“It was a Euphenism”

I’ve graded thousands of student essays over the years. I’ve long considered such work one of the more important and meaningful aspects of teaching, regardless of the subject matter. Helping students learn how to communicate effectively is another way of helping them learn how to think in logical, constructive ways. That’s what they’ll carry forward and will help them later, more so than anything else they learn in a given class.

As important as it is, though, I’ll admit grading papers is among my least favorite things to do. It can be especially challenging when the essay is so riddled with problems -- both “surface-level” errors (grammar, usage, punctuation, etc.) and issues having to do with the content (poor reasoning, factual errors, improper citation, etc.) -- that it becomes hard to decide where to start with one’s response.

In such cases, it becomes necessary to prioritize the problems, picking one or two big ones to concentrate on rather than fuss over every detail and thus overwhelm the student with negative feedback.

Imagine the poker pro hearing a novice player describe a misplayed hand riddled with mistakes at every step. Rather than highlight each one, the pro decides to focus on the decision to limp in from early position with king-six offsuit as an initial misstep. Let’s talk about position and starting hand selection, thinks the pro, and for now leave aside other errors coming later in the hand.

Earlier today our president-elect gave a brief speech during the afternoon in Indianapolis, and I happened to tune in as it began. He spoke at a facility belonging to Carrier, the company that manufactures and distributes heating, ventilating, and air conditioning systems. The point of the speech was to celebrate news that the company would not follow an earlier plan to outsource jobs to Mexico and shut down its Indianapolis plant, with Trump himself claiming credit for having brokered the deal.

It was a complicated bit of propaganda, frankly, and a few (though not many) reporting on it have already pointed out the claims made by Trump regarding both the deal itself and the planned-for outsourcing of jobs aren’t necessarily to be taken at face value. It’s also highly unorthodox and even threatening to a free-market system for a president or president-elect to be directly involved in attempts to save individual companies or jobs in such a fashion. Again, some have noticed that, but most seem not to be focusing on that so much with their reports.

Setting those deeper issues aside, though, near the start of Trump’s remarks he referred to having made a promise on the campaign trail that the Carrier plant wouldn’t close and jobs wouldn’t be outsourced. In telling the story, he confessed he’d forgotten he’d ever made such a promise for Carrier specifically, though did recall making more general statements about keeping jobs in the U.S.

Apparently, Trump saw a worker -- “great guy, handsome guy” -- on television reiterating Trump’s assurance, saying “Trump promised us that we’re not leaving.” He had no memory of making such a pledge, but then he saw a video showing that indeed he had said exactly that. “They played my statement,” said Trump. “I said ‘Carrier will never leave.’”

“But that was a euphenism,” Trump continued. “I was talking about Carrier like all other companies from here on in.”

I had to rewind the DVR to make sure, and indeed that was what Trump said. Like a teacher grading a paper, it was one of those “where to begin?”-type moments.

In fact, transcripts and articles of the speech are silently editing out Trump’s weird mispronunciation, with those responsible perhaps feeling too embarrassed to bother drawing attention to the mistake.

But I will.

First, the word is euphemism, not “euphenism.” As they say on Monday Night Countdown, C’MON, MAN!

Second, what Trump is describing is not a euphemism. That would be choosing a less harsh way of describing something in order to remain polite or observe a certain level of decorum. You know, like saying “to pass away” instead of “to die.” Not really Trump’s style, if you think about it. I mean, after all, his catch phrase on Celebrity Apprentice wasn’t “You’re being let go.”

No, it was more accurately metonymy, although no one outside of English class is going to say “I was using metonymy” there. That’s when a speaker refers vaguely to something specific (like, say, “Washington”) in order to suggest something more general (like “the government”).

Third, it seems more clear that what Trump really intended to say was that the promise he’d made (and forgotten) on the campaign trail regarding Carrier shouldn’t have been taken literally. “I didn’t mean it that way,” said Trump, implying a kind of amazement that the worker he’d seen on TV had taken his words at face value.

“I wonder if he’s being sarcastic,” added Trump when recalling how he initially responded to seeing the fellow saying “Trump promised us that we’re not leaving.”

You can see where this is going.

There’s a surface-level problem, a bald-faced, easy-to-spot “error” that can be easily corrected by circling a word and writing out the correct spelling nearby.

But the word is the wrong word, so that would require more writing in the margin to correct.

But there’s an even more serious problem being demonstrated regarding a lack of appreciation of the relationship between words and what they normally signify. The speaker doesn’t believe what he is saying, and when someone else does he’s surprised, thinking his auditor perhaps isn’t being truthful (is “sarcastic”) when expressing such belief.

There’s not enough room in the margin to explain all of this. And even if there were, someone with such a strange understanding of words and their meanings would likely have a hard time following the explanation, anyway.

I think this is the position in which a lot of media covering Trump might be at present, finding it a lot easier to make “silent edits” than to try to investigate and explain all of the deeper, more profound errors being demonstrated just about every time he opens his mouth.

I liked the tweet appearing below that popped up in my timeline yesterday after the speech. Its conclusion is not really an available option to the writing teacher, but it’s one the present circumstance seems to be forcing upon a lot of people:

Image: “blah blah blah” (adapted), Michelle Milla. CC BY 2.0.

Helping Hands

I have been keeping up with the 2016 World Series of Poker Main Event coverage on ESPN. I never watch them live, only picking them up on YouTube later -- much better without the commercials.

They’ve been rolling out a couple of episodes every Sunday, having gotten through eight so far. The last one this week finished partway through Day 6 with 51 players remaining.

I marvel at how good Lon McEachern and Norman Chad continue to be with their commentary. They do especially well pitching things in such a way that different kinds of viewers -- from the most casual fans to hardcore strategy-nerds -- can find something to focus on and enjoy. They work in plenty of grins, too, and I find myself genuinely laughing out loud a couple of times per hour either at the more overt jokes or sly “inside baseball” references occasionally snuck into the proceedings.

The first episode this week (Episode 7) began with the start of Day 6 and an interesting situation involving the player Jason McConnon. Returning to a about 25 big blinds, McConnon had brought to the feature table a “cheat sheet” ostensibly offering guidance for when to push or fold a short stack with certain hands in certain spots. You know, kind of a helping hand (pun intended).

Kenny Hallaert was sitting to McConnon’s left and mentioned to McConnon before they started how he wouldn’t be able to use the sheets during a hand. (Hallaert, who went on to make the November Nine, is a tournament director himself, likely to know something about the issue.) Then during the very first hand McConnon picked up ace-queen offsuit and pulled out the sheets to take a look. That led to a visit to the table by Tournament Director Jack Effel and a ruling that McConnon had to put his notes away while playing his hand.

There’s an article over on PokerNews today reviewing the situation and highlighting some of the WSOP’s rules that are pertinent. It actually sounds like a bit of a judgment call, though just stepping back from this particular situation I prefer players not using notes or other helpers during hands. On the broadcast Norman Chad offers a similar take as a humorous rant (made even funnier when his teleprompter “fails” him as he’s trying to finish).

The situation reminds a little of my teaching days when it did happen (rarely, but now and then) that I’d catch students trying to cheat in various ways. I’m vaguely recalling a little joke I’d make whenever passing out exams. I’d say something like, “Put your books away -- all you need is a pencil... and your brain.”

Back when I was teaching full-time, I didn’t have to deal with students being constantly online with smartphones and/or laptops, of course. Now that’s become part of the reality of the classroom, greatly affecting many instructors’ approaches to teaching and testing -- changing the pedagogical “game,” so to speak.

Some teachers ask students to put away all their electronics, kind of reverting back to a more “primitive” or even exotic-seeming situation of just simply talking to one another, perhaps with a book open and a pen and pad nearby for note-taking. I’d kind of like poker to be played that way, too -- with the phones and iPads put away and players interacting minus such interference.

But that’s not our world anymore, so I understand as well those who wouldn’t want to play that way.

Image: “110725-G-EM820-800,” US Coast Guard Academy. Public domain.

Talking Versus Listening

I’m a social person. I generally enjoy meeting new people and love having conversations, sharing stories, and joking around. I’ve also been correctly pegged by others as “laid back” or hard to get upset. A “Type B” personality, some say. I suppose I’d have to accept that as a label, and don’t mind it a bit.

I remember once teaching an especially challenging summer school college course, one for which the students had all been admitted for the fall but on a contingency basis. It was a program for which this particular population of students -- ones who were on the margins for having the qualifications to be accepted -- had to pass three courses that were essentially meant to be preparatory for college work, and mine was one of them.

The idea was both to get them ready for the real thing and to see if they could handle the daily demands and responsibilities of being college students. It was a weird “college-but-not-quite-college” kind of situation -- I suppose the closest I’ve come to teaching high school.

I thankfully never had to deal too greatly with unruly students during my full-time teaching days. But this class was probably the nuttiest in terms of in-class behavior, and I often had to exert a lot of extra energy to keep everyone focused and prevent the sucker going off the rails.

We were several weeks into the course when a student called out over the mild roar to say something I still remember. I guess I regard it as an unwitting compliment about my teaching style, although it also said something about my personality as well.

“I wish just once you would get reeeeally mad!” she said.

Everyone suddenly grew strangely quiet to hear what I’d say in response. I just smiled and shook my head, and everyone laughed. I had already well established that my getting upset or angry just wasn’t going to happen -- that no matter how crazy and loud they became, they weren’t getting me riled up enough to yell and scream in response. For better or worse, that just wasn’t my style.

When playing poker, I tend to keep quiet, too, particularly when involved in hands. I’ll speak up and be social, but mostly stay out of the way of “table talk,” finding it easier to reveal less myself than to try to get others to spill more.

On Monday of this week I had surgery on my vocal cords, which if I remember correctly is the first time I’ve had any kind of surgery since I was a child. Had some kind of bothersome growth appear over on one side that for much of the summer actually made it hard for me to talk at all. I was always hoarse-sounding, and sometimes I’d open up my trap and nothing would come out whatsoever.

The surgery went very well. I don’t remember a thing, of course, having been knocked out well before and only waking up after being wheeled back out of the OR. Still have to sweat a biopsy of what got clipped out of there, but the chances are very high it isn’t anything to fret.

Anyhow, as part of the post-op instructions I’m now on what they call “voice rest,” which means I’m not allowed to talk for five days. I found a cool free text-to-speech app for the phone I’ve used some, and I’ve also found out how to do the same on my laptop, so with Vera I’ve been conversing that way.

Otherwise, since I work at home I’m not having to speak much anyway, and so I haven’t missed being able to talk. Weirdly, I’ve discovered it hardest to keep quiet when with our cats and horses. I’m realizing I constantly talk to them when I’m around them, usually just saying their names over and over. But I’m having to stifle that urge this week.

Another thing I’ve realized this week is how much more I value being able to hear over being able to speak. It would be a devastating choice to have to make -- whether to give up talking or listening -- but for me it would be a trivially easy decision. Perhaps most would choose the same way, I don’t know.

Anyhow, no talking for now. And no singing for four weeks (say the instructions)! I’m not much of a singer, but if you want to hear me singing you can on my newly-released album, Welcome to Muscle Beach (one of seven albums I’ve released and the only one with vocals.)

Wish me well as I quietly wait out my five days here. Meanwhile, talk among yourselves.

Image: AskLisaAnne.com.

On Plagiarism and Selfhood

Way back when I taught my first college courses while still in graduate school, the internet was only just starting to become a significant part of our lives. In fact, I made it all the way through the Ph.D. before the change really happened, meaning I was part of the very last group of dissertation writers who didn’t have the web as a significant resource.

In other words, if I wanted to follow some avenue of inquiry relevant to my topic, I couldn’t type a few keywords in a box and be swiftly delivered answers to questions and sources to consult. That’s not to say there weren’t any resources online for me then (the mid-to-late 1990s). But they were quite limited, usually only providing some general direction for my journeys back into “the stacks” at the library where I spent countless hours (years, actually) tracking down leads, gathering evidence, and supporting the four-hundred-page-plus argument I ended up making about 17th- and 18th- century British literature.

For undergrads, the early web provided a lot of tempting “short cuts” when it came to essay writing, including a few very popular and notorious “paper mill”-type sites that provided ready made three-to-five page compositions for download, sometimes for purchase. Students could find plenty of other sites enticing them to cut-and-paste their way through an assignment, and unsurprisingly more than a few from that era gave in to the temptation.

Teachers had to adapt to the new technology, and so very early on in my teaching I had to make a special effort with students to address both what plagiarism was and how to avoid it, with the penalty for being guilty of plagiarism being severe -- zero credit for the assignment for a first offense, and a failing grade for the course for a second. (That said, many colleges and universities have honor codes that make even greater punishments necessary for plagiarism, including even being expelled.)

Also, as I explained to my students then, when it came to plagiarism -- i.e., presenting someone else’s words and/or thoughts as if they were your own, without attribution -- intention didn’t affect how it would be handled. Whether you meant to plagiarize or not, you still got the penalty.

Therefore it was critical for students to learn both how to use sources effectively and how to cite properly. In fact, over time, I came to view this very skill as the most important one students learned in college, and the one that distinguished college-level writing (or “academic” writing) from pretty much every other kind of writing they had been asked to do before.

I’ll never forget one of the first instances of plagiarism I encountered from a student. I believe the essay was about Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. It was about halfway through the semester, and the essay had been submitted by a young woman whom I had already come to regard as one of the brighter ones in the class. She participated actively in class discussions, had done well on quizzes, and was clearly thoughtful and articulate.

The essay she had handed in, though, was much too sophisticated in its approach to have been written by an undergrad, and a quick check online revealed it had been lifted entirely from a website. I asked the student to meet me in the office I was able to use that semester -- I was kind of “office-sitting” for a faculty member away on a sabbatical -- in order to discuss her essay.

After she arrived, I told her there was a problem with her paper, doing so in a way that gave her an obvious opening to go ahead and confess what she’d done. When she didn’t, I eventually pulled out a printout of the web page and her essay, setting them down side by side on the end of the desk. It wasn’t overly dramatic -- I wasn’t acting like a triumphant attorney catching a defendant having made a guilt-confirming contradiction. In fact, while I can’t remember exactly what I said, I remember being very careful not to seem too accusatory or upset.

I just wanted to give the student a chance to admit what she’d done so we could move past it. Whether she confessed or not, she wouldn’t be getting credit for the assignment, and I wanted it to be very clear how important it was for her not to make the same mistake again.

What do you think happened next? I remember having spent some effort thinking ahead of time of a couple of possible responses the student might have. But the one she gave I did not expect in the least.

She didn’t confess. She didn’t make excuses. She denied it. Over and over.

Eventually her voice began to falter and a few tears even showed, but she kept right on professing her innocence. She had no idea how it came to be that the thousand or so words of her essay were identical and in the exact sequence as the ones appearing on a website she claimed never to have seen before. It was an incredible coincidence, sure, but she had no explanation for it.

I don’t remember much else about the episode, other than the fact that after the student received zero credit for that assignment, all of the subsequent essays she turned in were all very obviously her own. The meeting was a learning experience for me, too, and would affect how I would approach the issue going forward.

Of course, I’m reminded of all this thanks to the brouhaha this week over Melania Trump’s speech on Monday at the Republican National Convention and its frankly incredible inclusion of passages (some verbatim) from Michelle Obama’s speech at the 2008 Democratic National Convention. In particular, the initial denials and rationalizations put forth by various party representatives made me think back to my student and her refusal to admit any wrongdoing.

We have a belated explanation of it all today from a speechwriter who likely has successfully scapegoated herself into causing the embarrassment to fade away for the Republicans. I was kind of incensed, though, by all of the excuse-making beforehand, including Chris Christie’s asinine defense it wasn’t plagiarism since most of the speech was original.

To be specific, Christie was asked on NBC’s Today show on Tuesday whether or not the speech was an example of plagiarism. “No,” he responded, “not when 93 percent of the speech is completely different from Michelle Obama’s speech.”

As a teacher, I detest this statement. It’s a bit like defending the player who cheats on only a small number of hands in a poker tournament, playing the other 93% on the square. It’s nonsense. It also helps further the idea that when a person speaks in public or writes for an audience, being clear about sources and claims about the originality of your ideas isn’t that big of a deal.

This might seem like a small issue, but to me it’s much broader and potentially damaging. When I teach students how to write, I’m teaching them also about taking responsibility for what they say when entering public discourse. How they must be able to stand behind everything they communicate, including giving clear, unambiguous credit when borrowing ideas or words from others. Christie and others this week have been suggesting that taking responsibility for what we say is not important -- that we can be selective about when and where we have to stand behind our words, abandoning such responsibility if needed.

I realize that Christie himself wholly operates within the poisoned context of political discourse in which the idea of being held to account for one’s words is laughable. Like many other politicians, Christie only occasionally has demonstrated such a sense of responsibility for what he says, and in fact over the last year has frequently contradicted himself so blatantly so as to confirm he has less concern than most politicians in this regard.

If you are my student, when I’m reading your paper about Heart of Darkness I want to know what you think of the book and what it means. I don’t want to hear what others think about it, and I sure don’t want you to share what others think about it as if those words and ideas are your own. That’s more important to me even than the thoughtfulness or depth of insight you have to share.

Plagiarism is a mean-sounding word. It almost seems rude. And maybe for a certain segment of the population, it sounds like something that should only concern eggheads and bookworms -- people who have spent too much time in libraries or classrooms and not enough in the real world.

But consider this. Stealing another’s ideas and words and presenting them as one’s own is obviously harmful to the uncredited source. But it’s much more harmful to the person doing the stealing. It’s a denial of self, an admission that a person has decided it is better to pass off someone else’s point of view as that person’s own.

Sure, the internet has confused things for many. It’s hard to know what is real, what’s being fabricated, and who is cutting-and-pasting. The idea of “authorship” has gotten complicated and perhaps even become less meaningful to many, what with so much borrowing and so little attribution happening everywhere we look.

Even so, don’t plagiarize. Even a little bit. Or maybe the recommendation would be more effective if I put it another way.

Don’t give up yourself.

Image: “PlaGiaRisM,” Digital Rebel. CC BY 2.0.

Dublin Up

Another post from the airport today as a little later I’ll be boarding a flight up to Philly, and from there will be heading to Ireland for the European Poker Tour Dublin festival.

This’ll be a first trip to Ireland for your humble scribbler. Closest I’ve ever gotten before has been London (several times), so am definitely excited not only to visit a new place, but to go somewhere I’ve focused a decent amount of attention on over the years thanks to degrees in English and many years studying and teaching literature.

The Irish authors I’ve read, studied, and taught the most over the years were undoubtedly Oscar Wilde, Jonathan Swift, and James Joyce. W.B. Yeats, Oliver Goldsmith, Samuel Beckett, and C.S. Lewis come to mind as well, although I don’t believe I ever taught anything by them except for one valiant attempt at carrying a group of undergrads taking World Lit through Waiting for Godot.

Was fascinated by Joyce for a time, reading up through Ulysses and starting Finnegans Wake (though like many, never finishing). I taught several stories from Dubliners over the years, and still have moments from “The Dead” randomly occurring to me as a result.

With Wilde I had a more casual acquaintance, reading The Importance of Being Earnest and Dorian Gray and duly appreciating his many one-liners. I remember De Profundis as well and becoming very interested in his imprisonment and relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas for a time. I taught Earnest a few times, which went over pretty well I recall.

Having focused on Restoration and 18th-century literature for the doctorate, Jonathan Swift is probably the one Irish writer whom I’ve spent the most time with over the decades, routinely teaching Gulliver’s Travels, A Tale of a Tub, Battle of the Books and, of course, “A Modest Proposal.” I even had students reading some of the Drapier’s Letters and a bit of Martinus Scriblerus here and there.

Beyond just appreciating his artistry and wit, the Swiftian world view has probably influenced me as much as the view of any writer I’ve seriously studied. (Vladimir Nabokov is perhaps the only rival.) I’m referring to a perspective that looks upon practically everything that we experience with a skeptical eye that at once seizes on flaws (causing irritation and pain) while also appreciating the humor and even absurdity of what is being witnessed (causing amusement and pleasure). That includes the various “systems” (especially political ones) on which Swift comments, but also just to human nature itself.

Sometimes when taking care of the horses here on the farm and “communicating” with them as I do, I think of Gulliver at the end of Book 4 who by then has decided horses (or the Houyhnhnms) to be much preferable as companions when compared to the hopelessly flawed, irrational humans (or Yahoos). I don’t go as far as to agree with Gulliver’s conclusion, but I’ll admit I find myself understanding his position sometimes.

I’m constantly thinking of episodes from Gulliver’s earlier voyages, too, to Lilliput, Brobdingnag, and the Academy of Lagado. There’s so much truth in all of those fictions.

It’s with a literary frame of mind, then, that I travel to Dublin. Will report back once there, hopefully with some stories that entertain and edify.

Image: “Dublin is located in Ireland,” NordNordWest. CC BY-SA 3.0.

Talking Nixon, Movies, Sports & Horses On the Thinking Poker Podcast

Quick post today to report the latest episode of The Thinking Poker podcast is now online (Episode 154), and your humble scribbler is the guest. No shinola!

After the usual strategy talk comes about an hour-long conversation between myself and co-hosts Nate Meyvis and Andrew Brokos. We ended up covering a number of different topics, starting out with my two college courses “Poker in American Film and Culture” and “Tricky Dick: Richard Nixon, Poker, and Politics.”

Since I just wrapped up teaching the Nixon class for the first time, I talk for a while about Nixon and his poker story. Donald Trump came up in there, too, along with some discussion about how politics and campaigning has changed over the last half-century or so.

Then we moved over into discussing in a more general way poker’s place in American culture before circling back to the “Poker in American Film and Culture” course and some talk about A Streetcar Named Desire, The Odd Couple, and John Wayne movies.

Toward the latter part of the hour we focused a bit on sports and the rise of analytics, moved over to chat about horses and farm life (and parallels between dressage and poker), and then I espoused the much underrated virtues of cleaning stalls.

If you’re curious, get started on those New Year’s resolutions early and go for a walk or jog, and while you do give the show a listen. And if you do, you can let me know what you were thinking when listening to the Thinking Poker Podcast.

From the Editor’s Desk

At the moment I am mostly up to my eyeballs in Nixon-related tasks, trying to finish up the last bit of pregame work for my American Studies course that begins in a little under two weeks.

I mentioned the class here last week -- “Tricky Dick: Richard Nixon, Poker, and Politics” -- and how it uses the angle of Nixon’s poker playing to explore his super-swingy political career that took him from the deepest valley to the highest mountain and back (to paraphrase his own words).

I’ve been preparing some videos to show the students, including some in which I’ve had a chance to work on my iMovie editing skills. In one video I’ve compiled a number of political ads from 1968. In another I’ve strung together some clips from the White House tapes, including transcripts to read as they go by. (I may at some point share some excerpts from some of the material I’ve created here.)

Today I was experimenting with pulling together another short video cutting back and forth between clips of Nixon talking about his poker strategy and much more familiar moments from various speeches (e.g., “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore,” “I am not a crook”).

I’ve always loved editing -- all kinds. Can be incredibly immersive, too, as I toil away carving something down to fit exactly with my idea for what it should be.

As a writer, I’ve often found revision nearly as rewarding, and sometimes even more so, than the initial drafting. I play guitar and bass and used to do a lot of recording with a four-track, and that, too, was always enjoyable, especially when I got around to working with some audio editing software. Editing video is fun as well, especially with a program like iMovie that allows for easy manipulation of clips and transitions.

The editor is so incredibly powerful when it comes to managing the ultimate message that gets conveyed, regardless of the form and content. Such a truth was acutely illustrated to me today as I spliced together a clip of Nixon saying “I knew when to get out of a pot; I didn’t stick around when I didn’t have the cards” with another of him declaring “I have never been a quitter.”

Now that I think about it, Nixon himself intensely engaged in editing throughout much of his career and afterwards, too.

Remembering Dean

It was my senior year at UNC-Chapel Hill. I found myself sitting in the back of a first-semester Latin class, something I’m going to guess had been recommended to me by one of my English professors (my major). It was an elective for me, as I’d already had French to cover the foreign language requirement. It was the first day, and there were a lot of freshmen in there.

The grad student teaching the course went over the syllabus, part of which involved reiterating a point about the final exam with which I was familiar given that I’d heard it many times before. If I remember correctly, there was a provision that applied to all courses that stated if you had three finals within a two-day period, you could get one of the finals rescheduled. However (the teacher explained), you had to take care of rescheduling your exam at some point before the end of the semester by contacting the Dean.

At that one of the freshmen raised her hand.

“Dean Smith?” she asked uncertainly.

The class laughed. I just grinned, spending the next few moments thinking about how little I had known when I’d first arrived at Carolina. Did I know what an academic dean was my first week in school? I can’t say for sure. But I knew who Dean Smith was, all right.

My earliest memories of basketball go way back almost to the mid-70s, and Dean Smith is right there at the heart of most of them. I remember Virginia upsetting UNC in the ACC tournament finals in 1976, then UNC losing to Marquette in the national finals the next year when Walter Davis -- “Sweet D” -- had to play with a broken index finger. From there the memories become more vivid, highlighted by the ’82 championship team with Worthy, Perkins, and Jordan. By ’93 I’d be on the campus to celebrate that year’s championship, and of course followed Smith’s continued career thereafter very closely until his retirement in ’97.

I played basketball growing up. The sport was a very important part of my life, something I did practically every single day, usually for at least a couple of hours. Some of my best memories involve playing for teams coached by my father and my friends’ fathers. When I think of those teams, I feel extremely fortunate to have had such adults in my life providing me with opportunities to play and enjoy being a kid, but also guiding me to become a good person via lessons in sportsmanship and teamwork.

Later on when teaching full-time at a small college I was offered a chance to serve as the school’s Faculty Athletic Representative, kind of a catch-all position serving primarily as a liaison between the athletic department and the academic side. I eagerly accepted the offer, because I loved sports and because I believed strongly in their value. That is to say, I thought -- and still do think -- that sports serve an important purpose when it comes to education, even higher education.

It was a small school and perhaps it was easier to think that way about sports since there wasn’t the big money and other temptations that at large Division I schools help create ambiguities about sports’ influence. I served as FAR for many years, only giving it up after the school suddenly veered in a direction that I believed not only compromised the school’s athletic department, but the school’s academic purpose, too. It was the beginning of the end for me in that position, in fact, as I’d eventually leave altogether.

I’ve always thought of sports and other games (including poker) as being very important -- valuable in the lessons they can teach, in the pleasures they can provide, and in the ways they bring individuals together in meaningful ways that transcend those competitions. These are things I first learned from my coaches. They are also things I learned (and my coaches did, too) from Dean Smith’s example.

It was impossible to watch Smith’s teams play and listen to how he spoke of their games and not absorb the many lessons he was constantly imparting to the men who played them. They are too many to list, although the lesson of the importance of humility stands out for me most strongly as I think of his life and legacy. That also seems to be the lesson many others are focusing on as they celebrate his life in the wake of his passing, the eagerness with which they are championing him directly proportionate to his own desire not to have done so.

No, Dean Smith couldn’t have helped us reschedule our final exams. But he helped a lot of us in a lot of other ways, something for which this student remains grateful.

(For a little more reminiscing about UNC hoops and Smith, listen to the podcast Dr. Pauly and I made about the 1993 UNC-Michigan NCAA final.)