I had the good fortune to remember at 6:15 p.m. tonight that we had a basketball home game scheduled, and one of my students is playing varsity this year and had asked me if I was going to go. So I grabbed a stack of papers I have to grade and went over there.
The j.v. game was more than half over when I showed up, and the home team was facing an insurmountable 40-6 deficit. Apparently visiting Acalanes was pretty good. But the first thing I noticed when I started watching was just how tentative and new these girls were (and are) to the sport .A couple hours earlier, or maybe more recently, I'd been listening to Stephen Covey's "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" and he was talking about proactivity--about how we can't control what happens to us, but we can control how we RESPOND to it. And it had made me think about how, in the classroom, I have learned that I do better when I slow down and choose my response, as opposed to just reacting with the first thing that comes into my head. If I can calmly, slowly, make a choice, there's a much better chance it will be an appropriate choice.
And I was imagining sharing this with my students and making the analogy to the way they respond to word problems. They so often "react" to the problems and attempt to solve them without stopping, slowing down, calmly taking a breath. So they make poor, nonsensical choices like the students on the video who tried to solve the problem, "There are 125 sheep and five dogs, how old is the shepherd?" by answering "120" or "25." And this is a real-world skill they're practicing, that of slowing down and choosing the appropriate response--responding not reacting--and the proof that is a real-world skill is that I constantly have to demonstrate it to preside over my classroom.
So with these thoughts fresh in my mind, I tune into this basketball game and I can see it--everywhere, on every play, these players are scared out of their minds. They are making mistakes on every play, always hyper-conscious of their opponents, over-reacting to their opponents' every move. If they would just stop and make calm decisions on the court ... If any one of them developed that type of maturity, she would instantly become the best player on the floor.
And so it hit me, my math classroom is just like this basketball team. These players are struggling with basketball the same way my students struggle with math. It reminded me of something somebody said, one of my mentors: it's like they're five years old. Because with these concepts, they really are like five-year-olds She was talking in particular about Algebra 1 high school students. I liked the analogy. It helped me re-establish their innocence, which I forget in my weaker moments in which I portray myself as the victim of their shenanigans. They are really trying in my class, and they are just so young and new and so it's natural to be tentative, and I have to teach them not to be (rather than being fearful and tentative myself).
The j.v. girls rallied to lose 46-16, and then varsity was up. It turned out the girl in my class who'd asked me to come to the game was a starter. I hadn't even known if she would make varsity; I knew she was only a sophomore. But there she was in the starting lineup, and racing up and down the court, getting into a defensive stance, moving without the ball ... I was impressed! And it occurred to me--that's how she has been as a student in my class as well! She works hard, makes good decisions. When behavior and effort break down around her, she doesn't let her own performance suffer.
And I became like MOVED at this heroic girl who I have failed to recognize. My colleague Justin wrote yesterday about stopping some of his students out in the hallways of his school to offer them praise, and I thought oh my goodness, this is the type of kid who needs this praise. Or .. I don't know if she needs it, but she DESERVES it. I certainly could offer some really specific praise, like I appreciate the way you apply yourself, and you always do your homework, and you don't mess around in class, and ... It's like I had to see what it looked like on a basketball court so I could recognize it--and I have several other students like her, whose quiet effort day in and day out deserves recognition. Effort and skill. These are the best players, the best students--the ones who are facing their fears and taking on responsibility anyway.
When I was in high school, I always thought that I had the makings of a great athlete, and never understood why my coaches didn't see it. I sat at the end of the bench in basketball. In tennis I thought my skill during warm-ups made my brilliance self-evident, but I couldn't replicate it during the actual matches which determined the ladder for the team. But now, looking back, I bet I was really easily discouraged. I bet I shied away from contact, I bet I was fearful ... I can imagine. Anyway ... I didn't want to bring all this back to more about ... me, but here I am. I guess the consistent effort I saw in this one student, her hustle and her determination not to get discouraged--these seem like qualities I have probably lacked, and I could learn them from her. Maybe that's what I can tell her.
And one of these years, I'm going to have to coach basketball. Because that is too much fun to stay away from.
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