of wanting to run their own business.  For many of them the goals, weren’t lofty but still challenging.  The people that they saw having success were fast-food owners, auto repair owners, restaurant owners, etc.  Their dream was to have their own place.  One of Krizia’s students has the same desire:

“That was fun! I’d rather be an employer, even if I have to hand out paychecks and make sure all the bills are paid on time. I’d rather call the shots.” [italics hers]

Business communities love to try to goad schools about not producing enough quality workers.  But what if we thought about addressing problem-based teaching to our kids with them being the role of managers of money, people, and information?  This makes some sense as this seems to be what they are telling us they want to be anyway. Sure, we’ll always have those 5′7 kids who want to be NBA starts or the punk in the back of the room who sees rap as the only career choice, but could some of that be because we haven’t provided a vision of other successful career choices and shown how school learning equates to future needs?

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