> ...compared to academic learning, sports is a very painful process. Where
> is the comparison in education in the glory of playing hurt, in the
> excitement of coming back from a terrible injury to be in the game, to the
> hours and hours, and years and years of thankless drills for one moment or
> time in your life. Many of our "customers" chose this pain as a passion
> and academics as a hobby.
I just read John Douillard, _Body, Mind, and Sport_. He argues, against
all expectation, that the way to get stronger is to always exercise in a
relaxed state -- all breathing through the nose, no heart beat over 135,
never raise a fight/flight emergency response. He says you can get a
runner's high every time, and that eventually you will outperform the
highest level that you could obtain under the 'tear down and recover'
training technique. He argues that "the glory of playing hurt" is a
delusion. You put your hours in, but the mind is in flow, and it is all
pleasure. After two weeks of following his advice (minus some competitive
backsliding) I believe he is right.
Assume for the moment that the body and mind are the same, and that they
respond in the same way to learning routines. Students who are into
painful sports training may simply not know how to learn properly, or are
wanting the wrong things from sports. Both sports and academics can be
done either the hard way or in a flow state. They choose the hard way in
sports, then look for the hard way in academics, but don't find their
perverse pleasures. Perhaps if they trained for sports in the flow state
and thus learned to learn in that manner, they would choose to drop out of
punishing varsity sports, and would also be swept up in academic flow.
Not all academic opportunities allow flow, any more than all atheletic
opportunities allow it. Dialogue is equivalent to runner's high: it is
not impatient for answers/results. (I'm wondering if Robert Hutchins'
passion for dialogue was connected in this way with his banning of varsity
sports at the University of Chicago.)
-- Kent Myers kent_myers@smtplink.sra.com