The Use of Athletics in Teaching Both Academic and Personal Voice, a Very Long Title Which I Will Shorten in the Near Future, but for Now Will Leave as Long Because I Am Feeling Whimsical

 Like I said, I owe another post on Graff: 

It’s fascinating to read Graff’s discussion of Hidden Intellectualism in sport and how his experiences in athletics invariably led to, influenced, and developed his intellectual development. I find it interesting because the sports he participated in are those of an accepted tradition, such as football and baseball, whereas I experienced many of the same tendencies, but in the much more marginalized sport of swimming.

In this intellectual context, Graff’s athletic experiences are comparable to the sciences, which in education never need to justify their own existence. And yet he is writing from a cultural context which connects sport to intellectual development in the area of argumentative formulation, most specifically in the humanities, which he—and most other literary theorists in academia—have always sought to raise up to a level of importance on par with the sciences. But my experiences, in a sport which was often derisively referred to as a sport for sissies (yes, swimmers often do wear small suits in anticipation of big meets; no, it does not bother us), are comparable to those of academics continually having to justify their own existences.

Ironical.

The inferiority complex of the humanities—“we are important! Really!”—is bypassed by equating the argumentation learned in English class to those sports which would, in any other metaphor, represent the sciences. In a way, Graff’s argument here is his first chance to get to be the bully, whereas athletes such as myself have to continue to justify the worth of our own sport (Really? You swim? Don’t you guys shave your legs?).

At present, this is just an amusing quirk of circumstance that doesn’t mean much to the overall teaching of academics; however, I plan to expand this post (in scope, but not really in length), to include the personally constructed mythos at the core of sport. Not only does sport—and the arguing over the trivial and/or specific aspects of it—train student’s for intellectual life in a statistical sense, it also trains them in the story-telling aspects of the humanities.

Athletics is an intensely melodramatic medium of expression (why else would we make so many by-the-numbers, inspirational films about it?), and arguing over the merits of its principal athletes is just part of how it can lead a student to join the field of academic discourse. After all, insomuch as Graff is intensely interested in the dichotomy between academic and personal voice, the melodramatic tendencies taught by athletic endeavors influence our personal voice as much as the statistical debates hone our academic ones.

-Matt