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What I have learnt with special kids and Neymar

How football can be a good way to create rapport with students

By RicardoPublished 3 years ago 3 min read
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What I have learnt with special kids and Neymar
Photo by Charisse Kenion on Unsplash

When I was a kid in Brazil all Physical Education teachers used to repeat the same statement at the beginning of the school year – it`s more important to compete than to win. Unfortunately, I was not smart enough to fully understand this philosophy and I used to hate PE.

Being bad in everything you do is terrible! But being bad at everything and sports is even worse. The feeling that you going to lose in your life is quite sad. In schools, all the time someone remembers you that outside will be worse will be harder - will be real life.

One day real life comes in the same way the sun raises. It is just there - real-life - moving to a big city and making new friends. I always wanted to be a professor, so I started by being a Teacher Assistant in a special school, at some point I needed to play football with the pupils and then I changed my perspective about it. The students loved Neymar and I could not say that football was not my preferred hobby, this was my opportunity to work better, to be heard. And then in a question of a few days, I was enjoying talking about football. I realized that my teachers were right – It is more important to compete than to win all the times, sports are a big vector to bring people together.

The sports news we see on television talk about millions of dollars players and worldwide competitions, mostly men competitions. The TV does not show a special kid with autism playing table tennis with his Teacher Assistant. They usually forgot about the small city teams that struggled to keep playing a championship without having money to pay for the hotels and travels. For one Neymar we have hundreds of thousands of kids that never gonna achieve ‘good’ outcome in sports, but it does not matter, everybody knows the benefit of physical activities but beyond that sports can help people to get more confident, to work in a team, to feel like part of something bigger – the national world cup in Brazil is the biggest event of all times, even bigger than carnival, people get together to watch the games, it is a national party.

There is a full range of things beyond wining; there are lots of people who get inspired, a lot of people to inspire. But I would be being naive if I just sustain that money play a bad role in sports. Even if sometimes super-star players and broadcasting just care about making more profit, these people help to keep the flames of the sport's burning. Mbape gave an amazing example in the last cup making donations and supporting important causes, in a reality where fairness is not always the rule of the game, watching normal people, poor kids, becoming the best players on the earth is something.

Maybe I was biased when I was a kid. A lot of other boys were even worse than me, and they played, they had fun, they went to the stadium with their parents and they made a big thing of it redirecting this energy to other sides of their lives. A lot of special kids have serious motor disabilities, but for some of them, Neymar keeps being a hero, sometimes Messi, other times Mbape. Football has been one of my key strategies to keep the conversation and create rapport with students, it is a world where we can navigate, a world where everything is big and great, trying to bring this greatness to education is a daily goal.

We need to keep embracing the most important values of the sport like playing as a team, nothing is worse than a bad loser or a bad winner. Sports exist to create solidarity and to show how to play by the rules, how to improve coordination and improving self-confidence. Money in sports is not bad by itself, not knowing the core values of something is bad by itself, and that is what we need to believe in to create a world where sports are more about example and inspiration than just money – we need to learn how to use something that most of the kids already like, already know about as a gear to improve education.

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About the Creator

Ricardo

Non native English speaker, native Human Being..

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