Being reared in Southwest Oklahoma, there are two absolute truths that you learn early on. First, oil is the number one cash crop and two, sports are the center of the social hub of many communities. In my part of the country, Texas & Oklahoma, that means in the fall football, in the spring Basketball and wrestling, and in the summer baseball. If you played another sport, good luck with that. For a very long time coaches in the classroom got a very bad wrap. For a number of reason, the stereotype of a coach reflected around them reading the newspaper and not teaching, and being assigned to the history department.
I had a number of coaches for teachers during middle school and high school. As a student, my opinion about them was reinforced by what I observed taking their class. When I started my teaching career as as a substitute teacher, back in 2004, and later as a History teacher in a High School, I brought with me my opinions from being a student. I was very fortunate that in both middle school and high school, I had many coaches who were excellent teachers. Unfortunately, I did have a few coaches, who left a lot to be desired. I am thankful that the latter were few and far between.
I want to take a moment to tell you about some of my colleagues who are both coaches and teachers. I want you to know about what kind of teacher they are, and what lessons we can learn from them. I admire the coaches I have worked with, both personally and professionally. Three of the many I have worked with are Reed, Brayden and Diane, not their real names.
When you think of a football coach, you think of the rough and tough, no holds bar demanding coach. A person who is loud and shouts at people and looks for anyway to win. I know when I think of a football coach I think of Mike Ditka or Tom Landry. These types of men demand respect. Reed may very will be a similar type of man, but I never saw it. Where as Ditka and Landry command respect, Reed earns it. He is caring, quiet, and professional. Reed is not the head football coach, that would be his dad. Reed is soft-spoken, firm, and gentle man, who will stop what he is doing to help someone out. Reed spends a good amount of time each semester building relationships with his players, and his students. It is his time building the personal relationships that I believe makes him excellent teacher and a great coach. The thing I admire most about Reed is how he brags on his students and his players. He is quick to praise them publicly, and he is always mindful of the needs of his students. He is never afraid to redirect both his students and athletes to task, and motivate them to make better decisions. He always has something positive to say about everyone, even those students who are less than perfect. I believe that when he looks at students and athletes, he finds the good in them and helps them express that in his class and in the sports he coaches. He looks for ways for young people to succeed.
I got to know Brayden over the years he had the classroom next to me, we shared many stories of growing up, sports, and life ambitions. Where Reed is soft-spoken, Brayden on the other hand is quick to point things out. The approach he takes on and off the field is to show the young people around him to take responsibility. He will tell you when something is embarrassing and he takes his job as teacher and coach very seriously. Brayden is very much goal and detail oriented two traits that are no doubt valuable to him on the baseball diamond, and in the Math classes he teaches. This is exemplified with how he carries himself, and how he dresses. When Brayden walks into class, he wastes no time getting started. He looks for opportunities for people to succeed and he believes in his students many times when they have given up believing in themselves. Perhaps the thing I admire most about Brayden, is how he treats everyone as a human being. He talks directly to people making eye contact and expressing exactly what he thinks.
Diane is all together different than Brayden and Reed, like Brayden and Reed, she teaches Math. There goes the idea all coaches teach history. In fact, she not only teaches math but she even organized the schools Pi day celebration. She takes her teaching from the approach that not everyone is going to love Math like she does, but she wants her students to not be fearful of it. She is just as a demanding of her students as she is of herself. She encourages her students to try new things and to explore ideas and concepts. She always has time for another project, to include making home made marsh mellows, and coconut cream pies for her friends. ( I do miss those by the way.) One of my first times working with Diane was when I was asked to chaperone a bus full of kids up to a Basketball game in Tulsa, and she was the bus driver. I observed how student oriented she was, the mere fact that she was driving a school bus on a Friday night to Tulsa some 3 hours away, meant that she was sacrificing a great deal of time from her family to ensure our students had an opportunity to cheer on their school. Diane also took time during the trip to tell me about all the school traditions, that new teachers were expected to know. She helped me ensure that the students entrusted to our care hundreds of miles away from home, were good ambassadors of our school and of our community.
As a teacher, I learned to appreciate all of my colleagues, including the coaches, and have been blessed to have them as allies. Many times, they knew of ways to get through to a student who was either a troublemaker, or were apathetic. They spend countless hours outside of the classroom and the playing field being good role models, and encouraging young people to do the same for others. In so many ways, my friends, were not just coaching athletics to students, but they coached their peers on people skills. If you take nothing else away from this article, take this. Teachers who are coaches, want students to succeed not just in school, not just in the sport, but in life.
The opportunities offered today to our young people are as vast as any ocean. The opportunities that our young people throw away are as vast as the stars in the sky. As adults we observe young people through the lens of personal failures, personal success, and personal values. It is no wonder why many times adults, think young people waste opportunities presented to them. Besides that, failure can be a wonderful learning experience for our young people. What they learn from their failures can serve to make them a better person in the future. More importantly, without a doubt a young person will fail at something. If they do not learn how to accept that and how to deal with that, then we are doing them a disservice.
I cannot tell you how many experiences I have that are the result of bad decisions. What I will tell you is it is a lot. It takes time for people to learn the lesson from good and bad experiences, and often times that knowledge isn't tested until an opportunity presents itself. For young people to get experience that is meaningful and helpful to them, students need to be encouraged to jump on opportunities. The quote at the top of the page is just a text-bite of what he said. Just too the right is what he said along with the first line. He talks about how he was never better than the job he had. He talks about hard work and how each job provided him with a new opportunity.