By Ned Ide, Conval High School, Peterborugh, NH

Something's totally unscrewed in a society that holds its coaches to a higher standard than its teachers. What's even more screwy is being a teacher who coaches. Talk about mixed messages.

As a colleague and I often marvel at, there are typically two to three times as many interviewers in a coach hiring than there are in a teacher hiring. The pay for coaching can be construed as nominal. The pay for teaching is anything but. This, however, is a simple way of looking at it. Neither of the jobs is about the money because any teacher worth his or her weight in salt could earn beaucoup bucks on the corporate treadmill.

Teachers and coaches work because they value time with kids. What is significant about the above hiring scenarios is their symbolism: there is a disproportionate amount of concern about who we hire to coach our sons and daughters. On the other end of the perspective, more adequate coaches are fired than there are inadequate teachers fired.

From my perspective, it all boils down to visibility. The public is rarely invited to line up in the bleachers to watch my students present William Saroyan's viewpoint on what it means to be human. The public does not line the perimeter of my classroom to witness decisions we make about R.P. MacMurphy's character in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. Rarely have I had phone calls at night from parents complaining about their children being excluded from class discussion.

Teaching and coaching at the public secondary school level in contemporary American society, in short, is nerve-wracking. These are the issues: a) superficial self-esteem, b) irrational parental expectations for children, c) mistrust of coaches.

I rarely have students in class who think they're excellent but who don't produce excellent work. More often, I have students with low academic self-esteem who are perfectly capable of producing quality work, but don't because they don't think they can. This is a gross generalization, but now that I've qualified my next remark, allow me to make it: I have coached many more athletes who think they're excellent players but who rarely produce excellent results. Thanks in large measure to our country's exaggerated fixation on youth sports, our secondary school athletes arrive with inflated egos, superficial self-esteem, and great expectations.

My ten-year-old nephew walks around with baseball cards of himself and his season's statistics on the back. Under his picture are the letters M.V.P. His friends have cards with pictures of themselves on them. Under their pictures are the letters M.V.P. The letter M stands for Most. The rest of the acronym stands for Valuable Player. His team is full of Most Valuable Players. This is a very poor message. It cheapens excellence by clustering it. Worse, everybody on the team is equally valuable. We all know that's not true.

The beauty of organized sports has always been, in my opinion, their sheer Darwinism. The older you get, the less or more you play because winning games becomes more important. It's simple and it's why someone invented recreational sports and intramurals.

Too many people do not understand this, and it's a real problem for secondary school coaches. Add to this the second double standard of the nineties, unfunded high school sport programs, and the pressures of coaching begin to add up. When the baseball-card-toting student gets to the high school and is summarily cut from the J.V. team or sits on the bench, a conflict emerges. Self-esteem is diminished and nobody feels good about. At this point, parental pressure on a coach can become too much to bear. Ironically, the baseball-card-toting student earns a C on his first math test, and his family, if they even hear about it, barely reacts. His mediocrity on the field is acknowledged as failure. His mediocrity in the classroom is acknowledged as mediocrity. Throughout my career, students, parents, supervisors, and administrators have been "in my face" about playing time. When it comes to quality performances in the classroom, however, Darwinism flourishes unnoticed!

This leads directly to the issue of trust, or mistrust. Clearly, we're culturally more mistrustful of our coaches than we are of our teachers. If parents and students trusted coaches, they wouldn't question strategy, play-calling, or substitutions. They would understand, because they trust coaches, that not everybody can be part of a team. If parents and students trusted coaches, they would begin to view themselves in a broader context-a team framework-in which their contributions are measured proportionally. Words like dedication, loyalty, hustle, and pride, words which have nothing to do with athletic ability, would make sense and have value to parents and students who trusted coaches.

As it is, coaches in the public forum of secondary school athletics are constantly looking over their shoulders for the fallout of decisions they've made for the good of the team. When I bring a student aside or down to the office because he's not "performing well," hence distracting the forward progress of the class, the onus is on him or her to improve. Decisions that the teacher makes to improve the the learning climate are supported all-around. On the field, when we bench players, too often the onus is on the coach to explain to parents why. The reason is simple. The son or daughter is not contributing effectively to the team effort to win. Yet time after time coaches are called on the carpet over playing time. This is mistrust. It's irrational and antithetical to preparing our children for a competitive world.

Our culture is slipping dangerously close to the one Kurt Vonnegut writes about in the " Harrison Bergeron." His is a society that values equity over every other "virtue." What it does is strip individuals of their strengths by making them all equally weak. Secondary school varsity athletics are not about equity. They are about fair and ethical competition that stretches and tests the belief of the individual in himself and, mostly, in others. As for the classroom, I only wish there was as much interest in and for my students by parents and community members as there is for my players. That's the kind of equity that we need. Until then, I'll continue to marvel at the mixed messages I continue to receive as a teacher/coach.