Preview

Gerald Graff's Essay 'Hidden Intellectualism'

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
213 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Gerald Graff's Essay 'Hidden Intellectualism'
In the essay “Hidden Intellectualism”, Gerald Graff references his own experience growing up to explain the reason he thinks academic intellectual should be channeled through a student’s interest rather than traditional teaching to improve academics. He knows that everyone need to read intellectually challenging writings to become intellectuals themselves, but they might have a harder time if they are force to write about something that the teacher may find interesting. The people who were “street smart” would not be so smart when they were in school and could not apply their intelligence to academic work. Gerald uses his own experience growing up and not liking to read anything accept sports magazines. He also talked about how the area he

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    Richard Rodriguez is a great example of what it is like to be part of the students who belong to the schooled category. Rodriguez himself is one of the many students that lacked the ability to critically think. Rodriguez read and read books that his teacher once mentioned, but still didn’t feel smart. Being a "scholarship boy" Rodriguez was unable to critically think for himself and was unable to capture and completely understand what he was reading. "I lacked a point of view when I read." (Rodriguez 202) Not only did this make him feel like he wasn’t smart but also made him feel insecure about himself.So insecure that many times, after reading a book, he would look up reviews and comments on what people thought of the book because he believed…

    • 364 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Undoubtedly, some of the language in this week’s assigned reading challenges readers. The context journal helps students meet this challenge by identifying:…

    • 350 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    In Gerald Graff’s essay Hidden Intellectualism; he criticizes those who do not put appropriate value into "street smarts." Graff persists that knowledge extends further than academic learning and carries into the everyday life. He writes about some of his precollege experiences with being as a “nonintellectual” due to his lack of interest in academic literary subjects. Graff also discusses how his interest in sports actually led him into academic intellectualism as an adult. Graff’s theses that intellectualism should not be restricted to just the “intellectual” academic subjects but instead should include popular interests of students into academic studies. Graff effectively debates that his childhood conversations with his friends are…

    • 606 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    In Kingwell’s 2012 essay “Intellectuals and democracy”, He deduces that education should be pursued to form wiser and more intellectual citizens. The 2012 essay was published in Unruly voices: essays on democracy, Civility, and the human imagination. His essay has a specific eye on students and parents. Kingwell’s essay is deliberately a philosophical argument of what has become of the ideology behind todays goal for education. His main strategy to persuade the reader of his argument is to build a trust between the reader he builds this intrinsic ethos from the very beginning by sharing a personal experience from the past. The connection built becomes crucial to the validity of his statements and also his proposal later…

    • 151 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Better Essays

    Mark Bauerlein's “The Dumbest Generation” states that being meaningfully connected is important, yet significantly interferes with our learning. The excerpt explains that we need to tone down our social connections in favour of education in order to excel in life, evident in Bauerlein’s statement, “Kids need a reprieve and retreat. For them to grow up into mindful citizens, and discerning consumers, then, adolescents need to break the social circuit and think beyond the clique and the schoolyard.” Bauerlein also holds the opinion on how “Maturity follows a formula: The more kids contact one another, the less they heed the tutelage of adults. When peer consciousness grows too fixed and firm, the teacher’s voice counts for nothing…

    • 1318 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Intelligence isn’t gained only in the class room. What people learn outside of school can actually teach many of the principles. Graff remembers, “It was in these discussions with friends about toughness and sports, I think, and in my readings of sport books and magazines, that I began to learn the rudiments of the intellectual life: how to make an argument, weigh different kinds of evidence, move between particulars and generalizations, summarize the views of others, and enter a conversation about ideas” (383). The essence of Graff’s statement is that while the subject he was engaged in was not considered relevant in academic circles; he did learn the principles that educators were trying to teach him with traditional subjects.…

    • 688 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In the article “Hidden Intellectualism” written by Gerald Graff, Graff target college students to inform them about a hidden intellectualism that can be found in our everyday society. In the article Graff draws attention to the many types and ways different people can identify with intellectualism. He argues that people are intelligent in several ways and just need to learn how to plug the intellectualism they enjoy into a school-like setting during classes. He exemplifies this by using his own intellect within sports and such as an adolescent. While being very analytical of sports team movies, and the toughness he and his friends engaged in, he was unknowingly before now trained to be intellect in a class room and other school subjects. In figuring all this out Graff only had to plug it into his school work. Graff uses descriptive detail, blunt similarities, and his own basic understand and experiences to convey his thoughts of hidden intellectualism to his collegiate audience.…

    • 850 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    The football team from Mountain View High School won the Arizona State Championship last year. Again. Unbeknownst to the vast majority of the school’s student body, so did the Science Bowl Team, the Speech and Debate Team, and the Academic Decathlon team. The football players enjoyed the attentions of an enthralled school, complete with banners, assemblies, and even video announcements in their honor, a virtual barrage of praise and downright deification . As for the three champion academic teams, they received a combined total of around ten minutes of recognition, tacked onto the beginning of a sports assembly. Nearly all of the graduating seniors will remember the name and escapades of their star quarterback; nearly none of them will ever even realize that their class produced Arizona’s first national champion in Lincoln-Douglass Debate. After all, why should they? He and his teammates were “just the nerds.”…

    • 1324 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    In Gerald's Graff essay Hidden Intellectualism, Gerald argues that many educators and other people do not take advantage of students full potential, stating that there is intellect far beyond academic skills, intellectualism can also be found in "street smarts" . Thorough out the essay, Graff supports his argument by providing us with his own life experience. Gerald was a man who loved sports, but hated books and anything involved with academics. Growing up in the Melting Pot of Chicago, being intellectual was not in favor for Graff. He lived deciding between two sides, having academic knowledge or streets smarts. Little did he realize that the squabbling of sports with his friends was making him smart and intellectual, he was analyzing, thinking, reading and learning. As Graff aged the brawl inside of him solved, and the intellect part won; the experience he had as a child opened his eyes, and saw that the love of sports info made him smart. It was his street smarts that got him where he is, Graff continues that if there is no connection between text and student. Students cannot find a life connection of their street smarts to the textbook thus making it boring and unappealing. Graff believes that street smarts are looked down upon because they are not good enough to teach, schools are missing the potential a student holds by not taking…

    • 438 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Growing up where I was raised street smart was having the experience and knowledge necessary to deal with the potential difficulties or dangers of life in an urban environment. Like you know people actions and how to read body language and get the sense something isn’t right here. It even can be starting your own busy be and entrepreneur. If you were book smart you’ll get call a nerd and picked on in rough area of the city. I saw some of my peers try to dumb down the way they would talk when they come down to the park to play basketball because not too many people in the area had the vocabulary they had.…

    • 327 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Gerald Graff's essay, "Hidden Intellectualism," is a critique on how schools are missing out on a valuable opportunity to encourage students to learn more academically. Graff feels that utilizing what he calls "street smarts" is an effective way to relate to students. I feel Graff's theory is an effective way to use student's interests to engage them in school. I agree with Graff because if a student is more interested in the lesson that is being taught, they are more likely to pay attention and actually learn something.…

    • 759 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Gerald Graff, Professor of English and Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, stated in "Hidden Intellectualism," that in every student, there is intellect that is trying to break out and encourage them to discover their own intellectualism, that was hiding within (Graff 23). “Hidden Intellectualism” is a teaching article directed towards schools and teachers to try and help kids bring out their intellectualism at a young age or bring different types of smarts to help students become more engaged. Graff's article, "Hidden Intellectualism," uses Ethos and Pathos effectively by using his own life in school to connect…

    • 1051 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Friedman begins with, bringing to our attention, the type of terms our society uses to describe the “intellectually curious and academically serious.” These types of derogatory terms aid in displaying Fridmans view point on the subject as he believes that the `use of these words to describe nerd and geeks are in fact an issue. Fridman uses diction that disgraces our society who casts out nerds because of their “intelligence and refusal to conform to societies anti-intellectual values.”…

    • 402 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Hidden Intellectualism

    • 737 Words
    • 3 Pages

    After coming to an understanding of what these conversations helped Graff establish, the idea that "the sports world was more compelling than school because it was more intellectual than school, not less" began to surface in his mind. Graff then pleads the reader to take interesting topics unrelated to school and look at them "through academic eyes." In other wards, Graff essentially conveys the idea of taking street smart topics and turning them into intellectual debates. His stance portrays a culture that incorporates common subjects to be discussed and viewed in different ways.…

    • 737 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    “A vocation is not fulfilled by vague reading and a few scattered writings” –A.G. Sertillanges.…

    • 760 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays