Teaching Philosophy

 Assignment for May 3rd in which I had two to three pages to explain my teaching philosophy. While I don't think this is what my teacher wants or expects, I am very happy with it.


I threw fire, at least that’s what they told me. In those days of unmitigated youth the only conclusion that can be drawn from baseball and football was that they were superheroes. The kind of superheroes that stood for something, and what it was it could not be named. It’s the feeling when my father stood up and celebrated the winning pitch on television. It was watching the movie “Sandlot” and understanding that part of growing up sometimes was running for my life. To a child, it was the feeling of complete power, and complete freedom. And for that short time as a child or even a teen, we learn we slowly lose that simplistic paradise. In hindsight some conceive that childhood freedom to be ill used. For me, I was a left-handed pitcher.
    They told me I threw fire. While this one kid threw faster but put bruises on their chests with wild forced exchanges, and the others were still trying to understand a curve ball, the great part about left-handed throwers is that we have a genetic advantage. When a left-handed pitcher throws a baseball, as long as his body presents a straight line from the mound to the hitter, the ball remains concealed. It’s especially important to keep the body in front until the very end. And to deal the perfect pitch, I held my glove out in front of the batter’s eyes. As long as my line was in between, the batter had a shorter time to react. No. I wasn’t the best, not even close. In fact I was so scared that I was terrible, I didn’t try out for the high school team. This was after playing as a child for eight years.
    But while this story seems to end on a note of skills becoming less and less relevant as I got older, the real catch was farther ahead in physics. Numbers to the history man seems to be an unnecessary theoretical assimilation of Egyptian hieroglyphics to plane crashes. Sure the symbols are there, but why calculate if the passengers are already dead? But what a physics teacher taught me in high school was that in the chaos of plane crashes, or pitching, we can come to terms with what makes an airplane pitch, or a baseball roll. My physics teacher explained events and things that occurred everyday, and all I had to do was find out for myself. Though I did not play baseball any longer, I dusted off the old glove, grabbed a couple baseballs, and headed for the backyard. Before I had thrown thousands of them at a wooden strike zone nailed to a tree, but now it seemed more powerful now than ever. The motion started, and as my right foot moved back and prepared for the kick my hands reached up towards the air. With the kick, there was a slight lean back, to balance the weight exchange to prepare for the leap forward in velocity. There was a lunge, and with it every muscle tweaked and cracked and hurled forward in motion as my right foot took the biggest step. The arm, while seeming to be most important, really carried the accuracy and added slight power to the legs. The ball screamed with initial velocity. And in my mind, there was a line that came out of the baseball. Numbers upon numbers calculating gravitational movement, wind resistances, and the final force as the loud “Smack!” fired off from the tree. Numbers singing.
    Pitching never felt better. And that’s the role of educators, is it not? It is small and fragile, but present a historical world in which men wore wigs and painful foot binding was considered attractive, and it would be irrelevant unless the rhyme of time would be accounted. But teachers are only a whisper in a lifetime, and in order for that whisper to tickle those small parts of our ears, they must attempt earnestly to present a world in which numbers are seen everyday. We must present a life that is filled with historical revelations, of how it fundamentally allows us to preserve and protect and improve positive ways of life. For history, make them understand that right now, we are all pulling it, and are pulled by it. We are both pitcher and batter, and the what of today, is the why of yesterday. Make a student understand in their very soul that not only is history important, but do so with the events of today, so they may tell their children the why of their lives.