Graffarticle Review

Graffarticle Points

1.) Makes a point where Street smarts are untapped in the education system because they are often times used towards anti-intellectual interests.

2.) Street smarts and intellectualism must join up in order to combat a boring education system. 

3.) Graff makes a point that he was making intellectual movements in ways he didn’t even know, for example his love for sports and how he knew so much about them as well as his arguments he would have with his friends regarding who was the toughest.

4.) Graff learned how to write intellectual sentences and partake in debate because of his early years with arguing about sports and it was from this that he was trained up into intellectualism. 

5.) Graff proposes various teaching ways where students can engage in a debate about school curriculum or a text without losing their own personal voice and way of speaking in the matter.

Critical Review

1.)    I agree with much of what he is saying here when it comes street smarts, because whereas in high school I had the ability to make friends pretty easily this in no way counted towards my GPA.

2.)    I think when bringing current fads or teenage media topics it will draw the students into the conversation more but there must be a line drawn where one does not take away too much from the other, after all school exists to educate.

3.)    I learned how to formulate my thoughts well and tell stories because of watching movies and sports and retelling the incidents to my friends and engaged in discussion from what I had just shared.  So I definitely agree with what he is saying here about learning how to share ideas and thoughts from the school yard.  I would find myself debating with friends over sports, people at school we disliked, or attractive women in the media, and this can definitely be argued to have helped shape our social abilities as well as sharpened the way our thinking process worked.

4.)    This is actually responding to number 5 because I feel I already answered 4, but how we read a text it is easy to show little interest in it because we don’t understand it completely, like Shakespeare.  I think it is important in schools to educate the individual without taking away their way of speaking, these texts have to be taught in a way that is relatable to the class.