Bad Cop…Good Cop…Great Coach—Summative Elective
Claire Owens, 14″ x 20″ watercolor on Arches paper•Robert Gerst, Digital Editing
In a summative elective, Professor Robert Gerst notes, students treat culturally rich topics from the perspectives of two or more Liberal Arts disciplines.
In the summative elective Friday Night Lights, students apply what they learned and how they learned to think in previous Liberal Arts courses to a television series that, even as it focuses on high school football in Texas, examines contemporary American society.
In her final Friday Night Lights essay, student Claire Owens writes that, as he coaches, Coach Taylor expresses two profoundly different educational philosophies. In the watercolor above, she expresses her assessment of Coach Taylor as an image.
In the cloud-filled sky above the home field of the Dillon Panthers, Claire Owens represents Coach Taylor’s two approaches. On the left she depicts his tough, stormy coaching. On the right she depicts his sunny, fatherly coaching. Taylor’s balance, she maintains, is what makes the Dillon Panthers the strong team that they are.
Every team needs a hard and stern coach as well as a soft, genuine one, Owens asserts. The middle ground where the two styles combine is the most vital aspect of any sports team, Owens says. For the Dillon Panthers, the blue skies in the distance signify hope for the future and winning the Texas state championship. Ultimately, in this show as in life, the players shine through the stormy clouds, learning and growing from when the coach was hard on them and strengthening their bonds with each other and with the coach when he welcomed them as a father would.
Taylor, Claire Owens judges, exemplifies how an effective coach bonds a team using both stern and gentle coaching methods. She say all that in the hues of her watercolor clouds.