My daughter's very progressive high school - thirty years ago - incorporated the teaching and coaching styles into their program. In addition to small classes that emphasized engagement and critical thinking, every student had one "class" called Advisory where a teacher acted as a learning coach for the students in his or her advisory. Advisory went beyond academics in teaching students to take responsibility for their actions and exposing their adolescent excuses to peer review. It was powerful.
I do agree about different personality types benefitting from different approaches, and excellence/winning is one such motivating goal.
I am most conscious of these psychological issues doing (informal) musical performance with others, where my goal is primarily about making the ensemble work better, by doing better work within the ensemble. That's a thrill, just like those moments when team play just comes together magically.
But I've also been a (somewhat reluctant) athlete, as all of us are forced to be during grade school, and in that context, where there is no hope of becoming a "star", and maybe not even in avoiding becoming a team liability, the best one can hope for is not to embarrass yourself in front of others, and that is adequately motivating at need.
In many ways, I think the "shaming" approach to these efforts is far more dysfunctional -- I've seen it cause all sorts of dropouts in these sorts of activities, and it's only because I am a stubborn "fuck it" type that I persist when that happens, and that's inborn. But I do despise the "coach" types who thing one size fits all. If the goal is winning, then be forthright about it. But if the goal is about participating/growing, as it should be in a learning (vs professional) situation, then you run the risk of creating a situation where only the best can be the winner, and no one else matters. We can't all be winners, but we can all be improved, given the appropriate coaching.
I honestly think a student in my class who is not all that into it and doesn't really have any facility with the material is still going to get something out of it, and I'm going to try to pay as much attention to that student as any other. I'm not saying that I remember and think about that student as much as I do either the heavily invested student who is struggling somewhat and needs my active intervention or the heavily invested student who is doing fantastic work, but the kind-of-checked-out student isn't going to get any visible evidence that they don't matter to me if I can help it. Whereas talk to athletes or musical performers who know they're bench players, who come in second-to-last in most track events, who are the last chair in their instrument, and they not only know they're unimportant to the coaches or conductor, they get active confirmation of that unimportance. No matter how much rhetoric there is about growing through participating, learning the art of being on a team, etc. Maybe that's unavoidable precisely because if you put the bench player in for as much time as the superstar, your team loses; if you put the last seat up for a solo, you ruin a concert. But then at least acknowledge that winning/excelling are cancelling out some of the "growing through participating", unless what you really mean is "we're teaching some people to accept life at the bottom of a hierarchy because that's a valuable life lesson".
This is an area that I have complicated feelings about, because I was very much a bench-warmer when I played basketball in high school, and chafed at that. The worst day I ever had at practice was a day after we went particularly hard in a scrimmage against the starters, and then were told to just stand in place and not actually play any defense. That really threw our low status in our faces, and it sucked. But that was also an aberration-- most of the time, we got close to the same level of attention and expectation as anyone else on the team (which is what had led to the blow-up that in turn led to us having to act like dummies for a practice or two, but now we're getting very far afield...).
Despite being someone who got in only in the last four minutes of a half when we were up by 30, I do still have fond memories of being a part of that team, and regard it as a valuable experience overall. There wasn't any question that some other guys were way more important to the success of the team than others, but those of us who rarely played weren't NOT part of the team, if that makes sense. And I certainly don't feel like I had any personal growth canceled out by my lack of playing time-- really, it was probably the opposite, because academic success came so easily to me that it was extremely valuable to confront real adversity in a sports context.
Different people will experience things differently, of course, but I don't think there's anything inconsistent about the competitive drive to do your absolute best co-existing with the knowledge that your best isn't going to match that of somebody up the talent hierarchy from you.
There's two ways to approach that point, though. There's you as an individual, and how you make your peace with knowing where you stand in the hierarchy of talents, knowing what your maximal best is and when you're underselling yourself, and how you feel about either. I think someone who is internally forcing themselves to be at maximal best at all times and under all circumstances is often someone doing harm to themselves; that might be equally true for the person who is always ok with underselling themselves.
And then there's what other people make of you and your place in the talent hierarchy. In some contexts, that's a difference that makes a huge difference, whether it's the difference between making millions of dollars and making a living wage, or between glory and anonymity. Sometimes the stakes involved naturally create that gap--the difference between the best neurosurgeon in the world and a basically competent neurosurgeon may matter a tremendous amount if it's testing an extremely difficult new technique or evaluating the use of a new surgical instrument. It will never *not* matter, given what neurosurgery is.
But I think for a great many other things, the stakes are nothing like that--and so the coach or teacher who ups the stakes and stretches out the talent hierarchies and then accentuates or intensifies the meaning of those hierarchies is maybe doing nobody any favors. And that's one of the things that motivated my original column: a lot of student athletes in the last decade have complained that this is precisely what has happened in a lot of college and secondary school athletics (and music performances and some other similar domains) and they're just not prepared to put up with it. What was an aberration in your experience is reported by at least some athletes in high school and university to be common.
Agreed. One of the unexamined causes is a belief that there is no place in life for amateur participation -- but we all know how much pleasure there is in a pickup game of softball or an evening bumbling through music at a friends' house. Being a (conscious but enthusiastic) amateur used to have a better place in our appreciation of a well-rounded citizen.
Amateurism is another angle to really look at in thinking about this in higher education. It's no fun to take the field against another team or player who could care less about the match if you're just playing a pickup game--but equally it's no fun to take the field against other players who are taking it all way too seriously. It's no fun to be in an amateur theater production at your college where no one in it cares at all--it's humiliating to perform in front of an audience under those conditions--but it's also no fun if the director or one of the actors thinks the stakes are the same as a Broadway production. Most colleges and universities believe in the importance of amateur/non-curricular versions of much of what they offer in the curriculum and yet faculty AND coaches frequently sort of don't really believe in that if it turns out that the amateur activities also require space or resources. It's very hard to let go and allow that sometimes people not only have fun but learn some of what we want to teach on their own. Maybe non-optimally, maybe not efficiently, maybe not so they can do it at a high level, but there's only so much cognitive space and actual time to learn everything that can be learned in an intense, always-best way. When we demand that, we need to recognize that we're demanding the biggest part of a whole person's energies and efforts. When you have three or four different faculty and coaches demanding that at once of one person, something's got to give. (Which is another point where I tend to say, "you're not primarily here to be an athlete" in a D3 school, if a coach is making demands of an athlete that are sufficiently intense as to cancel out all other possible investments of intensity.)
I do agree that the demand to excel in multiple areas will sometimes lead to sub-optimal performance in some. At the same time, though, I think this starts to get into a question of personal agency and learning to set priorities, which is also a part of the growth and learning process. If a particular student-athlete feels that devoting extra hours in the weight room or film study or whatever is more valuable to them than maximizing their effort in my class, that's a choice I'm happy to let them make. I don't know that I can honestly say that earning an A- instead of a B in any course that I teach is going to enrich their life to such a degree that they should forgo whatever benefits they feel they're deriving from sports, or theater, or a student club, or a Greek organization. As long as they're making that choice with their eyes open, and know what they're trading off, that's fine with me.
Now, there are certainly cases where coaches or directors or other organizations make demands that are fundamentally unreasonable, but that's pretty rare outside of the "revenue sports" at the Division I level. And, of course, the same is true of some faculty who take a particularly hard line on what they expect students to do and when; I can think of a number of coaches who have shown greater flexibility in dealing with student scheduling issues than some faculty.
(The absolute worst was a student who had to miss the last week of her senior year because the medical school she'd gotten into insisted that she be present for the first week of their mandatory summer program instead. They were also absolute dicks about demanding that I send them grade reports on a tight deadline. But, of course, medical schools are the Div I revenue sports of the academic world...)
If it's the difference between performing in a sport and passing my class, that's another issue, and a harder call to make. But I can think of maybe 3 cases like that over the course of 20-ish years, where a student was on the verge of failing due to time and effort going into extracurriculars rather than my class. That's smaller then the number of students who were on the verge of failing due to lack of effort despite having no visible activity that they WERE putting effort into. Most of the time, it's like I said, more of a "Play sports and get a B or do more homework and get an A-" kind of decision, and I'm not sure that's necessarily a bad trade.
I think it's a fine trade and I absolute endorse students making those kinds of decisions--if they're doing it with their eyes open and as conscious agents, as you say.
I am not as confident as you are that coaches, directors, conductors etc. are consistently reasonable in the way you and I are being when we endorse a student consciously making decisions about what to do with maximum intensity and what to do adequately. In fact, I think there's a reasonable amount of evidence that across D3 schools, there's a fair amount of people with authority in those domains consistently demanding time commitments and commitments of intensity that circumscribe the ability of students to make their own choices.
Interesting! And some really good responses that make me think.
A couple of initial thoughts.
1. The point about the way sequencing works in different disciplines is important. It's one reason that a lot of humanists get frustrated by recent proclamations about a shift to "active teaching" or "flipped classrooms", in the sense that our characteristic classroom pedagogies have been "active" in some sense, "flipped" in some sense, for a very long time. But there is also a difference that's interesting between working with students who are holding the object of study in their hands (a text, a piece of evidence, a timeline or graph) and talking about their interpretations and reactions to it and working with students who are in a lab, being present as they carry out a procedure, collect data and so on. I'm generally not standing over a student's shoulder while they read (though I do some forms of live reading with the whole class). Reading in modern societies is mostly a private, interior experience (though it wasn't always so). Whereas in a lab, faculty can observe a material process and be pedagogically engaged the whole time: don't do it that way, be careful not to jostle that part of the apparatus, you didn't mix it well enough. And it's not just corrective: some lab procedures need to be thought out together--the apparatus is finicky, it's difficult to get the results you're looking for, I think we need to get a second kind of measurement that a colleague knows more about so let's talk to her. That's much more like what I call coaching here--and I don't mean that word at all pejoratively in using it as such. I could say "active teaching" only, well, go back to where I started, because read-and-discuss isn't "passive pedagogy". It's about a pedagogy that is watching what students do with material objects, physical spaces, landscapes, and their own bodies, and offering real-time assistance and commentary, as well as eliciting from students their own thinking about what just happened or what they're intending to do.
2. I freely confess to the implication that I am saying "it's fine if they want to play sports, but..." except that I would say this about almost anything else in higher education. That's the flip side of one conception of the liberal arts: that there are a thousand pathways to learning. I've generally been a skeptic about "general education" when it is strongly prescriptive, because I can either make a case for a hundred essential things if we're going to start saying "you must learn this, you must do this" or I can say "you have to provision as much as possible with your available resources and then trust students to find their way to what they need, with the help of advisors and peers." The thing is, most colleges and universities are in a muddled middle and faculty are not particularly prone to having open conversation between themselves about how the conceptually muddled state of their overall curriculum came to be or whether it should stay that way. I think one especially closed conversation is between varsity athletics and the rest of the curriculum. At some institutions, esp. D1, varsity athletics is very formally and sharply its own thing altogether, and when there is any question about the relationship between faculty roles and coaching roles in those places, there's generally little ambiguity about how it's going to shake out: the power and authority of coaches over athletics and athletes is going to come first. In D3 institutions, it's more typical for athletics staff to be counted as faculty and for many of them to teach courses for credit. It's also typical for physical education to be a general education requirement, even at institutions that have no other prescriptive requirements. And yet at those institutions, there are very very rarely conversations about varsity athletics or physical education within the faculty that resemble the conversations we have about other decisions over resource allocation or curricular design. Pointing out that coaching is a kind of pedagogy that some faculty in academic subjects *also* practice shows that we could be talking about coaching in a way that makes the connections clear. (In the pedagogy seminar I mentioned, we had a coach participating, in fact.) But we don't pursue those connections often, which suggests that athletics is imagined differently and serves other needs. If so, what are those, and how needful are they? If on the other hand, athletics is part of education, is shaped by pedagogical work, then it ought to be as transparent to the conversations we have about whether we need this or that faculty line, whether this or that department needs to restructure its major, whether growing interest or falling interest by students needs to be considered. If athletics is part of education, then you can't take for granted that it IS important, any more than history or English literature or physics gets to say "of course this is important". Especially if there are gen ed requirements for athletics and not for any other academic subject.
3. I agree we're being asked to care more and more about who are students are as individuals, especially in small colleges. But there's still a difference between teaching them for set periods of time in a course and being on the team bus with them for hours, practicing with them all the time, being in the locker room and on the benches with them during matches--and there's a difference between what some coaches think they are not only allowed but required to say to athletes about their personal lives and what most faculty feel is proper. I wouldn't ever dream of saying aloud to a student in front of other students that they look hungover or that they seem to have gained weight a lot recently. I'm careful even when I say, "Ok, I think that's not actually what this text is saying".
4. I'm really interested that saying "winning isn't always important, peak performance isn't always required" is the thing that really got under your skin. I understand why it does: I think this touches on some very sharp, underdiscussed divides in the motivational underpinnings of faculty life and higher education. I think I should write more on this soon. I am partly here processing some things I've learned from colleagues in psychology who study motivation, work and choice where at least one of the arguments they've made (based on considerable empirical evidence) is that the distinction between being someone who says "good enough" and someone driven to seek maximized, optimized , as-near-to-perfect outcomes in all things is the difference between being happy and not being happy. But it's also the difference between a sort of inefficient efficiency and spending way too much energy and labor time relative to the outcomes being sought. There's maybe a complicated middle ground to talk about where there is more than one way to skin a cat, of course. E.g., maybe if one says "I expect the best from you", whether coaching, teaching or doing anything pedagogical, but also one offers graceful and empathetic acceptance for whatever you get, then you are both motivating and pragmatic. Or caring. E.g., maybe even if you believe what I believe, you don't say to students (or athletes) "hey, whatever you do is ok, if you're feeling undermotivated this week it's fine", because that actually encourages students to do poorly or to check out. What I'm teaching matters to me and I think should matter to them and it's incumbent on me to act that way. But I'm also not going to read a student the riot act when I get an essay turned in that seems to underperform what the student is capable of, and I generally don't think a coach should shout at or shame an athlete in front of team-mates in the aftermath of what looks like a less-than-perfect performance. Winning--or academic performance--matters. I just think that if you assume it's the only thing that does, it pushes you as a teacher into some bad teaching. Or coaching.
Re: point 2, I find this sort of amusing in that I think it reflects our very different institutional contexts. That is, Union doesn't have any formal Phys. Ed. requirements, but we do have a complicated and to my mind overly prescriptive set of General Education requirements on the academic side. So what I would like is very much for our academic program to be more like our athletic program, rather than the other way around...
Re: point 3, I absolutely HAVE said to students "Wow, you look hung over..." in a class setting. But that was at a stage of the term where I knew them well enough to be reasonably confident that they would take that the right way. (Also, it was some years ago; I might be a little more careful about that now...)
Re: point 4, I think the issue is that what constitutes problematic shouting or "shaming" is very much in the eye of the beholder. Some people are fine with being challenged in ways that would be unacceptable to others, and sometimes even feel that they need that. It's really difficult to make bright-line rules for a lot of this, outside of ought-to-be-obvious cases like avoiding slurs relating to race, gender, or sexuality, and avoiding risks of physical harm.
More generally, as I said in an earlier response to a later comment (I ended up replying to these in reverse order), I don't think there's necessarily a conflict between being motivated by competition to do your best and knowing that your best might not be THE best. I would agree that needing EVERYTHING to be perfect, and needing to ALWAYS be the winner are a path to unhappiness, but I think there are a very large number of fairly well-adjusted people in the world who are both motivated by challenges to excel and able to accept results that come short of perfection.
I am not kidding when I say I almost would like students to fill out a little form for me that answers questions like "Please do cold call on me Y/N", "It's fine to kid me a bit about being sleepy or checked out in discussion Y/N", "Do not ask me anything about my personal life ever Y/N" and so on. It's absolutely true that some people are fine being challenged and some aren't; the trouble is that this is precisely one of the things teachers and coaches can get badly wrong based on their reading of someone's external temperament. (A lot of the writing about the mental health issues of women in athletics has focused on exactly this point.) I know that when I'm learning something new that I see as intellectual, I'm pretty ok with somebody saying "no no, you have it all wrong, let me show you" but that if I'm learning something that's physical, I really need a teacher to be gentle about it. I don't know that this would be obvious unless I said so in advance.
I think it IS obvious -- I think it's tied to visible failure vs contingent failure.
When asked to do something physical, like sport or music, the "performance" aspect of it is immediately judgable __by the performer__ , not just the receiver, and they are well aware of just how short of their desire the result is (they want to do well, they know what "well" is, and they know they're not there -- they're sensitive to being criticized about it, since they already know). (Which has nothing to do with wanting to improve.)
But when asked to present a reasoned conclusion or analysis, they are more distanced from the intellectual failure. They haven't necessarily tried & failed, they may simply have not (yet) properly understood. They are not yet "short of their goal". That requires less delicacy of criticism than the former.
Of course, performance failures for professionals in athletics or music are treated differently -- I'm speaking of amateurs.
If you think about how much physical comedy is tied to someone faking their way through something they don't know how to do well (or at all), the point gets underscored. Folks can bullshit their way through some kinds of talk-based learning for a while (though this is also more obvious than many students think it is), and sometimes that's an effective stall until a thought really clicks into place and you get it. But the moment you see someone in a lab trying to fake their way through a procedure that's going to blow up in their face or waste expensive reagents, you have to stop them there and then. The moment it's clear that someone who is the second cello out of two in a small orchestra can't play the piece everyone else is playing, you have to say something about it, however you choose to do that.
There's also a "tinkering" aspect to a lot of learning. As an example, when I was at Yale in the early 70s, the Rifle Team (a club sport) had died under the assault of anti-war student politics, and a handful of us determined to revive it. We had shit leftover ROTC equipment, and we were all undistinguished (if experienced) target shooters.
We knew we couldn't beat anyone, and that wasn't going to change during our college career, and none of us was headed to the Olympics. But so what? We had a great deal of fun dealing from a losing deck and seeing if we could apply unusual approaches (psyching out the opposing teams, for example). That was a team activity that constituted a useful learning experience in toughening up regardless of the odds. And, BTW, no teachers or coaches were involved -- just us.
Too much teaching is oriented at providing the professional path forward for the few who will qualify and want to. The point of a liberal arts education was to create educated citizens, not professionals. A helluva lot more people pass through educational hands than can be turned into grad students -- there are worse things than giving them a taste of the glories of knowledge and the principles of striving.
My daughter's very progressive high school - thirty years ago - incorporated the teaching and coaching styles into their program. In addition to small classes that emphasized engagement and critical thinking, every student had one "class" called Advisory where a teacher acted as a learning coach for the students in his or her advisory. Advisory went beyond academics in teaching students to take responsibility for their actions and exposing their adolescent excuses to peer review. It was powerful.
I do agree about different personality types benefitting from different approaches, and excellence/winning is one such motivating goal.
I am most conscious of these psychological issues doing (informal) musical performance with others, where my goal is primarily about making the ensemble work better, by doing better work within the ensemble. That's a thrill, just like those moments when team play just comes together magically.
But I've also been a (somewhat reluctant) athlete, as all of us are forced to be during grade school, and in that context, where there is no hope of becoming a "star", and maybe not even in avoiding becoming a team liability, the best one can hope for is not to embarrass yourself in front of others, and that is adequately motivating at need.
In many ways, I think the "shaming" approach to these efforts is far more dysfunctional -- I've seen it cause all sorts of dropouts in these sorts of activities, and it's only because I am a stubborn "fuck it" type that I persist when that happens, and that's inborn. But I do despise the "coach" types who thing one size fits all. If the goal is winning, then be forthright about it. But if the goal is about participating/growing, as it should be in a learning (vs professional) situation, then you run the risk of creating a situation where only the best can be the winner, and no one else matters. We can't all be winners, but we can all be improved, given the appropriate coaching.
I honestly think a student in my class who is not all that into it and doesn't really have any facility with the material is still going to get something out of it, and I'm going to try to pay as much attention to that student as any other. I'm not saying that I remember and think about that student as much as I do either the heavily invested student who is struggling somewhat and needs my active intervention or the heavily invested student who is doing fantastic work, but the kind-of-checked-out student isn't going to get any visible evidence that they don't matter to me if I can help it. Whereas talk to athletes or musical performers who know they're bench players, who come in second-to-last in most track events, who are the last chair in their instrument, and they not only know they're unimportant to the coaches or conductor, they get active confirmation of that unimportance. No matter how much rhetoric there is about growing through participating, learning the art of being on a team, etc. Maybe that's unavoidable precisely because if you put the bench player in for as much time as the superstar, your team loses; if you put the last seat up for a solo, you ruin a concert. But then at least acknowledge that winning/excelling are cancelling out some of the "growing through participating", unless what you really mean is "we're teaching some people to accept life at the bottom of a hierarchy because that's a valuable life lesson".
This is an area that I have complicated feelings about, because I was very much a bench-warmer when I played basketball in high school, and chafed at that. The worst day I ever had at practice was a day after we went particularly hard in a scrimmage against the starters, and then were told to just stand in place and not actually play any defense. That really threw our low status in our faces, and it sucked. But that was also an aberration-- most of the time, we got close to the same level of attention and expectation as anyone else on the team (which is what had led to the blow-up that in turn led to us having to act like dummies for a practice or two, but now we're getting very far afield...).
Despite being someone who got in only in the last four minutes of a half when we were up by 30, I do still have fond memories of being a part of that team, and regard it as a valuable experience overall. There wasn't any question that some other guys were way more important to the success of the team than others, but those of us who rarely played weren't NOT part of the team, if that makes sense. And I certainly don't feel like I had any personal growth canceled out by my lack of playing time-- really, it was probably the opposite, because academic success came so easily to me that it was extremely valuable to confront real adversity in a sports context.
Different people will experience things differently, of course, but I don't think there's anything inconsistent about the competitive drive to do your absolute best co-existing with the knowledge that your best isn't going to match that of somebody up the talent hierarchy from you.
There's two ways to approach that point, though. There's you as an individual, and how you make your peace with knowing where you stand in the hierarchy of talents, knowing what your maximal best is and when you're underselling yourself, and how you feel about either. I think someone who is internally forcing themselves to be at maximal best at all times and under all circumstances is often someone doing harm to themselves; that might be equally true for the person who is always ok with underselling themselves.
And then there's what other people make of you and your place in the talent hierarchy. In some contexts, that's a difference that makes a huge difference, whether it's the difference between making millions of dollars and making a living wage, or between glory and anonymity. Sometimes the stakes involved naturally create that gap--the difference between the best neurosurgeon in the world and a basically competent neurosurgeon may matter a tremendous amount if it's testing an extremely difficult new technique or evaluating the use of a new surgical instrument. It will never *not* matter, given what neurosurgery is.
But I think for a great many other things, the stakes are nothing like that--and so the coach or teacher who ups the stakes and stretches out the talent hierarchies and then accentuates or intensifies the meaning of those hierarchies is maybe doing nobody any favors. And that's one of the things that motivated my original column: a lot of student athletes in the last decade have complained that this is precisely what has happened in a lot of college and secondary school athletics (and music performances and some other similar domains) and they're just not prepared to put up with it. What was an aberration in your experience is reported by at least some athletes in high school and university to be common.
Agreed. One of the unexamined causes is a belief that there is no place in life for amateur participation -- but we all know how much pleasure there is in a pickup game of softball or an evening bumbling through music at a friends' house. Being a (conscious but enthusiastic) amateur used to have a better place in our appreciation of a well-rounded citizen.
Amateurism is another angle to really look at in thinking about this in higher education. It's no fun to take the field against another team or player who could care less about the match if you're just playing a pickup game--but equally it's no fun to take the field against other players who are taking it all way too seriously. It's no fun to be in an amateur theater production at your college where no one in it cares at all--it's humiliating to perform in front of an audience under those conditions--but it's also no fun if the director or one of the actors thinks the stakes are the same as a Broadway production. Most colleges and universities believe in the importance of amateur/non-curricular versions of much of what they offer in the curriculum and yet faculty AND coaches frequently sort of don't really believe in that if it turns out that the amateur activities also require space or resources. It's very hard to let go and allow that sometimes people not only have fun but learn some of what we want to teach on their own. Maybe non-optimally, maybe not efficiently, maybe not so they can do it at a high level, but there's only so much cognitive space and actual time to learn everything that can be learned in an intense, always-best way. When we demand that, we need to recognize that we're demanding the biggest part of a whole person's energies and efforts. When you have three or four different faculty and coaches demanding that at once of one person, something's got to give. (Which is another point where I tend to say, "you're not primarily here to be an athlete" in a D3 school, if a coach is making demands of an athlete that are sufficiently intense as to cancel out all other possible investments of intensity.)
I do agree that the demand to excel in multiple areas will sometimes lead to sub-optimal performance in some. At the same time, though, I think this starts to get into a question of personal agency and learning to set priorities, which is also a part of the growth and learning process. If a particular student-athlete feels that devoting extra hours in the weight room or film study or whatever is more valuable to them than maximizing their effort in my class, that's a choice I'm happy to let them make. I don't know that I can honestly say that earning an A- instead of a B in any course that I teach is going to enrich their life to such a degree that they should forgo whatever benefits they feel they're deriving from sports, or theater, or a student club, or a Greek organization. As long as they're making that choice with their eyes open, and know what they're trading off, that's fine with me.
Now, there are certainly cases where coaches or directors or other organizations make demands that are fundamentally unreasonable, but that's pretty rare outside of the "revenue sports" at the Division I level. And, of course, the same is true of some faculty who take a particularly hard line on what they expect students to do and when; I can think of a number of coaches who have shown greater flexibility in dealing with student scheduling issues than some faculty.
(The absolute worst was a student who had to miss the last week of her senior year because the medical school she'd gotten into insisted that she be present for the first week of their mandatory summer program instead. They were also absolute dicks about demanding that I send them grade reports on a tight deadline. But, of course, medical schools are the Div I revenue sports of the academic world...)
If it's the difference between performing in a sport and passing my class, that's another issue, and a harder call to make. But I can think of maybe 3 cases like that over the course of 20-ish years, where a student was on the verge of failing due to time and effort going into extracurriculars rather than my class. That's smaller then the number of students who were on the verge of failing due to lack of effort despite having no visible activity that they WERE putting effort into. Most of the time, it's like I said, more of a "Play sports and get a B or do more homework and get an A-" kind of decision, and I'm not sure that's necessarily a bad trade.
I think it's a fine trade and I absolute endorse students making those kinds of decisions--if they're doing it with their eyes open and as conscious agents, as you say.
I am not as confident as you are that coaches, directors, conductors etc. are consistently reasonable in the way you and I are being when we endorse a student consciously making decisions about what to do with maximum intensity and what to do adequately. In fact, I think there's a reasonable amount of evidence that across D3 schools, there's a fair amount of people with authority in those domains consistently demanding time commitments and commitments of intensity that circumscribe the ability of students to make their own choices.
Interesting! And some really good responses that make me think.
A couple of initial thoughts.
1. The point about the way sequencing works in different disciplines is important. It's one reason that a lot of humanists get frustrated by recent proclamations about a shift to "active teaching" or "flipped classrooms", in the sense that our characteristic classroom pedagogies have been "active" in some sense, "flipped" in some sense, for a very long time. But there is also a difference that's interesting between working with students who are holding the object of study in their hands (a text, a piece of evidence, a timeline or graph) and talking about their interpretations and reactions to it and working with students who are in a lab, being present as they carry out a procedure, collect data and so on. I'm generally not standing over a student's shoulder while they read (though I do some forms of live reading with the whole class). Reading in modern societies is mostly a private, interior experience (though it wasn't always so). Whereas in a lab, faculty can observe a material process and be pedagogically engaged the whole time: don't do it that way, be careful not to jostle that part of the apparatus, you didn't mix it well enough. And it's not just corrective: some lab procedures need to be thought out together--the apparatus is finicky, it's difficult to get the results you're looking for, I think we need to get a second kind of measurement that a colleague knows more about so let's talk to her. That's much more like what I call coaching here--and I don't mean that word at all pejoratively in using it as such. I could say "active teaching" only, well, go back to where I started, because read-and-discuss isn't "passive pedagogy". It's about a pedagogy that is watching what students do with material objects, physical spaces, landscapes, and their own bodies, and offering real-time assistance and commentary, as well as eliciting from students their own thinking about what just happened or what they're intending to do.
2. I freely confess to the implication that I am saying "it's fine if they want to play sports, but..." except that I would say this about almost anything else in higher education. That's the flip side of one conception of the liberal arts: that there are a thousand pathways to learning. I've generally been a skeptic about "general education" when it is strongly prescriptive, because I can either make a case for a hundred essential things if we're going to start saying "you must learn this, you must do this" or I can say "you have to provision as much as possible with your available resources and then trust students to find their way to what they need, with the help of advisors and peers." The thing is, most colleges and universities are in a muddled middle and faculty are not particularly prone to having open conversation between themselves about how the conceptually muddled state of their overall curriculum came to be or whether it should stay that way. I think one especially closed conversation is between varsity athletics and the rest of the curriculum. At some institutions, esp. D1, varsity athletics is very formally and sharply its own thing altogether, and when there is any question about the relationship between faculty roles and coaching roles in those places, there's generally little ambiguity about how it's going to shake out: the power and authority of coaches over athletics and athletes is going to come first. In D3 institutions, it's more typical for athletics staff to be counted as faculty and for many of them to teach courses for credit. It's also typical for physical education to be a general education requirement, even at institutions that have no other prescriptive requirements. And yet at those institutions, there are very very rarely conversations about varsity athletics or physical education within the faculty that resemble the conversations we have about other decisions over resource allocation or curricular design. Pointing out that coaching is a kind of pedagogy that some faculty in academic subjects *also* practice shows that we could be talking about coaching in a way that makes the connections clear. (In the pedagogy seminar I mentioned, we had a coach participating, in fact.) But we don't pursue those connections often, which suggests that athletics is imagined differently and serves other needs. If so, what are those, and how needful are they? If on the other hand, athletics is part of education, is shaped by pedagogical work, then it ought to be as transparent to the conversations we have about whether we need this or that faculty line, whether this or that department needs to restructure its major, whether growing interest or falling interest by students needs to be considered. If athletics is part of education, then you can't take for granted that it IS important, any more than history or English literature or physics gets to say "of course this is important". Especially if there are gen ed requirements for athletics and not for any other academic subject.
3. I agree we're being asked to care more and more about who are students are as individuals, especially in small colleges. But there's still a difference between teaching them for set periods of time in a course and being on the team bus with them for hours, practicing with them all the time, being in the locker room and on the benches with them during matches--and there's a difference between what some coaches think they are not only allowed but required to say to athletes about their personal lives and what most faculty feel is proper. I wouldn't ever dream of saying aloud to a student in front of other students that they look hungover or that they seem to have gained weight a lot recently. I'm careful even when I say, "Ok, I think that's not actually what this text is saying".
4. I'm really interested that saying "winning isn't always important, peak performance isn't always required" is the thing that really got under your skin. I understand why it does: I think this touches on some very sharp, underdiscussed divides in the motivational underpinnings of faculty life and higher education. I think I should write more on this soon. I am partly here processing some things I've learned from colleagues in psychology who study motivation, work and choice where at least one of the arguments they've made (based on considerable empirical evidence) is that the distinction between being someone who says "good enough" and someone driven to seek maximized, optimized , as-near-to-perfect outcomes in all things is the difference between being happy and not being happy. But it's also the difference between a sort of inefficient efficiency and spending way too much energy and labor time relative to the outcomes being sought. There's maybe a complicated middle ground to talk about where there is more than one way to skin a cat, of course. E.g., maybe if one says "I expect the best from you", whether coaching, teaching or doing anything pedagogical, but also one offers graceful and empathetic acceptance for whatever you get, then you are both motivating and pragmatic. Or caring. E.g., maybe even if you believe what I believe, you don't say to students (or athletes) "hey, whatever you do is ok, if you're feeling undermotivated this week it's fine", because that actually encourages students to do poorly or to check out. What I'm teaching matters to me and I think should matter to them and it's incumbent on me to act that way. But I'm also not going to read a student the riot act when I get an essay turned in that seems to underperform what the student is capable of, and I generally don't think a coach should shout at or shame an athlete in front of team-mates in the aftermath of what looks like a less-than-perfect performance. Winning--or academic performance--matters. I just think that if you assume it's the only thing that does, it pushes you as a teacher into some bad teaching. Or coaching.
Re: point 2, I find this sort of amusing in that I think it reflects our very different institutional contexts. That is, Union doesn't have any formal Phys. Ed. requirements, but we do have a complicated and to my mind overly prescriptive set of General Education requirements on the academic side. So what I would like is very much for our academic program to be more like our athletic program, rather than the other way around...
Re: point 3, I absolutely HAVE said to students "Wow, you look hung over..." in a class setting. But that was at a stage of the term where I knew them well enough to be reasonably confident that they would take that the right way. (Also, it was some years ago; I might be a little more careful about that now...)
Re: point 4, I think the issue is that what constitutes problematic shouting or "shaming" is very much in the eye of the beholder. Some people are fine with being challenged in ways that would be unacceptable to others, and sometimes even feel that they need that. It's really difficult to make bright-line rules for a lot of this, outside of ought-to-be-obvious cases like avoiding slurs relating to race, gender, or sexuality, and avoiding risks of physical harm.
More generally, as I said in an earlier response to a later comment (I ended up replying to these in reverse order), I don't think there's necessarily a conflict between being motivated by competition to do your best and knowing that your best might not be THE best. I would agree that needing EVERYTHING to be perfect, and needing to ALWAYS be the winner are a path to unhappiness, but I think there are a very large number of fairly well-adjusted people in the world who are both motivated by challenges to excel and able to accept results that come short of perfection.
I am not kidding when I say I almost would like students to fill out a little form for me that answers questions like "Please do cold call on me Y/N", "It's fine to kid me a bit about being sleepy or checked out in discussion Y/N", "Do not ask me anything about my personal life ever Y/N" and so on. It's absolutely true that some people are fine being challenged and some aren't; the trouble is that this is precisely one of the things teachers and coaches can get badly wrong based on their reading of someone's external temperament. (A lot of the writing about the mental health issues of women in athletics has focused on exactly this point.) I know that when I'm learning something new that I see as intellectual, I'm pretty ok with somebody saying "no no, you have it all wrong, let me show you" but that if I'm learning something that's physical, I really need a teacher to be gentle about it. I don't know that this would be obvious unless I said so in advance.
I think it IS obvious -- I think it's tied to visible failure vs contingent failure.
When asked to do something physical, like sport or music, the "performance" aspect of it is immediately judgable __by the performer__ , not just the receiver, and they are well aware of just how short of their desire the result is (they want to do well, they know what "well" is, and they know they're not there -- they're sensitive to being criticized about it, since they already know). (Which has nothing to do with wanting to improve.)
But when asked to present a reasoned conclusion or analysis, they are more distanced from the intellectual failure. They haven't necessarily tried & failed, they may simply have not (yet) properly understood. They are not yet "short of their goal". That requires less delicacy of criticism than the former.
Of course, performance failures for professionals in athletics or music are treated differently -- I'm speaking of amateurs.
If you think about how much physical comedy is tied to someone faking their way through something they don't know how to do well (or at all), the point gets underscored. Folks can bullshit their way through some kinds of talk-based learning for a while (though this is also more obvious than many students think it is), and sometimes that's an effective stall until a thought really clicks into place and you get it. But the moment you see someone in a lab trying to fake their way through a procedure that's going to blow up in their face or waste expensive reagents, you have to stop them there and then. The moment it's clear that someone who is the second cello out of two in a small orchestra can't play the piece everyone else is playing, you have to say something about it, however you choose to do that.
There's also a "tinkering" aspect to a lot of learning. As an example, when I was at Yale in the early 70s, the Rifle Team (a club sport) had died under the assault of anti-war student politics, and a handful of us determined to revive it. We had shit leftover ROTC equipment, and we were all undistinguished (if experienced) target shooters.
We knew we couldn't beat anyone, and that wasn't going to change during our college career, and none of us was headed to the Olympics. But so what? We had a great deal of fun dealing from a losing deck and seeing if we could apply unusual approaches (psyching out the opposing teams, for example). That was a team activity that constituted a useful learning experience in toughening up regardless of the odds. And, BTW, no teachers or coaches were involved -- just us.
Too much teaching is oriented at providing the professional path forward for the few who will qualify and want to. The point of a liberal arts education was to create educated citizens, not professionals. A helluva lot more people pass through educational hands than can be turned into grad students -- there are worse things than giving them a taste of the glories of knowledge and the principles of striving.