It’s a great time of year if you’re a sports fan. The NFL is in full swing, and college football is coming to the inconclusive end of its season (save for the weird six-weeks-later coda of the bowl games). The NBA and NHL are just starting up, and most importantly, college basketball season has just started.<\/p>\n
The abundance of sports, particularly college sports, at this time of year makes it a great time to be a fan. Unfortunately, the fact that both college football and college basketball (the biggest of the big-money sports) are in season at the moment also means that this is the peak season for sanctimonious discussions of how college athletics are the root of all evil.<\/p>\n
You get some of this from both sides– various people were defending the ludicrous college football bowl system last week on the grounds that their messed-up non-championship is all For the Good of the Students (oddly, they can’t really explain why Division III has both a playoff system, and a vastly larger number of schools who are serious about academics). Most of the sanctimonious crap comes from people who are opposed to college sports, though.<\/p>\n
The chief argument is always some variant on “These ‘student-athletes’ don’t belong in college, and aren’t serious about education. They’re just using college as a stepping-stone to a career in the NFL or the NBA.” <\/p>\n
There’s some truth to this, of course, but at the same time, you have to ask whether this is really different than the rest of the student body.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
After all, the number of students in college who are really and truly interested in learning for its own sake is pretty small. They’re the ones who go on to graduate school, and become professional academics.<\/p>\n
Most of the rest of the students are there because college is a stepping-stone to a better career than they otherwise would be able to get. They don’t care all that much about education per se, they care about getting the degree they need to get a good job after graduation.<\/p>\n
Anybody who has taught has seen dozens of these students. They’re probably the majority in most introductory classes, and there are certain disciplines where they tend to really pile up.<\/p>\n
They’re the ones who ask “Will this be on the exam?,” as if learning is a zero-sum game, and remembering some extra fact that they won’t be tested on will tie up neurons that are needed for some more important task.<\/p>\n
They’re the ones who ask “What is this good for?,” in a tone that suggests that anything without immediate practical applications is beneath them.<\/p>\n
They’re the ones who put twice as much effort into figuring out ways to weasel around curricular requirements than would be needed if they just took the classes and did the work that they’re supposed to do.<\/p>\n
So, yeah, there are a lot of football and basketball players marking time in college, doing the absolute minimum required to squeak by with their eligibility intact, waiting until they can go pro. They’re not alone, though– huge numbers of their classmates are marking time in exactly the same way, though their final goal is a middle-management job at a Fortune 500 company, not an eight-figure signing bonus and a shoe contract.<\/p>\n
If we’re going to start chasing people out of colleges because they’re not really serious about getting an education, we’re going to lose a whole lot more than the football and basketball teams.<\/p>\n
When you get down to it, there’s really not that much difference between big-time college athletes and most of their peers and classmates. They’re in college not so much for the education, as for the credential it gives them to go on to some later career.<\/p>\n
As academics and educators, our hope is that some of them will come for the credentials, and discover an interest in education along the way. Some class will “click” for them, and they’ll say “Hey, that’s pretty cool!” Or it might be a slow accumulation of classes, as they plod through the catalogue requirements, and gradually discover that they’ve learned a lot without being aware of it. Either way, a whole new set of possible futures will open before them.<\/p>\n
It doesn’t happen all that often, but every now and then, it does (probably about as often with athletes as non-athletes). On some level, that’s what keeps people in the teaching game– the hope that they’ll be there for the moment when everything suddenly falls into place for some student who never thought of themselves as that sort of student.<\/p>\n
It’s worth a lot of paper-grading, when it happens.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It’s a great time of year if you’re a sports fan. The NFL is in full swing, and college football is coming to the inconclusive end of its season (save for the weird six-weeks-later coda of the bowl games). The NBA and NHL are just starting up, and most importantly, college basketball season has just… Continue reading Athletes Aren’t Different<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3163"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3163\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}