Let's take care of people and have great schools (professional sports optional)

I think that no matter what the color of the people I'd feel better if I thought everyone, especially the people who don't have enough, were taken care of; if I felt that the government, the city government, the federal government were doing all that they could to help them.

When I go to readings around the country, people have been asking me about the baseball team. "Aren't you excited about the Washington Nationals?" they say. Well, no, I'm not. I have a friend who's been teaching elementary school for the last five or so years. I tell them that every year, she has to buy 500 dollars of school supplies for her kids, because she doesn't have enough. She and I spoke last week, and she said actually it's 2,000 dollars' worth. I had been using the 500-dollar figure, because she and I had once gone into an Office Depot and that's how much she spent. My problem is that you can be excited about the Redskins, excited about the Nationals, but the school system is going to pot.

Edward P. Jones, quoted in "Afterward: Washington, D.C., A Conversation with Edward P. Jones," in Matt Weiland & Sean Wilsey eds., State by State: A Panaramic Portrait of America (2008) (responding to the question, "Do you feel proud about living in one of the great majority black cities in the United States?")

Teacher learns from basketball

On some fundamental level, basketball is a game for which, love it as I may, I have no real aptitude. I move too slowly; the signals from my brain take too many detours on the way to my legs and arms. But it’s a good thing for someone who makes his living as a teacher to submit himself to a discipline that doesn’t come naturally. It builds a sort of kindliness and tolerance for students who come with varying abilities—some with seemingly no aptitude at all. Without the genial frustrations of basketball, I’d be more likely to think that stamping my foot might be the best way to get someone who seems utterly unable to understand a word of a poem by Wordsworth to find its flow. Well, I might suggest instead to this student that he can learn to read "Tintern Abbey" a little the way I learned to shoot a hook. Break it down into small, small elements; go one piece at a time; trace all the micromovements. "Long live what I badly did at Clemson": that’s James Dickey, thinking back to his "spindling explosions" as a running back in college. Well, long live what I do badly enough at basketball—humility, as the critic R. P. Blackmur liked to say, comes through submitting yourself to humiliation from time to time. 

Mark Edmundson, “Fadeaway Jumper,” American Scholar, v. 75, no. 1, Winter 2006, p. 61 at 65