The text set we worked with focused on sports and education. It started with the NYT Room for Debate set on Taking Sports Out of High School. (If you've never heard of Room for Debate, it's part of the Op-Ed section where various writers weigh in on a question). This text set turns on the question "Should high schools eliminate sports program?" Without even beginning the reading, students were inflamed by this question.
My students worked with a chart that asked that they record the writer's particular argument, the type of evidence presented with examples of the evidence. Once they had read all eight pieces, they also ranked them in order from the most enthusiastic supporter of sports in schools to the most skeptical. For the most part students were in general agreement about where writers landed on that spectrum. What I also loved about this set is how wide-ranging the reasoning for a writers' support or ambivalence was. One author focused on the positive benefits of Title IX while another author did not deride the importance of sports, but instead of focused on how sports have become overly central to school life.
These texts provided some basis for thinking about the role of sports in school and allowed students to see the diversity in thinking on this topic.
The next text, though, blew them away. Students wrote descriptive pieces on The probability of continuing in organized sports after high school. My co-worker taught an excellent lesson on how to write a graph description. She used Julie Groves' work as a basis for understanding how to translate data to text. This provoked some phenomenal thinking because this is the other piece of what we have been teaching around justification. While we spend plenty of time teaching how to attack prose work, we rarely dig in deep to think about how to read data.
What was heartbreaking, though, was how surprised students were about these numbers. For them, working hard at a sport should lead directly to fame and fortune and a professional contract. What we didn't read due to time, but I did summarize for my students was this wonderful piece in the Toronto Star about the shockingly low salaries of minor league players in Major League Baseball. The infographic midway through the page is excellent. Spoiler alert: the 5 month contract for a Class A player is $6250. Not a month, mind you, but for the entire contract. Given that, perhaps even being a professional player is not exactly renumerative either.
But of course, many who want to play at the NCAA level are not thinking about going pro. They talk of leveraging a sport into a college scholarship. This article, which I reformatted when I printed and would be happy to share if you plan on using this, from the Houston Chronicle provides a look at the myth of the college scholarship for athletes. There are many more articles like it, including one from CBS that also talks about the average dollar value of athletic scholarships that are equally accessible.
I think what my personal takeaway from this is not that schools should not have sports, but that sports participation fills a need that is separate from financial considerations. The writing we will do will look at whether the benefits of sports outweigh the limitations and costs of such programs.
As a side note, this text set would be an excellent precursor to Stefan Fatsis's book, which I write about here.
