| SPORTS
| October 13, 2004
Athletic
Academics
Professors talk sports as part
of English and economics classes
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Photo illustration by
Andrew Campbell |
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By Melissa
Winn
Contributor to The Shorthorn
Discussing baseball movies such as Bull Durham or talking about
the free agency of a major league sports player are hardly considered
schoolwork.
But those are some of the methods that attract students to English
and economics courses where traditional ideas are taught using sports
examples.
In the spring, the English Department will offer a Baseball in Literature
course. This is the third time the course will be offered and the
first time it will focus on screenplays.
Dr. Kathleen Porter started teaching the course last spring. The
English professor said she loves the game and grew up watching baseball
at Arlington Stadium, which was demolished in 1994. She said students
don’t necessarily have to be sports fans to learn from the
course.
Porter plans to publish a book next year entitled Striking Back:
Women In Baseball Literature.
“Baseball is a traditionally American pastime and unique to
our culture,” she said. “The literature allows you to
appreciate the American experience, not necessarily baseball.”
Six novels will be read, including Bernard Malamud’s The Natural
and Eliot Asinof’s Eight Men Out. The class will also watch
the movies and discuss the differences. Two films, A League Of Our
Own and Bull Durham, were not originally novels but will be viewed
and discussed in class.
Porter said the class fills up each time it’s offered, and
a lot of non-English majors sign up.
“I don’t really get a whole bunch of athletes taking
the course, surprisingly enough,” she said.
Porter said anyone who enjoys reading and writing will appreciate
the material, and she hopes to offer a more general sports literature
class in the future.
“Right now, I am just lucky I get to teach a course I love
so much,” she said.
Dr. Craig A. Depken II, who alternates teaching an Economics of
Sports class with Dr. Dennis Wilson in the summer, said that sports
helps students grasp basic concepts of economics quicker than traditional
classes.
“Whether you’re talking about free trade in NAFTA or
free agency in baseball, the principle is the same,” he said.
Depken said UTA is unique because it has two professors who can
teach the course. When it was first offered in 2000, only 20 other
schools in the country were experimenting with it.
“Economics is a powerful way of looking at the world,”
he said. “In the end, sports is a business, and there is a
lot of emotion involved in it. We try to change the way people think
about it.”
Both Porter and Depken said that students tend to be more talkative
in class because most can relate to sports. Depken said that women
who take his class end up knowing more about sports than their husband
or boyfriend.
“Sports is empowering,” he said.
He added that the course deals with all sports, but the examples
he uses focus mostly on baseball because more data is available.
He said he enjoys teaching something he knows a lot about.
“Students can tell if a teacher likes what they are teaching,
and it gets them more involved,” he said.
Because the course is only eight weeks and a junior level course,
students must first complete microeconomics. Depken said they don’t
spend as much time explaining the principles as they do applying
them.
“I want students to come away from the class saying ‘Wow,
I think I learned something there,’ ” he said.
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