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Math teachers should be more like football coaches

210 points by mjirv 7y ago

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Torwald 7y ago
Students should be more like jocks: giving a dam.
- daveFNbuck 7y ago
  That probably has a lot to do with it. It's hard to maintain enthusiasm over the years if it isn't being returned. I think the lack of passion from the students is more about the voluntary nature of the football team than anything inherent to the jocks.
  - papeda 7y ago
    The rewards are different, too. There is no level of mathematical achievement that will get the kind of broad (but typically local) social status and public approval of being a starting high school quarterback. Math just doesn't tap into anything near as easy and primal.
    - daveFNbuck 7y ago
      That's true, but I've seen years where an enthusiastic professor gets a packed room for a normally undersubscribed elective course like computational complexity theory or advanced algorithms.
      - majos 7y ago
        True, but there's a heavy selection going on there. A packed complexity class might mean 50? enthusiastic undergrads out of several hundred math/cs students at a university. A dedicated and charismatic professor might be instrumental in turning an interested computer science student into a raging algorithmist (indeed, I actually think a lot of computer science grad students study what they study because somebody appropriately passionate introduced it to them), but converting a just-here-for-the-requirement high schooler is a different story.
        daveFNbuck 7y ago
        The football team also has a heavy selection bias. Personally, I got into CS because there was a required intro class at my undergrad. A dedicated and charismatic professor noticed my aptitude and encouraged me to take the next course and consider a CS major. This could easily have happened in high school if my high school had a required CS course.
- alistairSH 7y ago
  Eh. Sure, students can be disinterested. But, in my personal experience, in advanced high school courses (where the students were highly engaged) at a top-notch public school, the math teachers were, by and large, far less enthusiastic than the teachers of all the other subjects. I had many excellent, engaging, exciting history teachers. My Latin teacher was quirky and annoying, but loved the subject and it rubbed off on us. My biology teacher made me think I wanted to go into hard sciences. I barely remember my math teachers. And I was good at math. I don't believe my experience is unique.
- kache_ 7y ago
  Pretty much. The kids that did the best in my highschool were the ones that did things due to competitive drive.
CrazyStat 7y ago
PE teachers should be more like math team coaches
devoply 7y ago
Perform brain imaging, split students into those with a strong math co-processor brain and those without. For those without, teach them math using logic rather than rote learning which is obvious to those with a strong math brain.
- scoopdewoop 7y ago
  What an absurd, elitist, reductive, sci-fi response. Brains don't have ALUs in them, btw. Nor can we image for different skills. Nor should we subject people to this kind of dystopian hierarchy of faulty biological determinism.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- labgrown 7y ago
  You don't need brain imaging to sort out those with a natural talent and affinity for math, the challenge of an education system is to maximize the level of those without such affinities.
  - thatcat 7y ago
    That's not how football is approached. I think GP's point is that football is approached by selecting for those with the most potential and maximizing that and that math teachers can't be like football coaches really.
- spaceprison 7y ago
  I agree, perhaps brain scans aren't an option, but I do think two tracks based on some kind of testing makes a lot of sense. I really struggled with the rote path and it wasn't until I could see more of the "why" and where it applies to practical situations that it all started to click.
cjohnson318 7y ago
I agree with the general idea that coaches are able to provide a much more personal and thorough training than the traditional teacher, but that's not a good thing for students and society in general. The reason is because students should have a right and an expectation to equal access to education. The reason we see very little diversity in the history of mathematics and science is because of this unequal access to mentors in particular, and education in general. (Most of the outstanding non-white and/or non-male mathematicians had white male mentors or sponsors that helped them get into the Old Boys Club.) When you have a monoculture in a field, then people tend to follow societal and cultural norms. This tendency impedes progress at best, and can cause disastrous blindspots at worst. The current American educational systems is an imperfect attempt at providing all students with equal opportunites. If we'd like to improve upon this, then let us improve the teacher to student ratio, rather than leaving it up to new hybrid teacher-coaches to try to identify MVPs at a young age, potentially allowing late-bloomers and marginalized groups to slip through the cracks.
- majos 7y ago
  Agreed. Math in particular is an area where mentorship matters a lot. Pretty tautologically, math relies on correctness, and correctness can be tricky to grok on your own. On the other hand, if you're trying to paint, make music, or write a story, there's a much larger margin for error and subjectivity, and it's easier to intuit when something feels wrong. There's a reason we talk about amateur mathematician cranks and not amateur pianist cranks.
  - perfmode 7y ago
    "in math, we don't understand things, we just get used to them." - Von Neumann
- sokoloff 7y ago
  I think that exceptional athletes should get more coaching than regular-old-me should get Phys Ed. I think that exceptional math students should get more coaching than regular-old student who needs to know basic math to survive in life. No different than music, art, science, or sports; I don't see a reason to put a thicker, even coat of peanut butter across all those disciplines and all the students, but rather to tailor the experience to go deeper in select areas when a student shows aptitude and interest. I have zero interest or aptitude in playing musical instruments. Any amount of time spent trying to teach me that is utterly wasted for all parties involved.
naveen99 7y ago
If advertisers can individualize teaching consumers about their products, maybe we just need an advertiser to start teaching math.
- ThrustVectoring 7y ago
  As someone who works in the field of digital advertising, please god no. Advertisers have zero idea what they're doing.
majos 7y ago
For those debating reading the piece -- do it! John Urschel wrote it, and he's probably the most qualified to do so. I think his point is broadly correct: the way we teach football, and the way talented football players get mentored in high school, often puts mathematics to shame. Two responses come to mind: 1. The incentive structures are different for high school math teachers and high school football coaches. If a high school football coach produces an elite college (or pro!) prospect then colleges will pay more attention to the coach. Get enough attention and the high school coach might become a college assistant, a college head coach, etc. There is a very real personal incentive for high school coaches to produce good players. In contrast, a high school math teacher who produces great math undergrads will probably get student appreciation and little else. Maybe they'll get to work with the math olympiads or something, but it's not like a college will recruit them as tenure-track faculty. Most great high school math teachers are doing it for pretty pure reasons. Admirable, but hard to expect from rational people. 2. Another big problem is that there are very few high school math teachers who have a good idea of what mathematicians do, or have strong math backgrounds in general. Makes sense given that most people with strong math abilities can make much more money doing something that's not teaching. Plus, based on almost a decade around people who study, research, and teach math, it's a pretty small fraction of them who get excited about teaching math to people who, for the most part, aren't into it anyway. In contrast, outside of very small schools, most high school football coaches love football, even if they didn't necessarily play at a high level. These factors combine to make math teachers not like football coaches. I don't have a great solution to either problem. I do wish there was some better, more organized way for bored and retired math people to help teach middle and high schoolers. I think for many such people the desire is there, but they're not going to start a whole organization and overcome a bunch of administrative hurdles (which, apparently, are particularly offensive to many people who like math) to do it.
- yodsanklai 7y ago
  > a high school math teacher who produces great math undergrads I don't believe a high-school teacher can produce great math undergrads. Personal anecdote, when I was in high-school (very small town in Europe), one of my friend was very gifted at maths. He would spend his time in math classes drawing cartoon. The curriculum didn't fit his abilities. Today he's professor in an Ivy league university. He would have been a great math undergraduate no matter who his high school teacher was. EDIT: It's just an anecdote and of course I'm not saying teachers are useless, but I wouldn't rate teachers based on how many stars they've produced.
omixi 7y ago
The key difference that's being overlooked between math teachers and football coaches are the populations they are working with. Football teams consist of competitive kids that WANT to play the sport and perform well (win). On the other hand most math classrooms consist of kids that HAVE to be there against their will, regardless of their interest in math.
- mmsimanga 7y ago
  I have to confess I haven't read the article. My first thought though was this would work only if the participants in Maths lessons are as keen as football players. Football(rugby in my case) is fun, even now as a middle-aged man I have vivid memories of playing rugby but hardly any memories cracking hard maths problems. I was motivated to play sport, it was fun. Maths was fun but not to the same level as a sport.
  - humanrebar 7y ago
    Casual phone games have more mathematics involved than people appreciate. Even if that involves figuring out that you will die before completing the game unless you pay for it. But, regardless of their merits, casual games are insanely popular for various reasons. And not just casual games. All sorts of games involve mathematics. That may not be your case, but a lot of people have fond memories playing SimCity or min-maxing their paladin.
    - momofarm 7y ago
      I wonder what's the relationship with Simcity with Math? It's just a game with building keep growing and some random disaster.
      - humanrebar 7y ago
        Budgeting. Tax rates. Growth rates. Density. Efficiency. Geometry in the planning. Most can intuitively guess and check to some success, but there is a ton of math involved even if most players don't bother to formalize it.
j7ake 7y ago
The workload of a football coach is probably much higher than that of a mathematics teacher. They are up and ready for morning practice early and stay late after school for more practice. They review videotapes of games, create strategy , and travel with students. I doubt there are many mathematics teachers that have the same dedication for the success of their cohort as football occurs , on average.
- maxxxxx 7y ago
  Football coaches also don’t have to deal with players that don’t want to be in the team. It’s much more rewarding. You can’t compare The two.
  - _qhtn 7y ago
    They can also cut players. The closest a math teacher can do is give the minimum necessary grade for the student to move on to the next class at the end of the year.
    - maxxxxx 7y ago
      "They can also cut players." Exactly. That's also why the phrase" let's run government like a business" doesn't work. You can't just lay off 10% of your country's population if they don't perform.
    - 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
      Failing a student should be possible.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
  - dudleypippin 7y ago
    Absolutely. The two roles are both challenging, but math teachers don't typically have kids competing to be in their class. It's a lot easier to motivate someone when they have someone on the bench who wants their spot. Up early to make sure the classroom is ready. Stay late to help struggling students. Lesson planning. Multiple groups of students per day, each of which might be on a slightly different topic. Far fewer pep rallies. source: Live with a math teacher. Child of two teachers, one of which taught for 18 years in a Brooklyn public middle school.
madengr 7y ago
Hell, my math teachers in high school were the coaches. Geometry - Volleyball Algebra II- Football Trigonometry-Track I wish I had a math teachers who taught math as a main function, not a secondary. At least my daughters middle school math teacher has a BA in math.
naveen99 7y ago
Math teams are a thing. They even have a coach just like football. Also football gets played in regular physical education also, with much less individual attention to students.
- vitaflo 7y ago
  Yup, I was on the math team at my HS and we won state my senior year. Certainly not as rah-rah as football (which I was also in) but it was competitive and we all took it pretty seriously (obviously). Winning the state competition was just as satisfying than any playoff victory I had in football (perhaps more so).
yodsanklai 7y ago
I used to teach maths (undergraduate level) and I was also a snowboarding coach. These two roles aren't really comparable. - In my snowboarding groups, there were usually about five students, no more than ten. We would spend a full day together, and I had time to spend quite a lot of time with each student individually. In my math "exercise" classes, there were up to 25 students. I would see them 3 hours a week (they had other teachers as well). - Unlike math students, snowboarding students were all very motivated. Nobody forced them to be there. - Snowboarding students have usually quite similar level of abilities. Of course, some learn faster than others but nobody improves 10 times faster than someone else (which happens in maths). If a student is better, she/he can move to another group the following week (something impossible in my math class). - As a math teacher, I'm also the one who evaluates them, and who stands between them and their degree. As a snowboarding coach, I'm the one who helps them achieving their goal. Different dynamic. - I'm confident that anyone without disability can learn to be a decent snowboarder after a few weeks of training. But I think that a lot of students don't have what it takes to learn the mathematics curriculum they signed up for, no matter how you teach them.
- Alex3917 7y ago
  Not sure if you saw the book I linked to in my other comment, but that's the premise: "This book compares how traditional schools can, metaphorically, act like a ski school, which temporarily organizes its students into classes where each student shares a specific and common instructional need but has previously mastered the critical prerequisites that will enable new learning to take place." https://www.amazon.com/General-Systems-Unique-Learning-Schools/dp/1683196309 https://www.amazon.com/General-Systems-Unique-Learning-Schoo...
- jacobolus 7y ago
  > nobody improves 10 times faster than someone else (which happens in maths). This does not happen in math either. What does happen is some students have significantly more preparation than others (including, for example, introspecting more while doing their homework for several years, playing board games, solving logic puzzles, building with construction toys, ...) and do more or better focused practice during a course. Better-prepared students already know a significant part of the material being presented in a course, have extensively thought about ideas which are similar, or have improved their generic problem-solving skills. They end up stuck behind fewer blocking misconceptions.
acjohnson55 7y ago
Former math teacher here and basketball coach. I agree with the article. My training as a teacher emphasized fostering investment from students just as much as it did lesson planning. All of these things are are really important. But one of the toughest problems in teaching math is that, unlike sports, a student doesn't get a whole lot of feedback on their success and improvement in the short-term, besides grades. And grades have some major cons when it comes to motivation. Also, most of us don't use the exact skills from math class in life outside of class. What we use is the mindset of finding first principles, of abstraction, of modeling, and of problem solving. It's quite difficult to connect these skills to the mentality of kids and adolescents. This is where extracurriculars come in, in my opinion. They teach the meta-skills of improvement mindset, coachability, and work ethic. I saw first-hand how my players came to class with a different mindset when sports were in season. I have to say, it sounds like Mr. Urschel benefited from having good sports coaches, while having math teachers that maybe weren't so good at the motivational part. A lot of folks have the opposite mix. So I wouldn't say there's necessarily an underlying thread that generalizes to all of American education.
User23 7y ago
My high school calculus teacher was the football coach.
stephencanon 7y ago
A plurality of the math teachers in my high school had degrees in PE, and two of them were the football coaches, so, uh ....
jasonhansel 7y ago
Math teachers should be just like football coaches: well-paid, especially when they work at prestigious universities.
microtherion 7y ago
I'm sure math teachers would love to get a million dollar salary. Not quite sure whether they would be willing to leave their students with irreversible brain damage for the sake of their career, though. https://careertrend.com/much-average-division-football-coach-earn-28837.html https://careertrend.com/much-average-division-football-coach... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_traumatic_encephalopathy_in_sports https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_traumatic_encephalopat...
bjornlouser 7y ago
“... it didn’t stop my coaches from encouraging me to believe I could reach my goal, and preparing and pushing me to work for it. When they told me I had potential but would have to work hard, I listened. I heard their voices in my ear when I dragged myself out of bed for predawn weightlifting sessions ...” How many adults can clearly communicate the incentives for predawn calculus sessions? “You’ll do better in college!”
- thisrod 7y ago
  "You'll have a chance at landing the dream job of the richest person on Earth"? (Bill Gates, member of the technical staff at Bell Labs in the late 1940s.)
  - bjornlouser 7y ago
    "You might play in the NFL one day!"
alexashka 7y ago
Football coaches are helping students achieve their dreams. Math teachers are living out hell - teaching a broken curriculum to students who don't understand why they have to suffer through it. Name 5 superstar athletes. Name 5 superstar scientists. Fix that first, the rest will follow.
olliej 7y ago
Is this saying that they should be paid huge amounts of money?
avip 7y ago
"Mr. Urschel is a Ph.D. candidate in mathematics and former professional football player". That is, in essence, the only line you should read. I also have many opinions about how others should do their work. They are doing it all wrong.
zaphirplane 7y ago
Like shouting and motivational. Coach: you will put in 110% Student: 100% is the max Coach: you are cut off the team. Who else thinks 100% is the maximum?
dragonwriter 7y ago
You mean, they should only have to deal with people who are motivated enough to volunteer to spend extra, non-mandated time at school and who are supported enough that someone is paying extra money for them to participate, in an activity that while not mandatory produces broader social approbation for success than math? Football coaches aren't generally better at motivating people than math teachers (heck, they are sometimes the exact same person.) They are just operating in a context that favors having more motivated people to start with and accepts them further weeding out the unmotivated.
parsamzand 7y ago
I think the fundamental difference here is that football is inherently competitive while math is not. While it's true that football coaches have incentives to produce great players that will eventually play in college/professionally, the most immediate incentive is to have players that will win games. Math teachers have no similar competitive incentives. The "passion" that Urschel mentions here is probably largely a product of the desire football coaches have to win every Friday/Saturday night, and this is reflected in the way that they develop kids. Additionally, Math teachers have to both teach kids AND grade them. This limits how much a teacher can really be "on your team" because they need to retain the ability to give you a bad grade. This is true with football coaches as well, but with football there is always a bigger "bad guy" (other teams/players) so a good coach is always more aligned with and close to the players.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

210 points by mjirv 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Torwald 7y ago

Students should be more like jocks: giving a dam.

daveFNbuck 7y ago
That probably has a lot to do with it. It's hard to maintain enthusiasm over the years if it isn't being returned. I think the lack of passion from the students is more about the voluntary nature of the football team than anything inherent to the jocks.
- papeda 7y ago
  The rewards are different, too. There is no level of mathematical achievement that will get the kind of broad (but typically local) social status and public approval of being a starting high school quarterback. Math just doesn't tap into anything near as easy and primal.
  - daveFNbuck 7y ago
    That's true, but I've seen years where an enthusiastic professor gets a packed room for a normally undersubscribed elective course like computational complexity theory or advanced algorithms.
    - majos 7y ago
      True, but there's a heavy selection going on there. A packed complexity class might mean 50? enthusiastic undergrads out of several hundred math/cs students at a university. A dedicated and charismatic professor might be instrumental in turning an interested computer science student into a raging algorithmist (indeed, I actually think a lot of computer science grad students study what they study because somebody appropriately passionate introduced it to them), but converting a just-here-for-the-requirement high schooler is a different story.
      - daveFNbuck 7y ago
        The football team also has a heavy selection bias. Personally, I got into CS because there was a required intro class at my undergrad. A dedicated and charismatic professor noticed my aptitude and encouraged me to take the next course and consider a CS major. This could easily have happened in high school if my high school had a required CS course.
alistairSH 7y ago
Eh. Sure, students can be disinterested. But, in my personal experience, in advanced high school courses (where the students were highly engaged) at a top-notch public school, the math teachers were, by and large, far less enthusiastic than the teachers of all the other subjects. I had many excellent, engaging, exciting history teachers. My Latin teacher was quirky and annoying, but loved the subject and it rubbed off on us. My biology teacher made me think I wanted to go into hard sciences. I barely remember my math teachers. And I was good at math. I don't believe my experience is unique.
kache_ 7y ago
Pretty much. The kids that did the best in my highschool were the ones that did things due to competitive drive.

CrazyStat 7y ago

PE teachers should be more like math team coaches

devoply 7y ago

Perform brain imaging, split students into those with a strong math co-processor brain and those without. For those without, teach them math using logic rather than rote learning which is obvious to those with a strong math brain.

scoopdewoop 7y ago
What an absurd, elitist, reductive, sci-fi response. Brains don't have ALUs in them, btw. Nor can we image for different skills. Nor should we subject people to this kind of dystopian hierarchy of faulty biological determinism.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
labgrown 7y ago
You don't need brain imaging to sort out those with a natural talent and affinity for math, the challenge of an education system is to maximize the level of those without such affinities.
- thatcat 7y ago
  That's not how football is approached. I think GP's point is that football is approached by selecting for those with the most potential and maximizing that and that math teachers can't be like football coaches really.
spaceprison 7y ago
I agree, perhaps brain scans aren't an option, but I do think two tracks based on some kind of testing makes a lot of sense. I really struggled with the rote path and it wasn't until I could see more of the "why" and where it applies to practical situations that it all started to click.

cjohnson318 7y ago

I agree with the general idea that coaches are able to provide a much more personal and thorough training than the traditional teacher, but that's not a good thing for students and society in general. The reason is because students should have a right and an expectation to equal access to education. The reason we see very little diversity in the history of mathematics and science is because of this unequal access to mentors in particular, and education in general. (Most of the outstanding non-white and/or non-male mathematicians had white male mentors or sponsors that helped them get into the Old Boys Club.) When you have a monoculture in a field, then people tend to follow societal and cultural norms. This tendency impedes progress at best, and can cause disastrous blindspots at worst. The current American educational systems is an imperfect attempt at providing all students with equal opportunites. If we'd like to improve upon this, then let us improve the teacher to student ratio, rather than leaving it up to new hybrid teacher-coaches to try to identify MVPs at a young age, potentially allowing late-bloomers and marginalized groups to slip through the cracks.

majos 7y ago
Agreed. Math in particular is an area where mentorship matters a lot. Pretty tautologically, math relies on correctness, and correctness can be tricky to grok on your own. On the other hand, if you're trying to paint, make music, or write a story, there's a much larger margin for error and subjectivity, and it's easier to intuit when something feels wrong. There's a reason we talk about amateur mathematician cranks and not amateur pianist cranks.
- perfmode 7y ago
  "in math, we don't understand things, we just get used to them." - Von Neumann
sokoloff 7y ago
I think that exceptional athletes should get more coaching than regular-old-me should get Phys Ed. I think that exceptional math students should get more coaching than regular-old student who needs to know basic math to survive in life. No different than music, art, science, or sports; I don't see a reason to put a thicker, even coat of peanut butter across all those disciplines and all the students, but rather to tailor the experience to go deeper in select areas when a student shows aptitude and interest. I have zero interest or aptitude in playing musical instruments. Any amount of time spent trying to teach me that is utterly wasted for all parties involved.

naveen99 7y ago

If advertisers can individualize teaching consumers about their products, maybe we just need an advertiser to start teaching math.

ThrustVectoring 7y ago
As someone who works in the field of digital advertising, please god no. Advertisers have zero idea what they're doing.

majos 7y ago

For those debating reading the piece -- do it! John Urschel wrote it, and he's probably the most qualified to do so. I think his point is broadly correct: the way we teach football, and the way talented football players get mentored in high school, often puts mathematics to shame. Two responses come to mind: 1. The incentive structures are different for high school math teachers and high school football coaches. If a high school football coach produces an elite college (or pro!) prospect then colleges will pay more attention to the coach. Get enough attention and the high school coach might become a college assistant, a college head coach, etc. There is a very real personal incentive for high school coaches to produce good players. In contrast, a high school math teacher who produces great math undergrads will probably get student appreciation and little else. Maybe they'll get to work with the math olympiads or something, but it's not like a college will recruit them as tenure-track faculty. Most great high school math teachers are doing it for pretty pure reasons. Admirable, but hard to expect from rational people. 2. Another big problem is that there are very few high school math teachers who have a good idea of what mathematicians do, or have strong math backgrounds in general. Makes sense given that most people with strong math abilities can make much more money doing something that's not teaching. Plus, based on almost a decade around people who study, research, and teach math, it's a pretty small fraction of them who get excited about teaching math to people who, for the most part, aren't into it anyway. In contrast, outside of very small schools, most high school football coaches love football, even if they didn't necessarily play at a high level. These factors combine to make math teachers not like football coaches. I don't have a great solution to either problem. I do wish there was some better, more organized way for bored and retired math people to help teach middle and high schoolers. I think for many such people the desire is there, but they're not going to start a whole organization and overcome a bunch of administrative hurdles (which, apparently, are particularly offensive to many people who like math) to do it.

yodsanklai 7y ago
> a high school math teacher who produces great math undergrads I don't believe a high-school teacher can produce great math undergrads. Personal anecdote, when I was in high-school (very small town in Europe), one of my friend was very gifted at maths. He would spend his time in math classes drawing cartoon. The curriculum didn't fit his abilities. Today he's professor in an Ivy league university. He would have been a great math undergraduate no matter who his high school teacher was. EDIT: It's just an anecdote and of course I'm not saying teachers are useless, but I wouldn't rate teachers based on how many stars they've produced.

omixi 7y ago

The key difference that's being overlooked between math teachers and football coaches are the populations they are working with. Football teams consist of competitive kids that WANT to play the sport and perform well (win). On the other hand most math classrooms consist of kids that HAVE to be there against their will, regardless of their interest in math.

mmsimanga 7y ago
I have to confess I haven't read the article. My first thought though was this would work only if the participants in Maths lessons are as keen as football players. Football(rugby in my case) is fun, even now as a middle-aged man I have vivid memories of playing rugby but hardly any memories cracking hard maths problems. I was motivated to play sport, it was fun. Maths was fun but not to the same level as a sport.
- humanrebar 7y ago
  Casual phone games have more mathematics involved than people appreciate. Even if that involves figuring out that you will die before completing the game unless you pay for it. But, regardless of their merits, casual games are insanely popular for various reasons. And not just casual games. All sorts of games involve mathematics. That may not be your case, but a lot of people have fond memories playing SimCity or min-maxing their paladin.
  - momofarm 7y ago
    I wonder what's the relationship with Simcity with Math? It's just a game with building keep growing and some random disaster.
    - humanrebar 7y ago
      Budgeting. Tax rates. Growth rates. Density. Efficiency. Geometry in the planning. Most can intuitively guess and check to some success, but there is a ton of math involved even if most players don't bother to formalize it.

j7ake 7y ago

The workload of a football coach is probably much higher than that of a mathematics teacher. They are up and ready for morning practice early and stay late after school for more practice. They review videotapes of games, create strategy , and travel with students. I doubt there are many mathematics teachers that have the same dedication for the success of their cohort as football occurs , on average.

maxxxxx 7y ago
Football coaches also don’t have to deal with players that don’t want to be in the team. It’s much more rewarding. You can’t compare The two.
- _qhtn 7y ago
  They can also cut players. The closest a math teacher can do is give the minimum necessary grade for the student to move on to the next class at the end of the year.
  - maxxxxx 7y ago
    "They can also cut players." Exactly. That's also why the phrase" let's run government like a business" doesn't work. You can't just lay off 10% of your country's population if they don't perform.
  - 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
    Failing a student should be possible.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
- dudleypippin 7y ago
  Absolutely. The two roles are both challenging, but math teachers don't typically have kids competing to be in their class. It's a lot easier to motivate someone when they have someone on the bench who wants their spot. Up early to make sure the classroom is ready. Stay late to help struggling students. Lesson planning. Multiple groups of students per day, each of which might be on a slightly different topic. Far fewer pep rallies. source: Live with a math teacher. Child of two teachers, one of which taught for 18 years in a Brooklyn public middle school.

madengr 7y ago

Hell, my math teachers in high school were the coaches. Geometry - Volleyball Algebra II- Football Trigonometry-Track I wish I had a math teachers who taught math as a main function, not a secondary. At least my daughters middle school math teacher has a BA in math.

naveen99 7y ago

Math teams are a thing. They even have a coach just like football. Also football gets played in regular physical education also, with much less individual attention to students.

vitaflo 7y ago
Yup, I was on the math team at my HS and we won state my senior year. Certainly not as rah-rah as football (which I was also in) but it was competitive and we all took it pretty seriously (obviously). Winning the state competition was just as satisfying than any playoff victory I had in football (perhaps more so).

yodsanklai 7y ago

I used to teach maths (undergraduate level) and I was also a snowboarding coach. These two roles aren't really comparable. - In my snowboarding groups, there were usually about five students, no more than ten. We would spend a full day together, and I had time to spend quite a lot of time with each student individually. In my math "exercise" classes, there were up to 25 students. I would see them 3 hours a week (they had other teachers as well). - Unlike math students, snowboarding students were all very motivated. Nobody forced them to be there. - Snowboarding students have usually quite similar level of abilities. Of course, some learn faster than others but nobody improves 10 times faster than someone else (which happens in maths). If a student is better, she/he can move to another group the following week (something impossible in my math class). - As a math teacher, I'm also the one who evaluates them, and who stands between them and their degree. As a snowboarding coach, I'm the one who helps them achieving their goal. Different dynamic. - I'm confident that anyone without disability can learn to be a decent snowboarder after a few weeks of training. But I think that a lot of students don't have what it takes to learn the mathematics curriculum they signed up for, no matter how you teach them.

Alex3917 7y ago
Not sure if you saw the book I linked to in my other comment, but that's the premise: "This book compares how traditional schools can, metaphorically, act like a ski school, which temporarily organizes its students into classes where each student shares a specific and common instructional need but has previously mastered the critical prerequisites that will enable new learning to take place." https://www.amazon.com/General-Systems-Unique-Learning-Schools/dp/1683196309 https://www.amazon.com/General-Systems-Unique-Learning-Schoo...
jacobolus 7y ago
> nobody improves 10 times faster than someone else (which happens in maths). This does not happen in math either. What does happen is some students have significantly more preparation than others (including, for example, introspecting more while doing their homework for several years, playing board games, solving logic puzzles, building with construction toys, ...) and do more or better focused practice during a course. Better-prepared students already know a significant part of the material being presented in a course, have extensively thought about ideas which are similar, or have improved their generic problem-solving skills. They end up stuck behind fewer blocking misconceptions.

acjohnson55 7y ago

Former math teacher here and basketball coach. I agree with the article. My training as a teacher emphasized fostering investment from students just as much as it did lesson planning. All of these things are are really important. But one of the toughest problems in teaching math is that, unlike sports, a student doesn't get a whole lot of feedback on their success and improvement in the short-term, besides grades. And grades have some major cons when it comes to motivation. Also, most of us don't use the exact skills from math class in life outside of class. What we use is the mindset of finding first principles, of abstraction, of modeling, and of problem solving. It's quite difficult to connect these skills to the mentality of kids and adolescents. This is where extracurriculars come in, in my opinion. They teach the meta-skills of improvement mindset, coachability, and work ethic. I saw first-hand how my players came to class with a different mindset when sports were in season. I have to say, it sounds like Mr. Urschel benefited from having good sports coaches, while having math teachers that maybe weren't so good at the motivational part. A lot of folks have the opposite mix. So I wouldn't say there's necessarily an underlying thread that generalizes to all of American education.

User23 7y ago

My high school calculus teacher was the football coach.

stephencanon 7y ago

A plurality of the math teachers in my high school had degrees in PE, and two of them were the football coaches, so, uh ....

jasonhansel 7y ago

Math teachers should be just like football coaches: well-paid, especially when they work at prestigious universities.

microtherion 7y ago

I'm sure math teachers would love to get a million dollar salary. Not quite sure whether they would be willing to leave their students with irreversible brain damage for the sake of their career, though. https://careertrend.com/much-average-division-football-coach-earn-28837.html https://careertrend.com/much-average-division-football-coach... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_traumatic_encephalopathy_in_sports https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_traumatic_encephalopat...

bjornlouser 7y ago

“... it didn’t stop my coaches from encouraging me to believe I could reach my goal, and preparing and pushing me to work for it. When they told me I had potential but would have to work hard, I listened. I heard their voices in my ear when I dragged myself out of bed for predawn weightlifting sessions ...” How many adults can clearly communicate the incentives for predawn calculus sessions? “You’ll do better in college!”

thisrod 7y ago
"You'll have a chance at landing the dream job of the richest person on Earth"? (Bill Gates, member of the technical staff at Bell Labs in the late 1940s.)
- bjornlouser 7y ago
  "You might play in the NFL one day!"

alexashka 7y ago

Football coaches are helping students achieve their dreams. Math teachers are living out hell - teaching a broken curriculum to students who don't understand why they have to suffer through it. Name 5 superstar athletes. Name 5 superstar scientists. Fix that first, the rest will follow.

olliej 7y ago

Is this saying that they should be paid huge amounts of money?

avip 7y ago

"Mr. Urschel is a Ph.D. candidate in mathematics and former professional football player". That is, in essence, the only line you should read. I also have many opinions about how others should do their work. They are doing it all wrong.

zaphirplane 7y ago

Like shouting and motivational. Coach: you will put in 110% Student: 100% is the max Coach: you are cut off the team. Who else thinks 100% is the maximum?

dragonwriter 7y ago

You mean, they should only have to deal with people who are motivated enough to volunteer to spend extra, non-mandated time at school and who are supported enough that someone is paying extra money for them to participate, in an activity that while not mandatory produces broader social approbation for success than math? Football coaches aren't generally better at motivating people than math teachers (heck, they are sometimes the exact same person.) They are just operating in a context that favors having more motivated people to start with and accepts them further weeding out the unmotivated.

parsamzand 7y ago

I think the fundamental difference here is that football is inherently competitive while math is not. While it's true that football coaches have incentives to produce great players that will eventually play in college/professionally, the most immediate incentive is to have players that will win games. Math teachers have no similar competitive incentives. The "passion" that Urschel mentions here is probably largely a product of the desire football coaches have to win every Friday/Saturday night, and this is reflected in the way that they develop kids. Additionally, Math teachers have to both teach kids AND grade them. This limits how much a teacher can really be "on your team" because they need to retain the ability to give you a bad grade. This is true with football coaches as well, but with football there is always a bigger "bad guy" (other teams/players) so a good coach is always more aligned with and close to the players.

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