Model Education
December 13, 2013
The athletic classroom is at least as pregnant with teachable moments as any other classroom of our comprehensive secondary schools.
I believe this so strongly that there is a tendency to overstate this truth; but if we include non-athletic activities like speech, music, debate and drama, I am even more certain it is true.
It is true in large part because nowhere in education will one find it to the degree we do in school activities that teachers are teaching what they want to teach to students who are learning what they want to learn, and both teachers and learners are willing to work hour after hour on their own time, even after the so-called “school day,” to make sure that everything that can be taught is taught and everything that can be learned is learned.
This is not a distraction from the educational mission of schools. It is a model of what more of education should be. And we shouldn’t hesitate to say so. Nor should we hesitate any longer to provide these model programs for younger grade levels.
Bubble Wrap
October 28, 2014
We must do everything we can do to minimize serious injuries in school sports; but because the benefits of school sports participation are so universal and serious injuries so unusual, we should accompany our continuing campaigns for safety with constant appeals for common sense.
It is a compliment to school sports that each and every one of the very rare number of school sports-related deaths carries with it great sorrow and scrutiny. Nationwide there are so few tragedies that schools treat all of them with tenderness; and we try to learn from each of them how to have fewer of them.
But the attention we give to increased safety should not outshout the safety record we already have in school sports, especially compared to activities that lead to far more deaths with far less attention. For example, each year . . .
- 20 skateboarding deaths;
- 40 skiing deaths;
- 400 youth drownings; and
- 700 bicycling deaths.
Compared to school sports, these numbers are epidemics; and compared to school sports, these epidemics are ignored.
Our world is not bubble wrapped, nor should it be. School sports is not 100 percent injury-free, nor can it be. We should work to make school sports still safer, and work almost as hard to explain how safe school sports already is.