I found Michael Mattison’s “Managing the Center: The Director as Coach” to be insufferable. To be honest, though, I find the whole genre he is borrowing from to be an unbearable accumulation of cliché and pretension. What I find especially bothersome, however, is the suggestion common to this genre that the reader can simply choose to be successful. I am, evidently, just not the audience Mattison has in mind. He assumes either that his reader knows more about coaching than about directing a Writing Center or that the collected wisdom of John Wooden is for the reader a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down—and neither of these is true in my case.
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3 comments:
I'm probably the audience he had in mind. I just spent all weekend coaching in a soccer tournament. In between games, I was doing the readings. Quite a coincidence for me that this reading should come this weekend. While I, too, found his article to be a bit cliche, I do understand what he is talking about. In my own experience, I do draw on my experience as a coach to teach and vice versa.
Actually I got the metaphor too, having played quite a few years of soccer and coaching just a few. In fact, the first time I coached (my daughter's team), I was startled at how much things had changed from the lap-running and cone dribbling of my youth. I was raised on current-traditional soccer; my daughter and son have played social constructionist soccer with skills-developing games like World Cup and sharks-and-minnows. The experience definitely helped me transition into teaching.
I haven't been involved in sports for a long time and have never coached any sport; however, what Tess stated about how sports are coached now compared to when she played intrigued me. I never thought that the teaching of sports transitioned from traditional to constructionist methods.
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