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

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.