Oakland Raiders: Object Lesson From Your First-Grade Teacher

Let's make it plain and simple. This is your object lesson for today.

Look at the blackboard and take good notes:

Go Raiders! Get a touchdown, Oakland Raiders.

Grab the football and hold on to it. Look at the picture to get an idea of what we are teaching today. This is your object lesson for today.

Now go back deep into the recesses of your mind and remember the time you first knew that you were good enough to aspire to play professional football.

Think back, all the way back to elementary school when you played touch ball. I think you called it that.

You were good then, and you are even better now.

You may have wobbled a little when you were short and young, but now you walk with a swagger and have a new attitude.

Don't disappoint those teachers from every level of schooling that you completed, Oakland Raiders. Give them something to get excited about. Get a touchdown!

Furthermore, keep the other guys from getting those touchdowns. Enough is enough.

I watch my students smirk at me on Mondays. I listen to my relatives telling me about what's been happening for five or six years.

Let me tell you right now: I don't want to hear it.

I want to see a touchdown.

Just imagine I am your tough, first grade teacher with the big paddle (before those laws on paddling were put in place).

She stood over you, tall and stern, like a giant in those days, telling you to get your homework done and to get to class on time, not sometimes, but everyday.

Well, here she is again. Come on, use your imagination! She's standing over you, again, with a big paddle. Only now you are the giant, and she looks like a petite senior citizen.

Yeah, you are taller and bigger than she is now, but you have that kind of respect for her that you just can't let her down.

She demands a touchdown. You muster up the strength, skills, and power to execute those plays and make one, if not two or maybe three.

That teacher that you are imagining has on the T-shirt that reminds you of military fatigues. She is looking at you eye-to-eye, telling you to go to war, football war, and aim for victory. Her message is loud and clear.

She's ready to give you a grade on Sunday evening.

You get inspired.

You don't want a C-, or D or F. You want an A.

In fact, you want more than an A for effort, you want an A for outstanding performance, for efficiency and effectiveness.

Class dismissed.