Bob Knight died yesterday (Wednesday, 1 November 2023) at the age of 83. I love the irony of Coach Knight dying on All Saints' Day. I learned a long time ago that having heroes is not a good idea. Nobody is perfect and hero worship inevitably leads to disappointment. Bob Knight was thus not someone I viewed as a hero, but I definitely admired him. Though I never had the pleasure of meeting Coach Knight, he did have an influence on me in the role he most thought of himself, that of a teacher.
Webster defines gestalt as "something that is made of many parts and yet is somehow more than or different from the combination of its parts." The philosophical adage most associated with that idea is that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That was the feeling I had watching Bob Knight's Indiana teams in the 1980s. At just five-and-a-half years old, I was too young to have memories of his famous 1976 undefeated team. And I was too into baseball in the late 1970s to pay much attention to college basketball. But I was part of the growing NBA fan base when Larry Bird and Magic Johnson took basketball to new heights after they left college following their epic national title battle in 1979. My growing interest in basketball took me to college basketball. Watching Bob Knight's teams made me realize that a brilliant mind could take rather average talent to extraordinary heights. The beautiful basketball I watched Indiana play was the result of a team executing better than the sum of its parts.
How did Coach Knight do it? Over the past couple of decades, I have seen hours of video of Coach Knight discussing his coaching methods, including videos of some of his practices. Of all that I learned from him about basketball, the one gem I have assimilated into my own teaching is that learning and improving often arises when one feels stress. Think about how we learn something. Set aside all of the glorious neurophysiology and consider the following two options. We are either ignorant of something, which means we have a hole to fill in our brains, or we are wrong about something, which means we have to correct something incorrect in our brains. I have struggled for years to come up with a better or more simplified way to explain how we learn, but the aforementioned sentence is my best effort to date. Now consider what many of us feel uncomfortable about admitting. Who likes to admit to being ignorant or being wrong? Doing so make us uncomfortable; doing so makes us feel stress.
I could not achieve success as a scientist if I had difficulty admitting I was ignorant or wrong. I can recall times in my life when I was flooded with great joy when I realized I was wrong about something. That joy came from learning something new, from discovery. Not having an accurate understanding of the natural world is more uncomfortable to me than admitting I do not know something or admitting that I am wrong. Stress over being ignorant or wrong is no longer what pushes me to improvement; my love of learning that came from early days of stress is now what motivates me.
Coach Knight would often say that he wanted his practices to be much harder and more demanding than what his players experienced in games. I feel the same way about my own teaching. I want to lay a gauntlet before my students, see them pick it up, and then push themselves to be better than they ever thought they could be. Coach Knight's practices involved repetition and growing from failure. Nobody wakes up one day never having played the piano, sits down at a Bösendorfer Opus, and plays one of Chopin's Mazurkas. And no athlete steps on a basketball court for the first time and drains three-pointer after three-pointer. Coach Knight also said, "The key is not the 'will to win'...everybody has that. It is the will to prepare to win that is important." Athletes must be put in stressful conditions, similar to the old "no pain, no gain" idea, to improve performance. Students must also be put in stressful conditions. An enormous amount of preparation that includes frustration, failure, stumbling, inching forward, and gradual understanding must occur before exam success and before career success. Once a kid says, "Hey, I don't know something and I'm going to work my butt off while failing many times before I really understand what I don't currently know," my work is done. That student is ready to do good science. I've seen it happen with many of my students, and it's wonderful to behold.
My fingers could dance across the keyboard for several more hours if I really wanted to discuss all that sits in my head on the topic of Bob Knight. For now, I will close this blog post with a note of thanks. Thank you, Coach Knight, for all the memories I have of sitting in Assembly Hall while in graduate school and watching your teams play the best team basketball that I have ever seen as you patrolled the sideline. And thank you most especially for the lessons you passed on to me about what it takes to learn and improve, be it athletically or mentally.
