"Kids are kids," "Good teaching is good teaching," and other lies
- American Strength Class
- Aug 4, 2020
- 5 min read
Updated: Jan 1, 2024
One of the most unhelpful tropes in teaching physical education is, "Kids are kids." The most insidious is, "Good teaching is good teaching."
As a quick initiation for those who are unfamiliar with such circular logic, the general idea is that despite emerging technologies, neighborhoods with vastly different cultures and available resources, or changes over the decades in fashion, vocabulary and communication styles, kids today are kind of the same they've always been; kids from the suburbs are kind of the same as kids from the inner city; and so on. While this is of course true in some obvious and important ways, the broad brush strokes with which we apply the "kids are kids" logic has dire impacts on the way we approach our teaching and coaching.
If I were an evil genius hellbent on creating unhealthy and unhappy teenagers, I would take the following seven steps:
1. Maximize the amount of time kids spend in front of screens, and especially on social media.
2. Make the standard American diet -- that is, a diet high in processed foods and sugar -- cheap and easily accessible.
3. Promote a sedentary lifestyle.
4. Minimize the amount of sleep teenagers get.
5. Make drugs and alcohol both prevalent and attractive.
6. Maintain a fanatical adherence to factory-style instruction (strict bell schedules, fluorescent lighting, orderly desks and chairs, standardized curriculum regardless of individual interests or talents, etc.)
7. Expose students to traumatic experiences early in life.
But this isn’t some dystopian future that kids might someday face -- it’s very commonly the reality they live now. Entire books have been and will continue to be written about the impacts of the seven quality-of-life factors noted above, and links are below if you are unfamiliar with their dangers or with the ways they have changed over time. But here's a quick overview of the research:
1. Screen time has increased in alarming ways since the advent of the smartphone, and correlates with notable changes in our brains, including the inability to focus for long periods of time, and increased rates of anxiety.
2. The standard American diet has changed radically since roughly the 1950s and the introduction of highly processed foods. The modern version is correlated with a host of preventable illnesses that are themselves correlated with a lower quality of life. As with screen time, nutrition is also strongly correlated with brain health.
3. The amount of average daily activity for American kids is only a fraction of what they used to experience. An active lifestyle is strongly correlated with brain function, mood regulation, and longevity.
4. Sleep among teenagers has decreased over time, with potentially catastrophic effects on cognition, mood regulation, and overall development (both physical and mental).
5. Marijuana use among teenagers has risen over time. While there are strong arguments to be made for its legality in a broad sense, research shows risks for developing brains. The negative effects of alcohol are far more established. The impact of the opioid crisis is so horrific that it defies description.
6. Traditional school structures, which rely largely on letter grades as incentives, negatively impact intrinsic motivation (which is a core component of lifelong learning). All-day sitting in school further contributes to the negative effects of a sedentary lifestyle, and negatively impacts posture and movement ability.
7. Trauma is a topic deserving of all the books that have been devoted to it, and no summary here will suffice. In short, we know that trauma impacts our brains in profound and powerful ways, and that students who have experienced trauma deserve teachers who understand and respect that impact.
Therefore if you are a teacher and begin a sentence with, "When I was a kid...", I can almost guarantee the rest of that sentence will be irrelevant, at least as it pertains to student behavior. The world has changed, and your students are not versions of your younger self.
As troubling as the above research is, a failure to understand the findings leads to even more tragic assumptions. Here I am referring to the idea that "good teaching is good teaching."
Recently, a motivated friend of mine reached out to the curriculum coordinator at his local county office of education to ask if he could observe successful P.E. teachers who work in under-resourced communities. She responded with recommendations to visit three suburban schools. When he pushed back on her suggestions, noting that those schools did not resemble the environment in which he taught, she responded by saying that good teaching is good teaching, and the successful models from the suburbs will work anywhere. This signals an astoundingly incomplete understanding of our public school system.
Good teaching in a carefully-screened and -selected class at an affluent suburban school will build on positive experiences students bring from previous academic success and extracurriculars; it could rely on a one-dimensional understanding of student behavior biased toward non-traumatized students; it will move at the pace of a group of students who have been placed together based on their similar abilities and backgrounds.
Good teaching at an urban public school, where students' academic and social experiences vary widely, will look much different. When we honestly evaluate the seven quality-of-life factors above, we must also acknowledge the hard fact that they don't impact all kids the same. It would be impossible to identify all the ways that racism, sexism, classism, poverty, and innumerable other social forces impact students in under-resourced communities, and make some of the negative impacts of these factors even more common and powerful. While we will attempt to untangle some of those issues in subsequent essays, for our purposes here we can simply acknowledge that gross inequities in education render a one-size-fits-all instructional model useless. To state the obvious, while some kids from traumatic backgrounds will learn the same as some kids from affluent and trauma-free childhoods, this is not true for all or even most students, and all students deserve our best effort. Even siblings will have different levels of exposure to our seven identified quality-of-life factors (as well as others not mentioned here, of course), and respond to them with different levels of resilience.
In physical education, we have already identified the fact that even play is a skill. A class in which students arrive at school with that skill fully developed will by necessity employ different instruction than a class where a low percentage of students possess those skills. This is just one example, and these differences are exacerbated as time goes on and societal inequalities weigh even heavier on older students.
“Good teaching is good teaching” ignores blatant inequality in our public school systems. It ignores students’ preferences for styles of learning. It ignores available resources, it ignores cultural differences, it ignores the different mental states students bring to school … you get the idea.
If you are a new educator looking to excel in the field, don’t become a “good” teacher. Become a versatile teacher, able to flex and bend according to students’ unique needs and talents, able to adapt to hard realities some of our kids face, able to work outside the orthodoxy.
---
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
Comments