Why Football Coaches Should Never Teach Geometry . . . . .

This week’s reading was very beneficial to me as an educator but it also sent me back to when I was a student and brought to mind two very different experiences that I had in high school and college. Some of my “favorite” teachers were the ones who had all four perspectives mentioned in the chapter incorporated in their class. The ones who I would say I disliked were teachers who were lacking one or all of the perspectives mentioned in the chapter.
In high school, I had a geometry teacher, who also happened to be the football coach. Mr. Sorber was one of my least favorite teachers and I can honestly say that I learned very little about geometry from this man. In his classroom we sat in rows, would listen to him talk a bit and then would go straight down the rows to give our answers to the homework problems that had been assigned the previous class. He was not a happy person. (Our football team was not very good.) If you did not give the right answer he would humiliate you and then go to the next person. There was such a sense of dread in that class that the students came together as a community out of fear. We learned some geometry but not from the teacher, rather from each other in an effort to survive! So, the class was not student centered, not knowledge centered, and certainly not assessment centered. The only one of the four perspectives we touched on was a sense of community . . . a community of students who were scared to death. While Mr. Sorber was responsible, in a back handed way, for creating that community, he certainly gets no credit for the little knowledge that we gained that year.
Conversely, a professor I had in college for Comp. I, Dr. August Nigro, was one of my favorite teachers. He took the time to get to know you by talking to you, assigning papers that would allow you to mention past experiences and info about your life(student centered), provided opportunities for ideas to be shared in class(community centered), gave direction on appropriate writing techniques and how to adequately express ideas(knowledge centered), gave innovative assignments that let you apply previously acquired skills but stretch to practice new ones and took time to review your work with you(assessment centered). He never just handed back a graded paper without having a very personal conversation with you about your work. I will never forget this man. He made a huge impression on me and my writing style and much of my teaching style is reflective of his influence on me.
I am certain that designing learning environments with these four perspectives in mind is crucial to the teaching and learning process. Not only will students benefit from the learning experiences, but their personal contacts with teachers will become part of their life experience and influence them well into their future.