Math teachers should be more like football coaches

This is going to be a bad look for me, but I'm going to comment this anyway. Please forgive me if this comes across as too harsh, but I've been reading articles and comments of this type for years, and they tend to grate after a while.

This article is an individual critiquing his teachers despite having outstanding success in his life outcomes (professional football player, Ph.D candidate in mathematics) and despite acknowledging that he was "prepared to do the subject at an advanced level" in college and that his teachers "taught [him] well."

Of all the things he could say about his life situation and the role of his teachers in that, he chooses criticism. Instead of taking time to appreciate that he's standing on the shoulders of the people who helped him become who he is, he's instead maligning them because they could have made his ascent slightly more comfortable. He also misses the fact that the skills he developed in doing the problem sets he bemoaned were prerequisites to being able to engage with math at such a high intellectual level in college. Students first learn to read before they can read for pleasure, and math follows a similar trajectory.

One of the problems we have in modern educational discourse and that this article furthers is that students reflect back on their time in education and bemoan all the ways it didn't fit them individually. "That teacher could have inspired me more." "That subject could have been more interesting for me." "That teacher could have connected with me more."

It's a very ego-centric view of a communal institution, and it's almost always universalized. Few people take the time to realize that a teacher they found uninspiring might have been inspiring to others. A subject they found mindless and boring might have been engrossing and fascinating to someone just a few seats away. Furthermore, there's the simple fact that it is outright impossible to make every base skill engaging to every student at all times. Someone will always be bored, confused, aloof, or checked out.

As we become increasingly individualized, we demand that things fit us like a glove and, more importantly, we deem them failures when they don't. When YouTube picks the wrong videos for us to watch, it's an affront. When Spotify plays an artist we don't like, it's an act that needs correcting. We demand past the point of having our needs met and instead assert that our wants must be addressed. We see an unmet want as an injustice in need of fixing rather than a simple fact of life, and as such the paradigm for good teaching then unfairly becomes 100% engaging and 100% inspirational 100% of the time for 100% of the students.

This perception has pervaded educational discourse, with so many falling into the trap of trying to "fix" education through the lens of an individual student, usually by using their own experiences as a proxy for everyone else's. Furthermore, this view rarely takes into account all of the embedded victories and successes of the educational system. You learned to read, write, think, work in groups, talk to your peers. You learned about cytoplasm and polynomials and the Roman Empire. You learned to play sports or an instrument, to sketch, to sing.

Your teachers helped you in all these things and so very many more, but few rarely realize that lessons come from problems too. The issues cited by former students aren't always issues because they too yield important results. You learned patience when you had to sit through a boring lecture on a boring topic. You learned perseverance in order to make it through tedious assignments. You learned what subjects you were interested in pursuing because they shone like stars against the drab backdrop of the topics that disinterested you.

Does this mean that education cannot be improved? Certainly not, and it definitely doesn't mean that all issues in education are excusable simply because they can yield positive soft skills. This article, however, does not address a real problem in education. It addresses the author's unmet wants without any appreciation for the countless needs that were provided for him. It's a criticism that buries the successes of his educational experiences and subsequent life under a magnified inconvenience.

I said at the beginning this was going to be a bad look for me, and I feel weird putting this out there because it comes across as mean-spirited and dismissive, which is not usually how I operate. Additionally, I fully believe the author thinks he is doing the right thing in expressing the beliefs he did, which makes my takedown of it all the more inflammatory.

Rather than deleting what I've written however, I'm submitting this to partially demonstrate how someone with benign intentions can accidentally write a takedown of their own. Though he didn't intend it this way, his writing is a passive shot at the entire teaching profession, implicitly claiming that we don't know what we're doing and that we could easily improve our practice with his one simple tip! It's belittling, patronizing, and reinforces the idea that we need outsiders to come in and save us from ourselves.

If he became a math teacher, he would quickly learn that the methods of coaching would not transform his practice as he assumes it might simply because he isn't faced with a group of skilled individuals who are fundamentally interested in his domain. Coaching is influenced heavily by selection bias, as you end up pushing those who want to be pushed. You're helping basketball players become better basketball players.

But as a math teacher you're not teaching just mathematicians. You have everyone, both skilled and unskilled, interested and uninterested. A coach can bench a player as a punishment because the sport itself is its own reward, but as a math teacher you have students that willingly bench themselves because math itself feels like a punishment. The skills to coach and the skills to teach certainly have some overlap, but to assume they are interchangeable is naive.

And that's what frustrates me most about the piece. He, of all people, should understand that good coaching comes from a profound knowledge and expertise of the game. He has watched some education from the sidelines, sure, but he's never been in it. If he wants to coach us on our jobs, he has to earn that right. He needs to play the game, or at the very least, show us that he understands it up and down, inside and out. In the absence of this, however, he comes across not so much as a coach for education as he does an armchair quarterback.