I’m Mr. Jackson. I am a world history and sports psychology teacher at Irvington. Not many people know about the Sports Psychology class. Everything you learned in sports psychology is specific to sports, but they can be applied in jobs, relationships, other things.

 In class, we watched these three episodes of Camp Spartan, which are on YouTube. Joe De Sena is the founder of Spartan Race. He is an outlier, he’s far out there. And that’s the person you want to study. Because if we’re studying everyone that’s doing the same thing, then we’re not learning anything. And in those episodes, he runs a two week Death Race for people ages 8 to 18. And for two weeks, he pushes them incredibly hard. The questions that arise from that situation are: If you were a parent, would you want your kids to go that camp? Would you want to go to that camp yourself? And that way, we learn a lot about ourselves. How far should you push yourself? 

Our class unit was on purpose at that time, and one of Joe’s purposes is he wants to make his kids better, stronger people. So the question is, you have a purpose that’s going to drive you, but how far do you take your purpose, especially in this situation?

Some students still think he’s crazy. Some say he was making a lot of good points. But that’s what makes for a good lesson. It’s something where everyone can have different opinions, we can listen to everyone’s opinions, then come up with our own. 

Joe’s an interesting guy. His whole personal philosophy is to rip people off the couch. So initially, it was to rip a million people off the couch, and he was able to do that. And now he wants to rip 100 million people off the couch. And he’s trying; his purpose is to make people better. So that’s interesting to study as well. 

Hunter S. Thompson is this famous author, and he wrote a letter and he said, “You’re either a swimmer or a floater.” And what he means by that is that swimmers have a definite goal and a purpose like Joe does: he wants to rip these people off couches, and he wakes up every morning, he’s swimming that direction every day. Then there’s a floater, which is somebody that’s basically just treading water. They don’t have a purpose.

These topics are always hard to teach. Like, how do you teach someone to have a passion? People don’t really understand that passion. I think people say, “Well, I’m going to follow my passion, I’m just going to be happy.” But the Latin root for passion is “pati-,” which means “to suffer.” I can be passionate about a sport, let’s say tennis. That’s great, but it’s not going to be all sunshine and roses, it’s going to be hard work.

I can’t tell somebody what their passion needs to be. It has to come from them. I can give ideas and things to talk about on how you can potentially create your best passion or purpose. But it’s eventually at the end gonna come up to the students. And my guess is, some students will get it, other students won’t yet. It’s like planting seeds. Hopefully 10-15 years down the road, they’ll realize that maybe I need something to swim towards. And then maybe, hopefully, this stuff will come back.