Coach Craig

When I worked as a teacher, I had a number of colleagues who were in the profession not to teach, but to coach. Most of them were ex-jocks who never grew out of the mentality that high school sports is the only thing in life that matters. By being a teacher, they had first dibs at leading the after school sports teams, and it also helped pay the bills considering that coaching wages are nominal at best.

I knew the type firsthand, since I had one of those teachers in high school, Coach Craig. No bones about it, Coach Craig was a football coach first and Health teacher second. More accurately, he was a coffee drinker second, a newspaper reader third, and maybe a Health teacher fourth, but that is being generous. Nothing else mattered since he had the prestige of leading the football team. Even with an impressive 2-10 record, the football team, as is the case at most schools, received all of the attention, including my own mandatory attendance as a member of the marching band. Never mind that we actually had good teams that won state championships – most of those were girls’ teams. Title nine can force schools to give them teams, but they can’t force them to give them fans!

Man, was Coach Craig a crappy teacher. When he was not using class time to convince us of his team’s importance or giving us surprise “study halls” so that he could sit at his desk and devise new plays, he was phoning in his lessons. His lesson on eating disorders consisted of showing us pictures of anorexic girls on the internet, some of which were semi-nude, and declaring that most of them weren’t attractive “except for a couple.” To “teach” us about sex and drugs, he showed us the NBC miniseries The ’60s in its entirety; our permission slip was to just promise not to tell our parents or the principal.

Coach Craig was also the only person I’ve ever known in my life to ask for work to be “quantity not quality.” It was apparent that he did not actually read our written assignments, a theory I put to the test with my five-page final paper on sleep deprivation. In this paper, I quoted and credited Dr. Seuss as my source, using nonsensical rhyming lines from the good doctor’s Sleep Book. Additionally, rather than writing a whole essay that would never be read, I simply cut and paste the first paragraph I had written as many times as it took to fill six pages; I went for six pages rather than five because I was striving for quantity over quality, apparently. When I received the paper back, I had only been docked five points because I failed to use a color printer, which supposedly would have made my essay look more professional.

For whatever reason, Coach Craig kept his job, even after he hit a student. The school helped cover up the scandal, which only resulted in additional scandal, all in the name of doing what exactly? Protecting the worst teacher and coach ever? The high school administration sure took a page out of Coach Craig’s unsuccessful playbook on that one. Coach Craig had tenure, so he probably would have had to kill a kid before losing his job. Forget that he taught us nothing of substance , he had already completed many years of teaching and would get to ride it out until retirement. Quantity over quality, after all.