Education and the brain: On grace and development

For Coach Tommy Jones

January is cold for baseball, but at this preseason practice, the team sitting, backs against the left field fence in front of our home dugout, I was as warm and shamefaced as I could be. Coach Tommy Jones, as he did before every practice, told us a story about life – sometimes the story had practical implications, sometimes moral, often both.

It was about a young man who had borrowed a bucket of baseballs in early June, six months prior, and had not returned every single ball to the bucket. In my memory, he said something along the lines of, “I like this guy. He’s a good guy, I think. But he messed up. He didn’t think anyone would notice. But I noticed.”

My heartrate spiked; I was just waiting for him to call me out in front of everyone. I had done it. I was guilty. I used the bucket of balls for homerun derby on the softball field, when the Wilson Hall campus was quiet on the weekend. Some friends and I lost a few – and as surly and cocky freshmen, we assumed no one would care, that no one would notice anyway. We were wrong.

Coach Jones continued his lesson. He reminded all of us about doing the little things right, even when we think no one is looking. That our integrity is paramount in this life.

He never mentioned my name. “I’ll bet this guy won’t make that same mistake again” was the last thing he said about it.

And I exhaled.

To this day, that moment of grace stands as one of the most formative events of my life. Before then, I don’t know if I had ever really experienced grace – had really felt what it was like to be let off the hook despite deserving punishment. His grace changed me. We never spoke about it, though we discussed many things about life during the years I played for him. We even won a state championship together during my senior year, and oddly enough, as I said at our athletics banquet, “I don’t remember Coach Jones and I ever really discussing baseball all that much, except for how the game’s fundamentals could be applied to living a good, responsible life.”

When Coach Jones died this summer, the first things I remembered about him was that, yes, he loved baseball and coaching the game – though he never took himself too seriously and always had fun – and that, yes, he enjoyed winning (and he won a lot), but mainly, I remembered that he cared deeply about the type of young men he was developing. He wanted them to be successful in life, and he used the game of baseball as a means to that end.

In my last article, I ended by saying I would begin to explore the “why” of education. For what ultimate purpose do we educate children? And that exploration begins with this educational axiom:

School is about child/adolescent development, not learning. Learning is important, of course, but as a means to development. Achievement (wins, SAT scores, GPAs, community service hours, accolades of all shapes and sizes) is a byproduct of positive development.

This axiom is grounded in research from neuroscience, cognitive psychology and education, and it is the foundation of my educational philosophy. It is, for me, the right orientation, the correct focus. And no doubt Coach Jones planted the seeds of this philosophy many years ago on that cold January preseason practice when he had all the right in the world to call me out, which would mean social embarrassment, potentially alienating me from my fellow players until I could earn their respect again, but he offered grace instead. At times, I would need calling out, too; I would need discipline to help me develop as a young man, but in that moment, grace was the right tactic.

Goodhart’s Law states that “when a measure becomes the target, it ceases to be a good measure.” And coaches and teachers alike have fallen prey to this problem: Making winning records or GPAs the target of playing the game and learning distorts the purpose of athletics and schools. It’s why we have rampant recruiting violations in high school sports and why the self-reported percentage of high school students who admit to cheating is outrageous and unacceptable. Achievement isn’t the goal; developing into good human beings who take responsibility for themselves, their families and their community is.

Brent Kaneft is head of school and an English teacher at Wilson Hall, Sumter, NC. He is also a writer. This article was originally published by The Sumter Item and is reposted here with permission from Brent Kaneft. 

Like most of the pictures on TeensParentsTeachers, the picture posted with this article is courtesy of a free download from Pixabay.com.