Athletes have long been role models for young people to look up to. Athletes like Stephen Curry, guard of the Golden State Warriors.
Curry has been named the NBA's Most Valuable Player for the 2014-2015 season, and his team is heading into the NBA Finals Thursday night.
But one high school teacher in Northern California has asked Curry NOT to visit his high school.
Matthew Amaral teaches English at Mt. Eden High School in Hayward. He wrote the letter on his blog this week, and it has since gone viral. In the post, he explains that he wouldn't want Curry to show up, because he doesn't think he'd be honest with students about their dreams.
"...The worst thing you won’t tell them Steph, is that they can’t do it. You won’t tell them that will you? You won’t be able to bring yourself to tell them it is already too late. You won’t tell them about all those years when you were playing in top competitive leagues as a child. You won’t tell them that if they haven’t played organized basketball by the age of sixteen (twelve, really), they have no chance of going pro. You see, the kids I am talking about do not play year-round, they are not in a travelling league, and they have never even heard of a McDonald’s All-American; they just eat McDonald’s two meals a day and have Hot Cheetos in between."
As it turns out, the post was part of a class assignment that Amaral and his students wrote together, and Curry was never actually invited to visit the school.
"This really began in my own classroom, talking about argumentation, and how do you make an argument?" Amaral said. "If you take something like Steph Curry, and let's say you want him to visit your high school, well, sure, you could write a letter to him saying, 'We're really great people, would you like coming here?' Or, what's a harder argument to make -- What if you tell him not to come? And can you make an argument for that?"
Amaral says the letter is about more than Steph Curry -- whom Amaral openly admires, and says so in the letter. It's really about teaching teens who face challenges to be successful by being prepared.
"I'm getting a lot of criticism. I'm being accused of killing dreams ... Our schools are a place where we're not hired to help them dream about being in the NBA, we're hired to give them other routes," Amaral said. "They're very good at dreaming big already, and I think that it's our job to help foster those dreams, but in the school setting, it's also our job to show them the real alternatives in case that dream doesn't happen."
Listen to host A Martinez's full interview with Matthew Amaral by clicking the blue audio player above.