Why Getting An ‘A’ In Sports Education Is Not Good Enough!
Sport goes deeper than the simple success that most of us attribute it with
Golf, Cricket, Diving, Cycling, Ice Hockey, Polo, Rugby, Curling, Judo, Roller sport, Field Hockey, Rowing, Hurdling, Ice Climbing, and Horse Polo. The list of sports without an ‘A’ in them can go on and on and upon first hearing the quiz question:
“What sport doesn’t have an ‘A’ in its name?”
that’s probably how most people would answer.
After all, although it’s a trivial question but with a little thought, it can be answered quite quickly.
Yet try answering a question like that when you`re under pressure. Then things are very different.
That would prove a stumbling block for many a quiz team. Because once you introduce competing quiz teams and a time element it becomes far more difficult to list out those obvious answers.
Then there’s the watching crowd, the clock, and the quiz master. All of them bring different demands on you and can leave you tongue-tied for even the simplest of answers.
Teaching the sports quiz:
Having been a teacher for many years I’ve had the pleasure of asking many quiz questions. Children and young people love it.
They adore the rush of adrenaline that blurting out answers gives them. Having the instantaneous opportunity to get admired by their peers for getting one correct answer makes them froth at the mouth for the oncoming next question.
Questions that create curiosity in a crowd of people also build competition.
Sport is all about competition:
No matter what way you look at it sport is all about competition.
Far from me going into the argument about whether it’s better for young people to just participate rather than competing too much at such a tender age, it still must be known that from their perspective, they love competition. And it’s the same for us adults.
We all need to admit to ourselves that when we’re put under a quiz question pressure that we’re tempted to bend our answers, just so we can get the point for our team.
Although a quiz may be a lot of fun, after all, it’s still a competition.
But maybe we don’t need to bend our answers to this question. Instead, upon reading the question for the very first time our answers could have differed. You see, we may have failed to initially consider sport within its overall international context. If we consider sport in a different context, then the answer can become quite different too.
Why a question of sport needs more worldly context nowadays:
When I was teaching one of the things that I quickly learned was that school books and the information within them were constantly changing. Sure Math, was the same most of the time.
But science was being updated, languages were beginning to change male and female nouns and even history books were having various slants on past events.
Much of this was due to more modern discussion about equality. But parts of it were due to our awareness of the world as we now know it.
Just because a question is asked in a certain language it doesn’t mean that the answer can’t come from another land.
How language explains things easier:
Although English is the most popular language in the world there are many other languages also. For example, Mandarin Chinese has roughly over 1 billion speakers. Hindi has over 615 million speakers. And even Spanish has half a million speakers with their neighboring language of French having over half of that again.
If a speaker of those languages were to answer a question on sport their answers may be different to English speakers, but they may be just as correct to the quiz master.
The real answer to the question
“What sport doesn’t have an ‘A’ in its name?”
If we take the example of the Mandarin Chinese language the letter ‘A’ is denoted by 诶.
In Hindi it’s अ .
Mandarin Chinese is spoken not only in China but in Taiwan, Singapore, and the United Nations too
Hindi is spoken in India, Nepal, Mauritius, Fiji, South Africa, Suriname, Uganda, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Germany, Trinidad and Tobago, Singapore, and even the United States.
That’s a hell of a lot of places, and a growing amount of people.
If people from those lands bunched into my classroom over the years the class quiz about sport would have many different answers. And many more than first perceived would be legitimately correct.
The real ‘A’ in all sports:
As a quiz master over the years, I`ve also noticed that although you write rules and tell them to the competitors at the beginning of the quiz, during the quiz things change.
You must be adaptable to each person’s version of the correct answer. Even if the answer on the slip of paper is correct, there may also be other answers that are just as deserving of getting the points in the quiz.
In that way, a question is just like sports.
After all, when a question is asked there are many takes on the answer. It all depends on where you`re from, what you know, and what you`ve experienced. Not only that but the language that you speak. All of that and more dictate your answer under pressure.
In sport, you take a side and you stick to it during the contest. Depending on where you`re from, what you’ve learned, and the language you speak it’ll dictate how you compete and your attempts at scoring under pressure.
But we are all people and we all have different versions of what the letter ‘A’ stands for.
Thankfully, sport unites us and in it, the letter ‘A’ means the first letter.
And in sport being the first is what it’s all about.
After all, what worth has finishing in the first place got if we don’t include everyone from anywhere within the competition from the beginning?
Surely if everyone does not get a fair chance to participate then being that ‘A’ may be first but it’s not necessarily the greatest when the truly correct answer is known.
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