Coach Tate, A teacher that embodies the legacy of the YMLA. Every 8th grade scholar must take coach Tate for 8th grade social studies. He also runs Conventus and coaches middle basketball.
Coach Tate comes from right here in stop 6. He went to Dunbar 6th, 7th, and 8th and went to Dunbar high school. After high school he went to Texas Wesleyan where he graduated and played baseball for a year. After college, he taught at William James for 19 years before being asked to join the original YMLA staff. Coach Tate has been married for over 20 years with 2 daughters and 2 sons. His 2 sons Isaac and Langston actually went to the YMLA.
After much consideration, he decided to be a original Dream Team member. While he was comfortable at William James, nothing really happens at William James. He was nervous to join the YMLA staff because there were meetings where parents protested and since this was his community he wasn’t sure if he wanted to go against that movement. But after interviewing with Mr. White, he was sure to join. He was the very first social studies teacher and the first coach for basketball and football. For the first couple of years, the basketball team actually went undefeated.
To him, the thing that makes the YMLA special is the teachers and the culture. Something really special here is Conventus Fratrum, which Coach Tate has been running since the very beginning of the YMLA. Coach Tate treats Conventus the same as a classroom. He finds activities for the young men, he makes them compete against each other, and really helps build a sense of brotherhood. He thinks of it as a break from the norm of the classroom. He also uses Conventus as a way to pass along important info such as events that are happening through the week and organizations you can join. He also shares a college of the week and SAT word of the week. This helped build a culture of college expectations. In the past few years, he’s slowly relinquished control of Conventus to organizations such as STUCO and the Journalism team. He thinks the organizations running Conventus is a great thing. “Brothers Leading Brothers” is exactly how he envisioned Conventus to be. His only piece of criticism is to be mindful of time.
Here at YMLA he now teaches 8th grade social studies. Over the years of him teaching, his teaching methods have changed greatly over the years. He originally taught as a disciplinary, “no talking and just copy the notes”. Later, he realized that the students were respecting the process, but they wouldn’t learn anything. He knew he needed to change his teaching methods so he tried different modalities. He says “kids and adults only have about a 15 minute attention span, and thats for your exceptional speakers. So to hold their attention, you need to give them some work to do every 15 minutes. Get them physically engaged or have them do group work, something to let the lesson sink in. When it comes to teaching history, he wants his students to be able to connect history to the modern day. He wants his students to be able to appreciate the hardship that hundreds of thousands of people went through for them to be citizens now.
His experience with coaching basketball has had it’s ups and downs. He likes teaching the younger guys and teaching the basics. As long as you don’t get lost in the wins and loses, you’ll have a great time as a coach
A quote he lives by is the following.
