Date: Sun, 28 Jan 2001 11:29:10 -0500 (EST)
Random Thought: Three Coaches

I watched last night, with some agony, Duke making its miraculous ten point comeback in the last minute of the basketball game against Maryland. While I was listening to an excited and disbelieving commentator on another station talk about Duke's Coach K, he said something that caught my ear. I heard him say that Coach K was a rare breed of college coach. He, along with John Thompson, ex-coach of the Georgetown Hoyas, and Dean Smith, ex-coach of my beloved North Carolina Tarheels are winners. He said something to the effect, "They're winners, not just because they've won over 1600 games between them and their graduation rates were almost 100%, but because more important to them than winning a basketball game was building the character of their players and getting them to see there was more to life than basketball, and that is what won them all those ball games. These kids came into their programs as basketball players and they left as young men."

Do we academics have the same commitment in our particular classes? We should.

Do we understand that a student can get "A's" and fail in his or her profession and in life, that a person can be an "honors" student and leave us as anything but an "honors" person? We should.

Do we see beyond the immediate and limited horizon of the facts and technical stuff of the subject matter, the test, the grade? We should.

Do we get so caught up in the mechanics, methodology, administration, assessment and presentment that we loose sight of the student's humanity? We shouldn't.

I think we should be judged--evaluated, assessed--by the kind of "person" who leaves our campus, not by the stats of a student who was accepted.

Just a thought or two.