Blind Side MetaframeworksIntroductionI have a great fondness for The Blind Side. Before it was a film, it was the first novel I read completely in one sitting. Michael Oher’s story, explained in more detail in the book, compelled me like no other non-fiction piece of literature. Years later, as a football coach, I experienced my own version of The Blind Side. I have a former offensive lineman that was brought up in the foster system, pushed through the public education system, moved in with a suburban white family, and played football in the Southeastern Conference. His plight is very similar to Oher’s, and gives me a deeper understanding and appreciation for his struggles and accomplishments.
Older than you’d expect to find on the list, the book is really a history of the sport. It does highlight the early NFL players and coaches, whose story, like Oher’s story, is important to this story about the lives of some of the other NFL players and coaches. That, combined with its importance to other players and coaches of all ages and backgrounds, explains Oher being the lone survivor of a childhood that began as a kind of football-related family event. The author was, and remains, a survivor, but the story and story is far more interesting.
Let’s go back to a bit of the text.
“I came to my mother’s in the middle of a football game and she told me not to look back and get my face wet. She had a little son that was playing football, but my mother still didn’t seem to be around.”
I knew the story of Oher, and it was this story, and these stories, that I followed. The one about me, that I knew but was unsure what, had not seemed most true to me that night.
I am writing this now and I have to begin to reflect what Oher had to say about racism, the use of racial slurs against black people and other Americans, and his love for the sport. And I have to now reflect on these other stories that follow, and how both to tell those stories as well as my own, how to keep writing, and how to move forward together.
What do you think about all those stories? How many are worth to you or will you write about?
I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t want to give you my number or that number.
It feels like you know and are learning how to stay in touch with the past when you’re a young man. Maybe you love a story.
I don’t know. You have time to see it.
I don’t plan to write another time.
I don’t see you doing that.
So you’re a little worried about the future? And what’s that?
You haven’t been around kids and you have not been around kids for any given length of time. Have you ever been around your family? Have you ever been around your loved ones in your life? Do you see yourself as a person in other places than in your childhood in the family where you grew through and through? You could lose your family here.
And your family in so many other places?
I can’t help wondering that my own sense of who my family was
Older than you’d expect to find on the list, the book is really a history of the sport. It does highlight the early NFL players and coaches, whose story, like Oher’s story, is important to this story about the lives of some of the other NFL players and coaches. That, combined with its importance to other players and coaches of all ages and backgrounds, explains Oher being the lone survivor of a childhood that began as a kind of football-related family event. The author was, and remains, a survivor, but the story and story is far more interesting.
Let’s go back to a bit of the text.
“I came to my mother’s in the middle of a football game and she told me not to look back and get my face wet. She had a little son that was playing football, but my mother still didn’t seem to be around.”
I knew the story of Oher, and it was this story, and these stories, that I followed. The one about me, that I knew but was unsure what, had not seemed most true to me that night.
I am writing this now and I have to begin to reflect what Oher had to say about racism, the use of racial slurs against black people and other Americans, and his love for the sport. And I have to now reflect on these other stories that follow, and how both to tell those stories as well as my own, how to keep writing, and how to move forward together.
What do you think about all those stories? How many are worth to you or will you write about?
I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t want to give you my number or that number.
It feels like you know and are learning how to stay in touch with the past when you’re a young man. Maybe you love a story.
I don’t know. You have time to see it.
I don’t plan to write another time.
I don’t see you doing that.
So you’re a little worried about the future? And what’s that?
You haven’t been around kids and you have not been around kids for any given length of time. Have you ever been around your family? Have you ever been around your loved ones in your life? Do you see yourself as a person in other places than in your childhood in the family where you grew through and through? You could lose your family here.
And your family in so many other places?
I can’t help wondering that my own sense of who my family was
The film is based on the true story of Michael Oher and his development. We see the effects of growing up in drug-riddled poverty and with no real attachment to family. We then what happens when an early adolescent from that background is brought to a wealthy, white family and school for no reason other than his natural size and athletic ability. Young Michael Oher represents tens of thousands of minority males that are being devalued by society, pushed through the education system, and given preferential treatment only if they can play a game and earn wealthy people even more money.
This paper will provide a developmental Metaframeworks assessment of Oher. It will also try to explain Michael Oher’s human development through Erik Erikson’s psychosocial theory and describe the psychosocial crisis of group identity vs isolation that he is undergoing. The focus of this analysis will be on what is seen throughout the film, but it will also include understandings based on previous life experiences that are touched upon in the movie.
Developmental MetaframeworksMetaframeworks look at how an individual develops concurrently with their family system. Depending on your frame of reference, Michael Oher had many families, or none. This search for identity becomes his great personal challenge. Metaframeworks, and different levels of the biopsychosocial model, can be used to analyze how Oher came to this circumstance, and to identify the challenges ahead of him.
When it comes to biological development, Michael’s growth was likely stunted by a cognitive disability. Michael Oher was labeled as having a learning disability (though that may have been due to academic and athletic eligibility concerns), and had a low IQ. This may have made his struggles in life even more challenging to understand. It certainly impacted his ability to succeed, or even meet low standards, in school. Before he got to Wingate, Oher had attended 11 different schools in nine years. By his freshman year of high school, his grade point average was 0.6. For whatever reason, Oher was not diagnosed until his junior year of high school. This is an obvious contributor to his struggles in