Biology or Football

At Aletheia Today, we are always on the lookout for new ways to structure primary and secondary education. Here’s a good idea from one school district that just came to my attention: 

In the fall semester, 9th graders may elect to study biology or they may play football.  Put another way, 9th graders are required to take Biology in fall semester, but they may satisfy that requirement by playing football.

Here’s how it reads in the school’s course catalog: “Students must choose between Biology 9A (class work) and Biology 9B (field work).” The school decided to pair these activities when they realized that learning to play football is akin to mastering the key concepts of cellular biology. 

This curriculum change is testimony to a new awareness that not all learning takes place in a classroom, that there are kinesthetic ways to master material that was once only taught verbally. How so?

All the cells in your body are identical…except they’re not. They all run off of the same code (DNA), but different cells ‘read’ that DNA differently. Not all cells do all things. Some do bone-things, some blood-things, some brain-things, but they never totally lose the pluripotency of a stem cell. 

Now think of a high school football team. 30 fresh faced 9th graders show up at ‘rookie camp’ in August. Some of these kids have never even played football before; few of them have a preconceived notion of what position they ought to be playing. Every player is theoretically available to play every position and in rare instances may be called upon to do just that. 

But not everyone should be a quarterback. Players have very different skill sets. The coaching staff will sort, observe and then reshuffle, over and over again, until they get it right. A process of natural selection is taking place right in front of you. What is the particular pattern of gene expression that will maximize the chances of survival and success, reproductive or athletic?

You and your best bud both signed up to be QB, until the coaches saw that neither of you could throw a football accurately. You became a right guard while your friend was slotted at wide receiver. Congrats on the great season, BTW!  

All coached-up and ready to go, the only thing left to do is to play the game itself. A game consists of executing a sequence of plays taken from the team’s playbook. Depending on the astuteness of the strategy, the cleverness of the play calling, the quality of the coaching and the skill and effort of the players – and a lot of luck – one team will emerge victorious.

The roster is not the game, as many a team has learned to its dismay. Neither is the playbook nor the coaching staff. You actually have to play the game…and the results may often surprise.

The cells that form your body are like the players on the football team. Your DNA is their playbook. If you’ve been fortunate enough to reproduce, some ‘you-specific code’ will be embedded in the DNA of others. Traces of your ‘software’ may turn up in the code (DNA) of species a million years from now…or not.

So when Play 36 Omaha is called, every player on the team executes it (or tries to execute it) as designed. However, executing the play means different things to different players. For some it means blocking, for others throwing or catching a pass, or crashing through your opponent’s thick front wall.

Every player has a tightly defined function in the context of a given play. Tightly defined until the ball is snapped, that is. At that moment, the primary function of every player is to survive, i.e. keep the ball in play.

Most often that means passers pass, runners run, and blockers block; but not always. Sometimes a 300 pound lineman ends up with the ball in his hands and has to find a way to get it into the end zone. Every player on the field may be called on to fill any role whatsoever at any time. Whether they will fill that role successfully or not is another matter. 

So how is football like cellular biology?

1. Every play and every player (cell) operates from the same playbook (DNA).

2. Every player has an assigned, but often context dependent, function (differentiation).

3. In the fog of war, every player is expected to assume uncomfortable roles when necessary to keep the play (organism) alive.

The natural selection process means that most teams get better as the season progresses. Ultimately, though, a minority of teams will ‘make the playoffs’ and continue playing into December. The others will become ‘extinct’…oops, I mean ‘ineligible’. 

(Caveat: Don’t ask me for the location of this progressive school district; it doesn’t exist IRL…yet!)

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