Essay 1

Sydney Cox
Mr. Andy Smith
Writing 1020-015
28 April 2009
Where is the Fun in Intellectualism?
A very common misconception is that students cannot learn or become more intellectual if they are having fun. People think that it is required to read books that are considered to be academic in order for them to learn anything. Being intellectual involves being able to have intelligent conversations, ask questions, debate, and knowing what questions to ask. In professor and author, Gerald Graff’s essay “Hidden Intellectualism,” he talks about how schools and colleges should try to find a way to channel students’ interests into academics. There is so much pressure on students to get good grades and to also fit in and be accepted by others. Gerald Graff’s essay “Hidden Intellectualism” effectively declares that we can learn how to be intellectual from life’s lessons as well as from academic texts.
In high school, our teachers would assign us papers all the time. These papers had topics that were fairly easy to write about but would bore the reader to death if anyone actually had to read them and attempt to be interested. They would give us a sheet of paper with a list of the different subjects we could write about. Graff understands this when he points out, “We assume that it’s possible to wax intellectual about Plato, Shakespeare, the French Revolution, and nuclear fission, but not about cars, dating, clothing fashions, sports, TV, or video games” (142). Writing papers about something that happened years and years ago is not very much fun and does not make me want to write a great paper. Your teachers tell you to write papers about intellectual books or subjects, but why would you want to write about something that has already been run into the ground by countless others before you? Those before us probably did a better job with Shakespeare than we ever will.
Most people are intellectual in their own way. It is just that certain people are classified as intellectuals because they are said to be smart, read intellectual books, and have intellectual discussions. We have always been told that school is where you learn things and become intellectual and that all other little things you do or focus on could never teach you anything. Graff mentions in his essay that, “Sports after all was full of challenging arguments, debates, problems for analysis, and intricate statistics that you could care about, as school conspicuously was not” (145). He explains how he thinks that schools and colleges should learn from and take after the world of sports entertainment in order to get students interested and want to learn about what they are saying, because obviously if you do not understand the intellectual books that you are forced to read at school then they are not helping you to be any more intellectual than you were before.
Also, there is the problem that our society does not accept people being smart or intellectual. Your teachers and your parents want you to be intellectual, but the people you want to be accepted by, like your peers and friends, will not think you are “cool” if they think that you are trying to act better than them. Growing up, Graff had to be careful about how he presented himself to each group of people that surrounded him. Graff explains that “it was necessary to maintain the boundary between ‘clean-cut’ boys like me and working-class ‘hoods,’ as we called them, which meant that it was good to be smart in an openly bookish sort of way” (144). He had to worry about his reputation with the hoods because if he acted or talked differently from them, then they would think he was trying to be better than them and beat him up. Students always feel the need to be accepted by their peers, so that is something that will interfere in the classroom and might affect their eagerness to learn things in class.
When was the last time you learned something? There is a big chance that you learned it from an experience you went through yourself. This may be the best and most interesting way to learn new things. There are a lot of teachers today that do not care enough about their teaching or their students. Teachers should try to find new ways of teaching their students that can get them involved and actually make them want to learn. During the time that I have been in school, there have only been a few teachers who have actually tried to make learning fun. One of these experiences was my first semester of college when we wrote and produced our own play. That was an awesome time, and it was so much fun because we got to plan out everything about the play and learn more about theater. It really showed us exactly what it took to put on a production. The only way that we were able to do that was because two of our professors wanted to do class a different way than just the normal, boring lecture. It is normally thought that if you are having fun, then you are not learning anything. Students often talk about things and learn about them outside of school with their friends. Graff recalls, “I was practicing being an intellectual before I knew that was what I wanted to be” (145). This shows how all the time, there are students that are practicing to be intellectuals because they argue and ask questions about things they care about, which shows that they do not necessarily have to read boring school books in order to learn things.
It would be really great if we could come up with ways for students to have fun and also learn without even realizing it. These days, college campuses consist of many different people of all age groups and ethnicities. With all of this new technology, we could have various different kinds of learning to offer. Some people learn better with more hands-on, fun activities, and some people learn better by being able to teach themselves the material. We do not have to do away with lecture classes because those are still beneficial, but there needs to be more done to encourage students to actually listen to what is being said in those classes. Universities could offer different types of classes, both hands-on and lecture, for students to choose from based on what kind of learning techniques they prefer. This could also reduce class sizes and produce more one-on-one time for the students with their professors in order for them to feel more confident in their class.
It is really disappointing that schools and colleges often do not try to target student’s interests in order to help them learn. A lot of people do not realize that school and learning can actually be interesting and not completely boring. Gerald Graff’s essay does a very good job describing his experience in high school where he was constantly battling being smart and also being interested in school. There are so many other ways to learn, like life lessons, rather than just reading books.







Work Cited
Graff, Gerald. “Hidden Intellectualism,” They Say I Say. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006. 142- 148.