Enthusiasm is Contagious

Enthusiasm is Contagious
Swen Nater

A salesman minus enthusiasm is just a clerk.
Harry F. Banks

In 1948 Coach Wooden took the job as UCLA head basketball coach. Early in the school year, all faculty and coaches were invited to hear a guest speaker at Royce Hall. Coach Wooden wasn’t very excited about going but he didn’t want the rest of the faculty to think he considered himself different or better. Therefore, he attended and, to make sure everyone knew he was there, he took a seat near the front.

In Coach Wooden’s own words, “The speaker presented a subject that, at the time, I had absolutely no interest in. However, because of his enthusiasm about it, the next day, I found myself at the UCLA library, reading books on the same subject. I have had a passion for it ever since.” The speaker’s subject was Abraham Lincoln.


One of Coach’s favorite poems is:
No written word, no spoken plea,
Can teach our youth what they should be,
Nor all the books on all the shelves.
It’s what the teachers are themselves.

When you teach anything, you start with motivation, and nothing can motivate better than a teacher’s enthusiasm for the subject. There are few things I like more than card tricks. There’s something really cool about messing with people’s minds. One trick is where I have you pick three cards, put them back into the deck, and then discard the entire deck into two piles, face up and face down while you look for one of your cards in the face up pile. You don’t find it. I keep discarding the face down piles until there are three cards left face down. Those are your cards. During the entire trick, I never see your cards. Isn’t that cool? (E-mail me and I’ll send you the step-by step method.)

I gained my enthusiasm for card tricks from Bob Weiss (NBA guard one generation before me). When I had my team (the San Diego Clippers) over to my house for a Christmas party, Bob—then assistant Coach—had everyone glued as he performed amazing trick after amazing trick. After the party, I asked him to show me one trick. He did, and the next day I found myself in the bookstore, looking for books on card tricks.

How does a teacher use enthusiasm to motivate students to be interested in a subject? For one thing, you never tell them you are excited about it; that won’t mean anything. That would be like Bob Weiss telling us he loves doing card tricks but never doing one, or the Royce Hall speaker telling the audience he loves Lincoln but never saying why. Enthusiasm becomes contagious when a teacher shows how cool he or she thinks the subject is. It’s the World History teacher who is perplexed and fascinated with Columbus’s drive to sail. It’s the English teacher who comes up with crazy mnemonics for memorizing spelling words.  

So math teachers! Get out there and show ‘em how much you love logarithms.

A salesman minus enthusiasm is just a clerk.
Harry F. Banks

Check this website out - Great for the coaches!