SameOldNudityDrew wrote:I've told this here before but I did a master's degree in history at Villanova between 2004 and 2006. While I was there, I was the teaching assistant for an undergraduate class and I was responsible for helping the two professors who were giving the lectures by helping one of the professors facilitate class discussions once a week between lectures, and I also graded all of the students' work, except for the final exam. It was a survey of Western History basically from 1500 to the present. We covered the Enlightenment, the various revolutions, colonialism, industrialization, the rise of democracy, the world wars, etc.
Anyway, one of the students in the class was on the team. The class started in the first semester of his freshman year, before he'd played much, so he wasn't quite a celebrity in the way that big-name athletes often are on campus, but people in class still knew he was on the team. People worshipped that team on that campus. And frankly, all those players stood out anyway. He was tall (relative to normal humans) and the only black kid in the class.
Anyway, a couple things stand out.
First, he had a habit of checking his phone during class. I could tell he was doing it because he'd always look down at his pocket when he was doing it. So I started calling on him every time he looked down there so he stopped that pretty quick. One time, when he looked down to check his phone, I called on him and he had an unintentionally hilarious answer when I asked him what he thought of what somebody else had just said. His response was, "I don't know, I'm just here to learn."
Second, and I hate to say this, but I caught him plagiarizing an essay he submitted. The writing just sounded suspiciously refined given how little he'd say in class. We didn't have turnitin.com, but I typed in a few sentences in Google and it was clear he was copying and pasting from some webpages. It was policy to report it to the professors, so I did. I did follow up with the professor later, and he told me "that's been taken care of," but I wasn't given an explanation.
Third, before the final was coming up, the professor told me that I had to tutor a couple of the students with the lowest grades in the class in a one-on-one cram session and this guy was one of them. So I prepared some material, showed up to the assigned class, and the student showed up with some middle-aged guy in a polo shirt that indicated he was an assistant coach or something. The student was just looking down at his phone and texting while he walked up to the room. When I invited the student in to get started, the other guy interrupted, and said "just tell me what he needs to know for the final and I'll make sure he knows it." I tried to explain I had some excerpts that I was going to help him practice analyzing (a Voltaire extract, a Dickens account of a visit to a factory), and that I was going to go through how to structure an essay with him, and the assistant coach just said "great," then grabbed the papers I was holding and the two of them just walked off. Later, the professor told me he'd passed the final.
The student was Kyle Lowry.
I'm not sure what to make of the whole thing. I remember thinking he was a terrible student, but that he was clearly there to play basketball, so it was kind of ridiculous to expect him to be going to school too. At the same time, there was clearly a system in place to make sure the players passed, even if that meant essentially the system itself was complicit with cheating. I can't really blame Kyle for that. Still, he really was a terrible student! At the time, I remember having this mixture of feelings. By the end of that semester, he'd established himself as a pretty good player on the team (though not the best in most people's estimation at the time--most people thought Foye and Allen Ray were better--old hands on the board will remember the days when I was really pulling for Randy when he played for us). And I remember feeling kind of impressed with the fact that I TAd Kyle, and other TAs in school were kind of jealous of me, and that made me feel good. But the whole student thing just felt like a charade, and I didn't like that, and still don't really like it. I guess if the class had been able to get through to him a bit more I would've felt better about it. Not that knowing about the roots of democracy would have helped him out in any material way. Honestly, the odds were that if he was like most college players, he was likely not going to be able to make a career out of basketball and who know where he would've ended up. I knew he'd had kind of a tough background there in Philly. But it still felt a bit like a missed opportunity. I'm still a teacher today, and it's my goal that all of my students will walk out of my class having at least thought a little bit more about the world around them. I'm sorry to say I don't think that really happened in Kyle's case in that class.
One the years, as I've kind of followed his career, his personality has come out a lot more than what I saw back then, not just on the basketball court, but also in interviews. Frankly, even if I didn't have that personal connection to him, I'd love him as a player. He's exactly the kind of hard-nosed player I love and he seems like a good guy, especially his friendship with DeRozan. I feel like I've gotten to know him better now as a fan than I did when I was actually helping to lead a class discussion with him in it once a week. Maybe he's come out of his shell a lot more. I think that's part of it. Even if you watch interviews with him from early in his career, he was usually pretty quiet. But I also think it's clear he just wasn't in school to learn, at least not in the way we typically expect from students. I can smile about this story now. He made it. But the much more common odds are that students like that don't succeed and classes like that really don't help those students much. So situations like that are failures. I was a part of it as a young grad student. And Kyle did deserve some responsibility for not trying harder (and for plagiarizing). But I do think it was the adults involved at the time and the school who were mostly responsible.
The whole experience definitely shaped my thinking about college sports, that's for sure. And it also made me a fan of Kyle's. I wish the best for him.
If I had the chance to talk with him again, I'd love to bring up Voltaire's satirical book Candide, which we read in that class. In it, a young student, Candide, is taught by a teacher named Pangloss who convinces the young and impressionable Candide that the world is basically perfect. Then Candide goes out and discovers it's . . . uhh, definitely not! Candide learns not to believe what his teachers tell him but what he learns through experience. If I could, I'd ask Kyle what he's learned from his experience in the world--because (at least in that history class) he sure didn't learn much from his teachers!
Thanks for sharing this story. Lowry is a bit quirky but he has seemed to have grown into himself as a person as well as a player. I think we often forget these guys are kids and while they absolutely have incredible opportunities there is also incredible pressure associated with that.
