How can that sleepy kid in fifth hour be so full of energy on the athletic field?

Continuing with my interest in sports journalism and how it can become the heart of our reporting (though not the sole topic, of course), I will be citing several sections of a 1998 essay by an ethnographer named Herb Childress. He spent hundreds of hours observing and interviewing high school students over a year, spending most of his time observing outside normal class time, and approaching them as he would any "new" culture.

This will hardly shock anyone, but he consistently found that students who were listless and bored while in almost any classroom would suddenly summon up endless energy and focus and enthusiasm for an after-school activity -- from sports to part-time jobs to hobbies.

The classic line was something like, "I wish Billy could work as hard in math class as he does on the football field."

Childress titled his essay "17 Reasons Football is Better Than High School," but he explained in the article that what he meant was more like "even football is better than high school," since he doesn't like football as a sport. 

The nice thing is that you can sub in almost any high school activity for "football" and his findings still make sense. So we could have "journalism" is better than high school, with the assumption here that by "high school" Childress meant traditional classroom instruction.

Here's reason #1 from the article: In football, teenagers are considered important contributors rather than passive recipients. 

This is significant mostly because this sort of attitude is quite rare for teenagers to experience. Most academic life begins with the basic idea that children are "empty vessels," ready to be filled with knowledge and skills, and class time is when that gets done. The students are not in charge of much -- "you don't want the animals running the zoo" -- but even football, with its authoritarian tendencies, looks so different from daily classes.

Most students enter a new term with blank notebooks and await instruction. That is the definition of passive behavior.

No matter how knowledgeable or skilled a football coach is, he can't make tackles or throw passes. The players are responsible for their performance, in the end. That is why a football coach might completely change an offense from one year to another. If one year a team features some big, fast running backs and a quarterback who is not a accurate passer, no one is surprised to see an offense that runs the ball most of the time. If a couple years later the team has a quarterback who can throw and several speedy wide receivers, the passing game is going to be emphasized. 

There is no one right way to play football, it turns out, and innovation is prized. Is that how geometry classes work? Are skills and interests of students taken into account when curriculum is created and taught, or are students all expected to master the same material in the same amount of time (or grades suffer)?

If a football coach stubbornly sticks to one strategy, despite not having the needed talent and skills on the roster, that coach will eventually be looking for a new position. 

Is that true of a geometry teacher whose class is not meeting state-mandated goals and not performing well on standardized tests? Heck, no. Those lazy students will need to pick things up. No need to fiddle with class size or class length or even classroom strategies.

If we sub in "student media" for football, we realize that advisers can't force students to be great photographers (though we can certainly teach skills and provide opportunities and equipment), so insisting on publications that feature large photos and relatively little copy for that particular staff and year. 

If we find ourselves with talented writers who possess clear and unique voices, advisers might find ways to provide sufficient space in student media for them to share those gifts. 

There are no standardized tests in football or in student media.