Math Teachers Should Be More Like Football Coaches That style of motivation could help in the classroom, too.
By John Urschel
Mr. Urschel is a Ph.D. candidate in mathematics and former professional football player.
New York Times
May 11, 2019
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No one expects a math teacher to tell a talented student that he or she could become the next John von Neumann. (No one expects math teachers to tell students about von Neumann — perhaps the greatest mathematician of the 20th century — at all.) And no one expects math teachers to talk with the kind of fire, or to demand the kind of commitment and accountability, that football coaches do. But I wish they did.
A growing body of research shows that students are affected by more than just the quality of a lesson plan. They also respond to the passion of their teachers and the engagement of their peers, and they seek a sense of purpose. They benefit from specific instructions, constant feedback and a culture of learning that encourages resilience in the face of failure — not unlike a football practice. There are many ways to be an effective teacher, just as there are many ways to be an effective coach. But all good teachers, like good coaches, communicate that they care about your goals.
Until I got to college, I didn’t really know what mathematics was. I still thought of it as problem sets and laborious computations. Then one day, one of my professors summoned me to his office, handed me a book and suggested that I think about a particular problem. Understanding it, I realized, required reading other, more elementary books. I would make my way down one path only to hit a dead end. It wasn’t easy, but it was fascinating.
My professor kept giving me problems, and I kept pursuing them, even though I couldn’t always solve them immediately. Before long, he was introducing me to problems that had never been solved before, and urging me to find new techniques to help crack them.
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