Lessons Learned About Failure
April 6th, 2007 by Brian
Of course I’m not talking about my own failure because I’m infallible and I never fail at anything. Today I’m aiming at the failure of others, namely the vast crowd of teachers and coaches I’ve had to endure over the years.
In the 80’s I played baseball through the local park district. You probably know the drill. Local parents (usually fathers) were the coaches and local high school students were generally the umpires. My lifetime stats after 3 seasons ended up being something like .001 batting average with 1 hit and 1 RBI. I had some serious problems getting the bat on the ball and all the coaches could ever tell me was “you’re swinging too late.” Season after season (including summer baseball camp) that line was the only piece of coaching they had for me; obviously it didn’t help. One evening during one of the last games of the last season I played my coach finally expanded on the “swinging too late” nonsense. She said “you have to start swinging when the ball is about halfway between the pitcher and the plate so that your bat has time to come around.” I got my one hit at that at-bat and my coach hopefully realized how completely worthless she had been.
I had a similar experience when I hit Algebra in 8th grade. My teacher that year was a worthless tub of shit just showing up to work so she could retire in a few years. One of the many concepts she just plain failed to get across to us was factoring “ax^2 + bx +c” type equations. At the end of the year she even had to give us a packet for us to study over the summer because literally nobody in the class was prepared for high school algebra. When I hit high school it only took about an hour for my teacher to explain these concepts in a way that most of the class understood. To this day I don’t understand why my school district banished so many horse shit teachers to Junior High.
Baseball and Mathematics are still subjects I wish I was better at. As a kid I lacked the ability to distinguish a capable adult from one who didn’t know what the hell they were doing. To a kid, all adults are equally infallible. This obviously explains how so many lousy teachers can make it through an entire career. I think the teachers at my Junior High were just lucky to be riding the coat tails of a group of excellent grammar school teachers. In other words, we were well-prepared enough to squeeze by without falling seriously behind.
Wow, I had almost the same 8th grade Algebra experience. Fortunately, it became glaringly obvious to everyone how lousy our teacher was when out of 24 students only 1 passed the mid-term exam. The school shifted her to other math and a different teacher taught the Algebra class for the rest of the year (and the mid-term exam wasn’t counted towards our grades).
As far as the perception of adult infallibility in relation to sports, I remember playing soccer and thinking at the first practice that the kid whose dad was coach was obviously going to be really good since his dad was a (cue capital letters) Soccer Coach. It never occurred to me that he was just the parent who volunteered for the job- I assumed he was some kind of soccer expert.