What To Do About Procrastination

Procrastination is the bane of my existence as a teacher.  I see it in my students every day, but as Terry Ellis, my former pastor, consistently quoted:

“There is so much good in the worst of us, And so much bad in the best of us,

That it ill behooves any of us To find fault with the rest of us.”

And so it is with me, the worst procrastinator of the lot, not a positive example for my students, or for my son or daughter for that matter.  A few days more and then I will plow through those examinations, just waiting on my desk to be graded.  Another cup of coffee, and then I will be ready to answer those emails.  I will wait to prepare my discussion notes until after lunch.  There’s still plenty of time before the next class.  Surely, those thank you notes can wait.

I always seem to find something else to do, other than the job at hand.  Quite simply, I put things off.  Even as I write these words I have other writing projects languishing in file folders and scattered notes, one project still hanging over my head for a decade now.  I have neat stacks of projects waiting to be completed.  I carry these stacks, along with my laptop, home from my university office with the idea that I will work on them after supper, and then I lug them back to the office the next day undisturbed.  My various projects are well-traveled, if unfinished.

I write off this procrastination to an inner tendency toward perfectionism, but I’m not sure if I agree or disagree with that unknown poet when he or she wrote:

“If a task is once begun

Never leave it till it’s done.

Be the labor great or small,

Do it well or not at all.”

And so despairing that a job will not be done well, I simply put it off for another day, when I can do the thing right.

A big thing must wait until I can really do it justice.  Little things don’t matter anyway.  Big or little, it’s all the same;  surely, the thing can wait.  But then, in the way of things, the little things pile up into a big thing.  I remember reading as a child the Julia Fletcher poem, a rhyme that alerted me, even in my child’s mind, to the fact that little things, taken all together, amount to big things through the tick tock of time:

“Little drops of water,

Little grains of sand,

Make the mighty ocean

And the pleasant land.

Thus the little minutes,

Humble though they be,

Make the mighty ages

Of eternity.”

In the whole scheme of things, it is after all a matter of priorities, I think.  What tasks simply cannot wait?  Must this thing be done immediately?  Well . . . I am in the middle of that engaging novel.  A few pages more;  then, I will hop to it.  In the meantime, a nap would be really nice too.

Teaching Sports History is Very Enlightening

This semester I have the pleasure of teaching HIS 330, Sports in America, an upper-level History elective.  I love to teach this course, because each time I teach it I learn so much more about American History.

Murray State’s Sports in America course, offered every now and again by our Department of History, is a rigorous, reading and writing intensive course.  The course includes demanding reading assignments of primary and secondary sources, oral and written student presentations, and mid-term and final essay examinations.

Students are required to read and write a book review, as well as a research paper on a topic of Sports History.  The course demands intensive study of the rise of sports in America from Native American Indian games, to the age of folk games in the colonial period, to the age of televised sports in the modern era.

The course requires critical thinking and analysis of the cultural, social, economic, and political aspects of the sporting scene, and extensive study and thought on sports and race issues and sports and gender issues.

OK sports fans.  Have I ruined it for you?  I hope not, because the course is a celebration of sports in America.  The course is also a celebration of the life of the mind and the world of ideas.

We are simply concentrating on a topic of extreme interest and relevance and fun for a large number of Americans (and especially Kentuckians).  Sports!

I developed an interest in sports history out of osmosis, I think.  As a boy I spent hours studying and discussing and trading baseball cards on my front porch in Dixon, Kentucky with my friend Duane Clark.  Memorization of the batting averages, RBIs, home runs, strikeouts, and earned run averages of my favorite New York Yankees taught me the connections between sports and ideas and facts.

My father took my brother and me to see Mickey Mantle as he signed autographs at a Montgomery Ward store in Fort Worth, Texas where we lived at the time.  I promptly took the signed baseball home and ruined it with grass stains playing pitch in my back yard.  I wish I still had that baseball today, minus the grass stains.

Playing basketball back in Kentucky, often alone on the concrete court behind the old Dixon Grade School, I tried to imitate the picture perfect jump shot form of my hero, Rick Mount, the sharpshooter of the Purdue Boilermakers, the first high school player whose picture graced the cover of “Sports Illustrated.”  I idolized the “blond bomber” and I tried to learn everything I could about his background.  I am embarrassed to admit that I carried a magazine photograph of Mount in my wallet.  Anyway, Mantle and Mount taught me the connection between sports and biography.

In the summers in between semesters at Belmont University, where I played basketball and majored in History, I went with friends to old Bosse Field in Evansville, Indiana to watch the Evansville Triplets, the Detroit Tigers triple-A affiliate.

There, in that historic old ballpark, the location for the shooting of the film, “A League of Their Own,” about the All American Girls Professional Baseball League during World War II, we sat along the third base line, harassing the umpires.  We saw future big league stars Mark “the Bird” Fidrych and Kirk Gibson just before they were called up to the Tigers.  After the game, we bought hot tamales from a vendor, relishing what we knew to be a “historic experience.”  Those game at old Bosse Field taught me the connection between sports and history.

Once, on a weekend, during an autumn semester at Belmont, I went with my east Tennessee teammate, Mitch Keebler, to a home football game at Neyland Stadium at the University of Tennessee.  There, we watched the Volunteers play the LSU Tigers before over 80,000 screaming fans.  This was more than a mere game;  it was a pageant, a social extravaganza, and from that game I learned the connection between sports and society.

As a graduate student at the University of Kentucky I attended all of the home basketball games, the men’s games at Rupp Arena, and the women’s games at Memorial Coliseum.  I also sat in Dr. Bert Nelli’s sports history class and his History of UK Basketball course.  I learned from those classroom experiences the value of sports as an academic exercise.

I tell you all of that, to try to relate how I came to teach a class in sports history at Murray State.  I hope to teach it again and again, because it is such a rewarding experience, rewarding for me at least, and I hope for the students too.

Teacher’s Journal: Classroom Demeanor

I entered into my calling to teach with trepidation and I still get shaky when I walk into the classroom each day.  Don’t get me wrong.  I love teaching.

Each week I am able to enter a room filled with young scholars.  I unlock the door to the Faculty Hall classroom—the door remains locked when not in use because of the high tech computer equipment contained within—and unload my books and folders and artifacts on the adjustable desk at the front of the class.

The desk is complicated;  one side is made up of an adjustable desktop that the professor, if astute enough, may position at just the right height to accommodate bifocaled eyes.

I can just see myself one day, having failed to have mastered the contraption, attempting to adjust the desktop to a suitable level, only to have the thing slam precipitously down on my finger.  I will step backwards in pain, planting my right foot into the trash can located conveniently behind the desk.

By the time I can extricate myself from the trash can, the stunned students will sit there transfixed observing the intricate dance by the middle-aged wonder at the front of the room.  Surely their tuition dollars had not paid for such a spectacle.  All this was extra.

Well, although I have yet to present just such a spectacle to my students, I can surely imagine it.  I know from my own real-life experience just how precarious a classroom performance can be.  I walk into the class with my notes neatly arranged in a folder and my thoughts rigidly ordered in my mind.

I notice when I walk into the room that a fresh packet of chalk is arranged in the tray under a freshly dusted chalkboard.  Everything seems to be in order.  I take up a pristine piece of dustless chalk and with the first swipe at the board break it into five or six shards.  I can never get the hang of writing with chalk, yet another reason why I am converting my class outlines and images to powerpoint slides.

Things could be worse.  I could replay my first day of student teaching at Bellevue High School in Nashville.  On that day I marched into the classroom all full of myself, not much older than the 18-year-olds I was to teach.

Today, I know how much I need to learn about technology;  my children teach me every day that their father is indeed a Neanderthal, or Luddite, or both.  In 1978, I just knew that I was on the cutting edge of the use of technology.

After all, I had decided to abandon the chalkboard for the high tech overhead projector.

I placed an outline of the day’s history lesson on a transparency on the overhead and then made notes with a non-permanent marker as I taught.  With such a system I could remain facing the class, rather than risk a barrage of spit wads with my back turned toward the students.

On that first day of student teaching, however, I walked confidently into the classroom in coat and tie, only to find the overhead placed on the floor beneath the chalkboard.  To place the thing in its proper place on the stand I bent down—and here was where I made my first teaching mistake on that first day of student teaching, a day that the real teacher, Ms. Fanning, had entrusted her World History class to me, a senior student teacher from Belmont University—I bent down, back end facing out to the class.  That was when I made my second teaching mistake of the day.

The too loud ripping noise as the seat of my too tight pants ripped open caught my attention, I think, before even my students could fathom the moment.

Of course, in due time they did realize what had happened to great hilarity.  For the rest of that first day of student teaching, I wrapped my sports jacket around my waist and taught very carefully, making sure to face my audience all the while.

Of course, I had the overhead projector in front of me and did not have to resort to the chalkboard behind.  Such is the inauspicious beginning of a teaching career.

So you can see how I entered into my calling to teach with trepidation and you can see why I still get shaky when I walk into the classroom each day.