Pitchers or batters?

As I watched the World Series last night, I got to thinking...baseball is intense. It's beautiful, with it's moments of glory and celebration, and awful in its moments of defeat and error. Someone comes up short while someone else rises to the occasion. It's never both.

It reminds me of a conversation I had out in Texas with another teacher as we watched the Cubs play in their first game of the playoffs last month.

As teachers, do we treat our students more like pitchers or like hitters?

Let's start by looking at the differences.

Pitchers
In baseball, the pitcher begins with an Earned Run Average (ERA) of 0.00. This is perfection. Every batter the pitcher faces, however, poses an opportunity to make a mistake. For a pitcher, perfection is expected and once they make enough mistakes, they get pulled from the game.

Batters
In baseball, the batter begins with a batting average of .000. This is the opposite of perfection. It is a number representing an inability to effectively do that thing that the game asks you to do: hit the ball. Every time the batter steps to the plate (and they get a turn once every nine times) there is an opportunity for success. The hope of glory. For a batter, batting below .200 represents futility and nobody has hit .400 since Ted Williams did so in 1941. Everybody else is somewhere in between. Success is getting three hits for every ten at bats.


So there it is. Both pitchers and batters are called upon to play defense, of course, and sometimes to run bases. And they also need to high five one another and add to the clubhouse chemistry. But my question is this: When we work with students, they come to our classes with an opportunity. Is each assessment, however, a chance to succeed and praise, or a chance to drop them down from perfection?


In my class this week my students are beginning to write essays about Prajwal Parajuly's collection of short stories, The Gurkha's Daughter. I am working with each of them to learn from the recommendations I made on their last essay (in response to Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men) and to set some goals for themselves. For some students this means working on developing their narrative voice; for others it means using stronger verbs and avoiding the verb "to be"; still other students are working on comma usage, or transitions, or a crafting a more universally-relevant conclusion.

This is kind of like a pitcher honing his/her craft. Can a student throw a perfect academic game? Yeah, sure they can. A+ grades happen and so do perfect scores on assignments. Students thrive and sometimes the pressure gets to them and they struggle mightily...just like a pitcher giving up a home run at the worst possible time.

Pitchers can close the gap toward perfection, lowering their ERA with each pitch. It can never get back to 0.00, but what is a teacher if they tell their students that they expect perfection?

Are there times, though, when batters are the apt comparison? Those same English students in my 8th grade class are required to choose three vocabulary words (from anything they read) that they want to learn each night. Of those three words, they then set one singular goal for themselves (e.g. "I want to understand the meaning of the word aesthetically" or "I want to use the word wrought in my essays." In essence, by asking them to choose one of their three words and add it to their accessible vocabulary I'm trying to dissuade them from the rote memorization of 100 vocabulary words that they'll forget moments after the test. 

Instead, I want to send the message that batting .333 is good enough, and if you can actually embed one word each night in your "useable" vocabulary, that would be awesome, it would be Hall of Fame worthy, and it would be so much more valuable than earning a 97% on a vocab quiz.

So maybe this metaphor is broken. Maybe I ask my students to be both pitchers and batters. At the end of each game, though, ballplayers leave the ballpark at the end of the day and go back to being human. And that's the same for my students, too. My hope, as a teacher, is that their performance in the classroom does not define them, no matter their batting average or ERA. My hope is that they feel whole and that their understanding of themselves stretches beyond the statistics and sabermetrics. I hope my students don't dwell on the numbers on the back of their baseball card, but instead that they each get to feel like the little kid who takes their first swing and feels the satisfaction of connecting bat with ball and says, I love this game because it's fun.