Addressing a Team Practice

[Mark T. DeNucci, Sr.]

[QUOTE]Originally posted by stripes

Do you really expect 7th and 8th graders to pay attention for an hour? Remember this is a lot more interesting to you than it is to them.

You might want to ask the coach what it is that he wants covered. Take what you can get, hit the high spots and answer all of the kid's questions. That is the best thing you can do.

As a someone who teaches at the jr. H.S. and H.S. level I most certainly do expect students at that age to be able to sit attentively and listen to an adult and to be able to ask intelligent questions.

School sports in the U.S. is supposed to be part of the learning experience (I do not necessarily buy into that school of thought). The quality of education in the U.S. is a major concern to the citizens of this country. One major problem with quality of education is that we do not demand more of our students and their parents. Telling me that 7th and 8th grade students are not capable of sitting attentively and listen to an adult for one hour is a classic example of the dumbing down of our students.

There have been a number of times when I have been told by a mathematics teacher, for whom I have substituted, that I am teaching over her students'heads. When following a teacher's instructions to go over a homework assignment, I have found that the students do not even know how to set up the problem to be able attempt a solution. Instead they are shown example problems which are very simplistic, but the teachers do not follow up with more demanding problems that require the students to think logically, and in the process discover how the example problems relate to a similar problem.

Today's students are more sophisticated than we think. We need to challenge. We do not challenge them because we do not want anybody to fail. But we cannot learn unless we do fail sometimes.