The baseball coach at my high school was also a history teacher. He was a real red-ass fire breathing tough guy as coach with mediocre results and resented by all but a very few favorites on the team. He was also a superb history teacher with patience and insight. He insisted on being called “Coach”, but he was a much better teacher. Possibly the best in the History Department.
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My Cross Country and (distance) track coach was a PhD history professor at Rutgers who decided to teach HS history as a second career. Who also happened to run very well. It was always a joy to talk deep history nuance on our long runs. He was good enough at it that he was able to keep six or seven 16-18 year old boys captivated in convo about something other than girls or cars. He did not tell us until years later that it was a devised strategy to increase lung capacity. Unsurprisingly, it’s pretty hard to carry on a conversation while running an 8 mile distance run at a sub-6:30 minute pace.
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My 7th grade English teacher was an NFL cheerleader.
*mic drop
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That explains why you had to repeat 7th grade.
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The only coach I ever had as a teacher that I recall was a half-semester of health. I would sit at the back of the class and read Field & Stream. I don’t think either of us wanted to be there.
My senior year, I still hadn’t taken Health. My teacher was not just a coach, but the offensive line coach who I had a great relationship with. I spent a grand total of about 45 minutes in that classroom, as he always found something for me to “run to the office”, which I was explicitly told meant not to come back.
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I had a similar problem. I was called in the guidance counselor’s office at the beginning of the spring my senior year and told I was doing great but wasn’t going to graduate because I never took Health, which most take their freshman year. I didn’t live in TX my freshman year, and they didn’t bother to tell me it was a state requirement to graduate. The only free elective I had that semester was PE, which was also required to play sports, so that was problematic. They hastily approved some other biology course to count for that credit. And it wasn’t taught by a coach.
I had a coach for 11th grade American History II; he fit the stereotype of the of AstrosFanInBigD’s post. Nice guy and all but he was mainly a babysitter. Other coaches in my HS taught English, very advanced math and science among other things so I suspect he was an outlier.
With 2 parents in the district (which was small: 2 elementary schools, 1 junior high, 1 high school) I knew many teachers that never taught me and of course they all knew my folks.
My best teacher was probably my 11th grade history teacher. He was a former coach, but that was far enough in the past the his first name was Mr.
He assigned us books from his library to read, write papers, and give presentations (i.e. The Guns of August, The Perils of Prosperity). I learned to write and wrote more papers in that class far more than any English class I ever took, high school or college.
His wife was one of the English teachers. She said when they first started dating he asked her if she’d like to go to the Bluebonnet Bowl. She said “Sure, I love baseball.”
Back to the thread subject…
Isn’t drinking in public part of the reason you go to a World Cup match in person?
I was with a co-worker when he got caught trying to sneak bacon and vodka into Kuwait. It was a very loud confrontation.
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Well that’s breakfast ruined.
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He later learned where to buy bacon on the blackmarket, in country. Had to take a taxi to some seedy dive, climb five flights of stairs, through a musty old curtain into a dark, poorly ventilated room. “I got hickory smoked this time…5 lbs…”. The underbelly of both the pig and polite society, it turns out.
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I love it – unlimited use of alcohol damages your health. Duh.
But it enhances the GameZone.
Know your limit and drink within it
Limit?
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He is pretending he is responsible.
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Hey, I’m responsible for over 200 living things, they don’t stay up late for baseball though
That’s a terrible idea. I once inadvertently smuggled some rum (I think) into KSA. My KLM Business Class flight to Bahrain gave out little ceramic row houses filled with rum. There was a whole collector’s set. My girlfriend collected them and I tossed it into my bag without thinking. I remembered it at the causeway crossing and kept my mouth shut and got an easy, cursory check. I left it with friends in Dharan.
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