Math teachers should be more like football coaches

I used to teach maths (undergraduate level) and I was also a snowboarding coach. These two roles aren&#x27;t really comparable.<p>- 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 &quot;exercise&quot; classes, there were up to 25 students. I would see them 3 hours a week (they had other teachers as well).<p>- Unlike math students, snowboarding students were all very motivated. Nobody forced them to be there.<p>- 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&#x2F;he can move to another group the following week (something impossible in my math class).<p>- As a math teacher, I&#x27;m also the one who evaluates them, and who stands between them and their degree. As a snowboarding coach, I&#x27;m the one who helps them achieving their goal. Different dynamic.<p>- I&#x27;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&#x27;t have what it takes to learn the mathematics curriculum they signed up for, no matter how you teach them.

For those debating reading the piece -- do it! John Urschel wrote it, and he&#x27;s probably the most qualified to do so.<p>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:<p>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.<p>In contrast, a high school math teacher who produces great math undergrads will probably get student appreciation and little else. Maybe they&#x27;ll get to work with the math olympiads or something, but it&#x27;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.<p>2. Another big problem is that there are <i>very</i> 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&#x27;s not teaching. Plus, based on almost a decade around people who study, research, and teach math, it&#x27;s a pretty small fraction of them who get excited about teaching math to people who, for the most part, aren&#x27;t into it anyway. In contrast, outside of very small schools, most high school football coaches love football, even if they didn&#x27;t necessarily play at a high level.<p>These factors combine to make math teachers not like football coaches.<p>I don&#x27;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&#x27;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.

The key difference that&#x27;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.

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.<p>But one of the toughest problems in teaching math is that, unlike sports, a student doesn&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;s quite difficult to connect these skills to the mentality of kids and adolescents.<p>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.<p>I have to say, it sounds like Mr. Urschel benefited from having good sports coaches, while having math teachers that maybe weren&#x27;t so good at the motivational part. A lot of folks have the opposite mix. So I wouldn&#x27;t say there&#x27;s necessarily an underlying thread that generalizes to all of American education.

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.<p>I doubt there are many mathematics teachers that have the same dedication for the success of their cohort as football occurs , on average.

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.

Football coaches are helping students achieve their dreams.<p>Math teachers are living out hell - teaching a broken curriculum to students who don&#x27;t understand why they have to suffer through it.<p>Name 5 superstar athletes. Name 5 superstar scientists. Fix that first, the rest will follow.

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?<p>Football coaches aren&#x27;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.

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&#x27;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&#x2F;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&#x27;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.

I think the fundamental difference here is that football is inherently competitive while math is not. While it&#x27;s true that football coaches have incentives to produce great players that will eventually play in college&#x2F;professionally, the most immediate incentive is to have players that will win games. Math teachers have no similar competitive incentives. The &quot;passion&quot; that Urschel mentions here is probably largely a product of the desire football coaches have to win every Friday&#x2F;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 &quot;on your team&quot; 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 &quot;bad guy&quot; (other teams&#x2F;players) so a good coach is always more aligned with and close to the players.

“... 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 ...”<p>How many adults can clearly communicate the incentives for predawn calculus sessions?<p>“You’ll do better in college!”

&quot;Mr. Urschel is a Ph.D. candidate in mathematics and former professional football player&quot;.<p>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.

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

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

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

I&#x27;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.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;careertrend.com&#x2F;much-average-division-football-coach-earn-28837.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;careertrend.com&#x2F;much-average-division-football-coach...</a> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Chronic_traumatic_encephalopathy_in_sports" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Chronic_traumatic_encephalopat...</a>

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

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

My high school calculus teacher was the football coach.

Students should be more like jocks: giving a dam.

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

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.