The Wisdom of Johnny Unitas

Since I've been at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, I've thought about Johnny Unitas a lot. Well, I've thought about something he said.

As the story goes, the Baltimore Colts were in the locker room before a big game. Various coaches and players were standing up one by one, giving their best rousing speeches--pumping up the team, helping them get their game faces on, etc. After the speeches, someone turned to Johnny U. who was leaning by the door and asked "Anything to say John?" To which he replied "Talk is cheap. Let's go play."

Sometimes that's what the Harvard Ed school is like. There's lots of people standing up and talking: what research they've done, what articles they've written, what programs they've studied, what curriculum should be used, what should be happening in classrooms, etc. Big name people in the field with big name reputations, making a good chunk of change doing it. And yet, it sometimes feels like it's a whole lot of swirling rhetoric that can keep everyone occupied, because doing the real work of education, actually stepping into a classroom, is HARD. So it's a nice enclosed system; keep talking about education, do it under a school's famous pedigree, build up your prestige so no one expects you to ever leave, and you can avoid true work--teaching students.

About once a day I imagine Johnny Unitas leaning against the wall of the classroom or lecture hall, and after listening to some expansive, eloquent speech on education, he says "Talk is cheap. Let's go teach."

(And this Johnny Unitas metaphor can be extended even further. Johnny lived what he said; he didn’t talk a lot, and he played a lot of football and played it HARD. He wore his body out doing it. In old age he couldn't even grip a pen regularly to sign his autograph--he had to stick it between his fingers that were locked in a claw shape to write at all. Which means when you do the real work of football, or teaching, and you try to do it well, it could break you down. I figure I did the real work for the past 15 years, and here I am at Harvard just to take a break, to recover a bit of myself and my interests and my energy. Yes, teaching wore me down. I'm not complaining or apologizing or regretting, I'm just explaining.

I suppose that could be the story of some of the professors, here . . . they put in their classroom time, spent themselves, and then shifted to the university to at least stay in the field. So I don’t begrudge them if that’s their story. I may even do it myself.)