There Are More Important Things in Life Than Softball

The impetus for this post is once again my daughter’s softball. She is currently playing in what is called “travel,” as opposed to “recreational,” ball and the seemingly endless string of practices and games almost every weekend tempt me to recite the title of this post to other parents.

Not that I want to take anything away from my daughter’s talent and desire to excel in a fun sport, nor the same of the other parents’ daughters, but a sense of perspective may be in order, especially considering the low odds of winning an athletic scholarship to college, the risks of injury (1, 2, 3) and burnout before even getting to that point, and the studies that now show multiple sports experiences and deliberate (unorganized) play develop better perception and decision making than the single, year-round specialization many young athletes today endure.

Sports, of course, are not the only activity of youth in which a nearly 24/7 pressure-cooker atmosphere exists. Music, dance, and drama teachers, and the children’s parents, not to mention the academic teachers, can also lay it on thick; the term “stage mom” (1, 2) that comes to us from the theatre keeps coming to mind.

Part of the obsession many coaches, teachers, and parents have about sports, or the arts and academics, stems from a misunderstanding of the differences between the less accomplished and the more accomplished, or between “amateur” and “professional.”

By “professional” here I mean only a greater degree of skill and dedication, not “paid professional,” though the young persons may be aiming for professional careers in sports or the arts or science and the coaches and teachers may be grooming them for that goal. In softball the difference is between “recreational” and “travel” ball and in the arts it may be the difference between performing in the local community and attending a select arts high school.

The assumed differences between these two levels, as stated by one youth baseball organization, include the possibility of failure and rejection in travel ball, but not in recreational; the alleged life lesson to sacrifice leisure to hard work so success will follow; and the supposed lack of need for instruction at this “nearly professional” level. There are kernels of truth in all three of these differences, but these kernels get distorted when coaches, teachers, and parents lose perspective, forgetting about the whole of life.

Take the difference about the possibility of failure. Even at a lower level of skill, such as in a marching band or softball, not everyone participates one-hundred percent of the time. Only some band members may perform in the pep band at basketball games and even fewer in the swing band. Soloists at the spring concert may be fewer than a handful. The same is true for softball; not everyone can be pitcher.

More important, not achieving an initial goal need not be viewed as failure. A clarinetist, for example, who transfers from a small-town marching band to an arts high school orchestra may not earn one of the top four positions in the orchestra. This eye-opening awareness of the greater skill of others should be experienced as motivator, not a threat to success or happiness. There is no more important attitude to cultivate than seeing others’ achievements as an inspiration.

To say that youth should sacrifice leisure to hard work so success will follow is misleading, especially if it is presented as “we expect you to give up your vacation” for the sake of softball, or music, etc. Paid professionals do not do this, except on occasion, mainly because they know their schedules well in advance. The problem with youth sports is that communication, advance or otherwise, is often lacking, leading to surprises in the schedule.

Hard work, yes; and all children who enjoy an activity, whether it be sports, the arts, or a business or science club will, if not hampered by authoritarian adults, devote long hours of concentrated attention to improving their knowledge and skill. This concentrated attention is sometimes, unfortunately, interpreted by adults as “sacrifice” in the sense of giving up a higher value for the sake of a lower one. “Dedication” and “self-motivation” would be better descriptors.

The notion that higher levels of skill do not need instruction stems from the term “director,” such as the director of a play or conductor of an orchestra. Some coaches claim the same prerogative for their advanced teams. But direction means guiding the skills of others to produce the effect the director envisions.

That in itself is teaching, and all directors, including conductors and coaches, provide a variety of instructions to their performers to accomplish what they want. That coaches at the highest level of professional sports are teachers became obvious during the 1987 National Football League strike when secondary players were hired as substitutes to play games while the stars were walking picket lines. Much commentary was made about the expert teaching abilities of various coaches.

When a coach, or conductor or director, says that he or she assumes a certain skill level and is not there to teach, I would beware that blind obedience is what is wanted, as in “I expect you to have the discipline to do what I say.” “Discipline,” however, means acting in accordance with one’s own self-imposed guidelines. It is the mark of an advanced skill. Even at an advanced level, coaches, teachers, and conductors should aim to help turn caterpillars into butterflies.

Total commitment at the expense of everything else—spending every weekend and a few week nights on one’s sport or art, because “that’s the way we do it here” or because “that’s the only way to get a scholarship”—is obsession of the stage parent type. When the commitment does not originate in the child, injury or burnout or even parental estrangement can result. Perspective on why an activity is being pursued needs always to be kept in the forefront of parents’ minds.

Rankism and the Well-Earned Disrespect of Some Teachers

In the ancient world, teachers were not respected. “He’s either dead or else he’s teaching somewhere” was a comment made in a comedy fragment about someone missing from a gathering. And Lucian relegated a dethroned king to Hades to sell salt or old boots . . . or to become a teacher.* Making money on the market—teachers were paid a fee for their services—was disparaged. Not until the Judeo-Christian influence did teachers begin to gain respect.

Today, teachers are admired, not just for the service they provide to educate the young, but for their seemingly tireless dedication to long hours of preparation and their equally seemingly tireless patience to answer repetitive questions. Unfortunately, not all teachers return the admiration to their students, colleagues, and administrative assistants, which leads to sniping complaints from outsiders about privilege and long vacations.

The root of this lack of respect is what former Oberlin College president, Robert Fuller, calls rankism or the abuse of rank (1, 2). The disrespect is deserved, for the rankism manifests itself as expressions of power over and taking advantage of those not at the same level of authority. For example, a professor may write an email explaining why an administrative assistant should drop everything and copy his receipts from a recent academic trip. The assistant works for the chair of the department, not the individual faculty, but the professor goes to great length to explain why his time is more valuable than the assistant’s—not in the least noticing that in the time it took him to compose and edit the email he could have copied his own receipts. Such manual labor, apparently, is beneath his dignity, but not that of the “lowly” administrative assistant.

Other forms of condescension by senior faculty include failing so much as to say hello to a part-time instructor or interrupting without apology a conversation between a part-time instructor and the chair of the department, with the part-timer seeing nothing but the interrupter’s back. Political power play is how some might cynically or even approvingly describe the senior professor’s behavior. Childish disingenuousness might be another description. Or the behavior might be characterized as the desperate quest for approval of a defensively frail ego because, as I have written before, the stakes in the academic world are so small.

Rankism toward students is legion. In the absence of corporal punishment, verbal abuse has become the tool of putting students in their places. An “appalling lack of civility” is how Charles Silberman in 1970 described the contempt that teachers and principals exhibit toward their students. Sarcasm, ridicule, and just plain rudeness seem to be the preferred means of pulling rank today, such as sternly telling a ten-year-old that she is still a child until the age of eighteen. This ignores and devalues the intelligence of the ten-year-old who knows well that one does not automatically become an adult by celebrating a birthday; it also ignores and devalues the maturity of the ten-year-old who considers a child to be younger than six. The effect of the rudeness is to deflate developing self-esteem and silence opposition or disagreement.

One of the worst forms of rankism that a teacher can pull is to talk in class negatively about others who are not present to defend themselves. Such behavior is beyond rude and childish. It is unethical. It certainly is none of the students’ business what the teacher thinks about other students, teachers, or administrative assistants. But such behavior does happen in the cocoon-tenured environment of the academic world. The teacher will not be fired, but the students and administrative assistants who are talked about may be harmed. Sometimes, unfortunately, that is even the intent of the negative talk.

Fuller’s campaign against rankism is to establish a new meaning of equality. It does not mean, he says, equality of ability, knowledge, intelligence, or position or rank. It means equality of dignity. It means treating others, regardless of age or rank (or race, gender, nationality, etc.), as human beings. In the military world, a soldier’s general is a commander who treats those under him with care and kindness. A player’s coach exhibits the same toward his athletes. Kindness and respect are what those in authority need to exude toward those in a lower rank. It means being nice.

*Cited in H. I. Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity, part two, chapter  5.

Teaching versus Learning versus Doing

Much ink has been spilled for decades over the concepts of teaching, learning, and doing, producing such commonplaces as “learning by doing is the best way to learn” and “let’s focus on learning, not teaching.” A couple of clarifications, however, need to be made about both of these remarks.

Consider the first one. Learning and doing, epistemologically and psychologically, are two different mental processes. They never occur precisely at the same time. Learning is the acquisition of knowledge, doing is application. Acquisition is generalization, application is deduction from the general to employ the deduction in a specific concrete situation. A child learns the generalization of balance, of shifting one’s weight, when riding a bicycle. The child applies that knowledge in practice to perfect the skill. Learning comes before doing, perhaps from a parent or older sibling who is teaching the concept of balance or through trial-and-error learning. Sometimes it might occur a split second before the doing but it still comes before.

Trial-and-error learning proceeds in this manner. Try one thing. It doesn’t work. Try something else. It doesn’t work. But there may be similarities in the two actions that did not work sufficient to make a primitive generalization. Deduction from the generalization then follows to try a new action. It doesn’t work perfectly, but it works better than the previous failures. More trial, error, generalization, deduction, and further trial then ensue. Some learners are quick to pick up through observation what has to be done to execute a new skill; others are not. The point, however, is that ideas—no matter how primitive or unformed, or even how unaware the actor may be of the ideas—precede action. Add to this that ingrained mental and/or physical habits may have to be challenged and changed before the skill can be developed.

The significance of teaching before doing is to save the time that can be wasted when going through repeated efforts of trial and error. It also may prevent injury that can result from uninformed trial and error, such as, without instruction, learning to ride a bicycle or operate a complicated piece of machinery. “Learn-by-doing”—when understood to mean practice—is essential to perfecting a skill, mental or physical, but mental understanding, even of a mental skill like logical thinking, comes first.

This takes us to the comment about focusing on learning, not teaching. To teach, however, means to effect learning, to see to it that the students understand and can apply what has been taught. Even the standard definition of teaching—the transfer of knowledge from one person to another—indicates that teaching is not achieved until learning has been accomplished.

Some of the desire, no doubt, to emphasize learning over teaching comes from distrust of the lecture as a legitimate teaching method, but a well crafted lecture framed in essentials and delivered with conviction can effect a great deal of learning in its listeners. More generally, the comment most likely stems from the tired indifference to teaching and learning, not to mention overt rudeness, exhibited by many tenured teachers and professors. The state-run school and university systems do not cater to the needs and wants of their customers. Yet that is precisely what the focus on learning means.

In marketing—and teachers, as I have written before, are sales reps—a notion called the “marketing concept” says that everyone in the company, from the president to the stock boy, should not make any decision or take any action without first considering its effects on the customer. “We are no longer in the business of selling what we make,” General Electric said many years ago, “but making only what we can sell.” This means, quite simply, whether one is a writer, a teacher, or a sales rep: “know thy audience.” Know where the students are now in the learning process, then challenge them by stretching. But the stretching cannot go too far because that produces discouragement and it cannot be too elementary because that creates boredom. Finding the middle ground is what teaching to effect learning is all about. It is not an easy task. It requires constant observation of the students and adaptation to the their needs.

Focusing on learning is what every good teacher should routinely do. Teaching and learning are separate activities, performed by different people. The teacher teaches, the learner learns. But the teacher knows what and how to teach by first tuning into the learner. Anything else is whistling in the wind.