During the first month of school, when I start to lose my voice—which I inevitably do: allergies and all the talking—I actually have some videos to fall back on (because of all the remote teaching during COVID) and I realized that I've never posted them . . . and that I may never tell these stories again, as they are very particular to certain lessons; yesterday the seniors were working on the College Essay, something in which I am certainly an expert; the first thing we do is list our "great" accomplishments, and then we try to figure out how to discuss these accomplishments without sounding pompous or arrogant or didactic or annoying—college essay prompts set kids up to be annoying . . . and I also remind them that they are children, and they may not have any actual "great" accomplishments and they have to be generous and open and sincere— being nice to your parents is a great accomplishment, as is having a wonderful friend group, or asking someone out on a date, or learning to cook something—it doesn't have to be a perfect score on the SAT or straight As or athletic prowess or digging wells for homeless orphans in Nicarauga . . . and then I give them two techniques to use when writing about this accomplishment; they could either tell a solid story (I give them the Dan Harmon 8-step story template and focus on the heavy price-- if you don't have a heavy price it's just an anecdote) and then I present them with two true stories from my high school golf career-- STORY NUMBER ONE and STORY NUMBER TWO . . . and I ask them which one would make for a better college essay (I also tell them that one of these stories WAS my college essay) and we discuss which story is more appropriate-- there's usually some debate (but the second story was my actual college essay . . . though I am the villain, as there's much better lesson and there's a heavy price for my actions) but then I give the kids an alternate route-- if you don't have a compelling structured story about your accomplishment or passion, then I tell them to develop something symbolic-- and I show them The Story of the String Bag, in which I describe how this string bag incident is a metaphor for coaching, symbolic of what it is like to be a coach-- which is a much better way to discuss something than listing all your accomplishments, which sounds more like a resume-- and then I made the kids watch my amazing, incredible pickleball video, in which I execute an ATP and I told them how great I am at pickleball and I made them applaud for my shot, and then I told them that they should not have applauded for me and no one likes a braggart and that I am actually BANNED from discussing pickleball in the English Office and I explained that if I were to write a College Essay about pickleball, instead of focusing on my incredible skills and ability, I would talk about pickleball and the the relationship with my brother-- and how it gives us something to do together— my brother was the one who pressed the button at the pickleball place so that my ATP video would be recorded, and my brother is the one who taught me to play, and pickleball is something we can do together-- not all siblings have that . . . so I would write about what pickleball symbolizes, a way for me to get together with a family member-- not about how good I am-- and the kids understood this concept, and then, while I was recounting all these sports stories and trying to teach them how to NOT to sound like an asshole, I remembered a moment from when I played freshman football that would be perfect for a college essay, a symbolic moment—so I tried to explain this to my three college writing classes and I learned that most kids do NOT understand football at all; my hypothetical essay was about switching from soccer to football-- I was the fastest kid in 8th grade—but no one wants to hear about how fast you are, that's not an essay-- so i would write about how I decided to switch from soccer to football because it was the 1980s and football was what the cool kids played, so I thought it would be a great avenue for scoring with the ladies (despite my bowl haircut and feathery, never-been-shaved mustache) and because I was fast, the coaches put me at running back (they didn't let me play defense because I couldn't really tackle anybody) and I asked my students where you should run on a soccer field and they kind of understood this—that you're allowed to run wherever you want: into space, you can check to the ball, you can get wide, you can go forwards, etcetera . . . it's free range—but then I asked them where you run on a football field, and it was like pulling teeth; barely anyone understood the concept of a PLAY or a ROUTE . . . and literally no student had heard the concept of a hole, a numbered spot where you were supposed to run because people were blocking for you there—because when I started playing football, I had a soccer mentality and never ran to the correct hole and that would be what my essay would focus on, the difference between soccer and football-- and there was this one symbolic moment, when I actually saw my coaches jump for joy at what I did-- and I wasn't running with the ball, all I did was successfully execute my "Gap Read Down" assignment and properly block the defensive end instead of going out wide-- our fullback gained some yards and the coaches were ecstatic that I didn't fuck up again . . . after one season I had enough though, football was too rigid and practice was boring-- too much runng through all these plays-- and so I switched back to soccer because I loved the autonomy . . . it would be a great college essay, as long as the reader had some knowledge of sports (and my students do not have much knowledge of sports . . . it's wild to explain this stuff to them).
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