Chapter 8

12/5/2012

The Blind Side by Michael Lewis

Chapter 8 (pages 176-206) – Character Coaches

As a highly recruited high school athlete, Michael Oher was more worried about his play on the football field over his work in the classroom. This caused the Tuohy family to hire a tutor to help Michael’s grades so he could get into college. If he was planning on going to a major college like Ole Miss or Mississippi State to play football, he would still need the grades to make it into the college like any other student. This meant that Michael would have to raise his ACT and SAT test scores and also his GPA. His GPA had to go from 0.9 in his sophomore year up to at least a 2.65 GPA by the end of his senior year to play college football. Michael began to work with a tutor. Her name was Sue Mitchell and she was a graduate of Ole Miss. Michael would work with Sue for up to eight hours a night after a seven hour school day. Studying meant almost no time to himself and he couldn’t stay focused enough to remain ready for new information.

By the end of Michael’s senior year, he was at a 2.05 GPA but he needed to raise it to a 2.65 GPA. Sean began looking for ways to increase Michael’s GPA. He was told about online courses that could update a grade more rapidly than high school or a different form of education. He was told all of this from the Ole Miss football coach. “From Coach O, Sean learned about the Internet courses offered by Brigham Young University. The BYU courses had magical properties: a grade took a mere ten days to obtain and could be used to replace a grade from an entire semester on a high school transcript.” Coach O really wanted Michael Oher on the football team, so he attempted to bend the rules for Sean but was unable to do so. This meant Michael would use the BYU online education. Michael picked a course called “Character Education” and he was able to increase his GPA by using the online courses on BYU’s educational website.

I connected to this chapter because for an extended amount of time in my freshman year, I was really worried about how my grades were going to end up. I was thinking that my GPA wasn’t going to be high enough and that it would really affect my future in high school. However, I didn’t think about my SAT or ACT scores because I didn’t know about the tests. The obvious later became clear to me. Freshman year seemed more important than it really was and I began to think about my future after high school. I figured out what I wanted to have my major in college be and how that would assist me with the future that I wanted.