The Warm Glow

This semester I've been enjoying teaching a sports literature class I designed and promoted. We covered football during January, reading Friday Night Lights and some short stories. One short story, "The Eighty Yard Run" by Shaw, the class didn't get at all. They just couldn't see how the story could be classified as a sports story. I spent the period walking the students through the story, pointing out the various literary elements as well as the connections between sport and everyday life. The other short story, "A Quarterback Speaks to His God" by Wilner, the class loved, and this astonished me. I had prepared myself before class for an even tougher second round of "I don't get this." Every single student, though, surprised me by eagerly and maturely offering his/her opinion about different aspects of the story. One talked about comparing the main characters from the two stories and seeing how in some ways they were alike but in other ways they were very different. Another student talked about returning to the Shaw piece and re-reading it to get a better grasp on what had been discussed last week, and to be able to apply it to Wilner. Another student understood Wilner's piece because of his own illness and the limitations placed on him because of the illness. I closed the door and locked the room at the end of the period with that warm glow that happens when a class goes much better than expected.

Now that January is over, the class is moving on to the subject of running. I'm excited about this since I have been running for almost two years now and am still struggling with it. I asked the class today if any of them run, and all replied with a laugh followed by an emphatic, "No!" I'm curious to see how not being runners will affect the way they read and understand the selections. One certainly doesn't have to participate in the sport to be able to discuss it, but having experience from actually participating does perhaps offer one a different way of talking about it.

To begin our adventure with running fiction, the class will start with Sillitoe's The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and Maitland's "The Loveliness of the Long Distance Runner." The titles alone suggest the psychology attached to the sport, an aspect I'm very interested in addressing thoroughly. Given the response to the question of anyone in the class being a runner, I'd say it's not going to be difficult at all to bring in the psychology of the sport. I'm just hoping one class during this section sends me home with that warm glow feeling.