Former NBA player motivates El Dorado teachers
Former NBA player Joe Kleine stopped by the El Dorado School District’s kick off event to motivate teachers and administrators to be team players.
After leaving the Hogs, he was drafted to the Sacramento Kings and played on several teams including the 1998 NBA champions, the Chicago Bulls. Today, Kleine is co-owner of two Corky’s BBQ restaurants and lives in Little Rock.
Kleine, a former Razorback, met district superintendent Jim Tucker during a summer basketball camp in Fayetteville and kept in touch with him through the years. Tucker invited him to speak to ESD staff, he said.
He used his experience from coaching at UA-Little Rock to encourage enthusiasm, which he said can help uplift people. Older teachers should embrace the younger teachers’ enthusiasm and younger teachers should take advantage of experienced teachers’ wisdom, Kleine said.
“Nothing can be accomplished without enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is infectious. It can take someone who’s having a bad day, a student or a fellow teacher and bring them up. Everything that comes with enthusiasm is positive.”
The former coach said that he didn’t like math until his fourth grade teacher used March Madness-styled competitions to encourage him.
“Every Friday, we’d have a tournament … We would do multiplication tables and it got to where it was so infectious, so much fun and so enthusiastic in the room that I grew to love math. I hated math until Coach Hall made it fun, made it enthusiastic (and) made it different,” he said.
He said that he felt like he was on a team when he played alongside Larry Bird and the Boston Celtics and felt the same feeling among the teachers.
“The agenda wasn’t ‘me’ it was ‘we’ … It was Larry and the leaders setting the tone. By the time we threw the ball up, it was World War III. We were going at it and what it did, it pushed us to push each other and pushed us to compete,” he said. “As I tell my players this all the time, it starts from within … If it’s always coming from the principal, if it’s always coming from the board, if it’s always coming from the coach, players or teachers tune it out, but when it starts coming from your peers … that’s when it takes off.”
Teachers help reinforce a parent’s guidance and are also advocates for children who don’t have adequate home lives, he said.
“Even with knowledgeable, good parents that are involved, it takes the reinforcement of the teacher because sometimes it clicks when someone else says it. Then you have the bad situations, sometimes you’re the only hope … These kids that you’re helping, this is the start of the race for them. It’s so hard to finish the race in a good fashion when you get off to a bad start. You guys got to hang in there together and work with each other.”