Former NFL QB Jon Kitna finds ‘gold mine’ at a school where other teachers only saw problems

Yahoo ^ | 12/19/12 | Les Carpenter

[DFG]

Before he left the Dallas Cowboys to come home again, Jon Kitna had one request of the two principals who run Lincoln High School:

Give me your worst students.

The other teachers told him to stop. This was last February and it was going to be hard enough to teach three algebra classes in the middle of a semester. He was two months gone from an NFL career that went for 16 years, after all. Yes, this was his old high school, the one where he was a star quarterback in the early 1990s, but didn’t the new football coach understand what he was getting into?

Didn’t he see the numbers? Didn’t he know that four of every five of the students were on free or reduced lunches? That finding a meal was more important than understanding negative integers? Inspiring the best students was going to be difficult enough. Save himself, they advised. Start slow. Make it easy.

[Some Fat Guy in L.A.]

Sounds like a God thing to me.

[driftless2]

I’m not “hijacking” the thread. I’m just observing that the person who interviewed Kitna wrote about how hard it is to teach kids who are hungry. It might be true, but how many kids who are not learning are not learning because they’re hungry? I’ll bet very few. But the writer felt warranted to add the hunger angle. That’s my point mister thread dictator.

[Quick Shot]

This reminds me of a teacher I had in the mid 70’s. English teacher and took her Public Speaking class. What a wonderful person. She did not take bull from any one and brought all students up in a positive way. She took the shy and made them confident and we had fun. Her students ended up the leaders in society.

She has a son who then had just graduated as starting QB at U of Minnesota, got drafted as a wide receiver at Pittsburgh. You may have heard of him, Tony Dungy. Mrs Dungy was a wonderful person.