Disliking Books Summary Carl Roger’s once said, “The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn and change.” In Gerald Graff’s, “Disliking Books”, Graff describes his academic and intellectual upcoming through his experiences with literature in school. Graff, an English major from University of Chicago and Stanford, was not always the scholar that he is now. Growing up in an unforgiving environment like Chicago often threatened Graff with menacing situations including the risk of being beaten by fellow peers if he was perceived to be knowledgeable or involved in his school work. Nevertheless, Graff’s encouragement at home and latent desire to be well-informed supported him through his adolescence and through college
In Gerald Graff’s “Hidden Intellectualism” he emphasizes his own personal opinion and thoughts on street smarts vs. intellect or book smarts. He then goes into saying how students do not need to read intellectually challenging writing to become intellectuals. While talking through this he figures out what category he would put himself in. He really notices this about himself when he stopped and listened to himself and realize how much he argued and how he reasoned with particular subjects. Graff then goes in telling a story about Michael Warner who also, like Graff, found out where he would put himself, and it would for the same reason Graff did, by arguing.
Dance is so much more than how many times you can twirl or high you can jump. Dance allows us to tell our stories in the most basic and truthful way. I agree with Graff’s, “Hidden Intellectualism” because Graff argues that school related subjects are less known knowledgeable than subjects that are in interest. He uses the term street smarts over power book smarts because students who have a more understanding on a topic they have interest in than academic subjects intend to do good. The less the students know about a subject they are not interested in bore them which attempts them to do poorly.
Hidden Intellectualism In Hidden Intellectualism, Gerald Graff begins with the age-old argument of difference between “book smart” and “street smarts.” He explains that in many cases, these book smarts, are “hidden” intellectualism. He states that current society is still focused on textbook, and classroom intellectualism. Moreover, the form of intellectualism is concealed under the mask of usual discussion about fashion, sport, co-star and many more. And it is also true that some young generation are not good on classroom but extra ordinary on other aspects of extra-curricular activities. Graff argues that school should take these street smarts and make them work on academic work.
Gerald Graff’s essay “Hidden Intellectualism” contemplates the age-old idea that street smarts are anti-intellectual. However, as Graff points out, “schools and colleges are at fault for missing the opportunity to tap into such street smarts and channel them into academic smarts.” (244). What Graff means by this is that being street smart does not mean a person lacks intelligence. Rather, educational institutions need to find a way to effectively ‘tap into’ this different format of intellectualism to produce academic intelligence. Graff goes on to point out that society associates ‘weighty’ subjects, like Shakespeare and Plato, with intellectualism, but not less serious subjects, such as sports and video games.
In “Hidden Intellectualism”, by Gerald Graff he makes a stunning point that compares street smarts to book smarts. He brought up the idea that if teachers incorporated things that students are passionate about, and topics that they can relate to they would get more passion and effort in their work, rather than assigning topics that the students have nothing in common with. I agree with this author's opinion one hundred percent. Just recently my high school teacher let us write an essay on our favorite band so she could evaluate our writing, and I felt like writing the essay was a piece of cake. In another class we had to write about the Bill of Rights and court cases from hundreds of years ago.
In Gerald Graff’s essay, “Hidden Intellectualism”, he believes that students who do well in sports are more intellectual than those students who focus on academics. The reason being that students tend to do well in concepts that interest them more than those subjects that don’t. He says, “For students who get excited about their passion for cars will often write poorly and unreflectively on that topic of Shakespeare or Plato.” Something that I have always loved to do when I was a little kid was to watch my grandma bake. It’s how I got so into baking. For many people, baking is a tedious task that requires too much work which takes up a lot of time.
Roosevelt was a very well-respected President. He also happened to be the only President in American history to ever to receive a third term. Having three terms alone shows his credibility and the trust that his listeners had in him. Though he was so well respected and obviously knew he was much more important than most Americas, right from the start of his radio broadcast he addresses the people listening as “My Friends” which implies he is talking to everybody on one specific level. It is also Franklin D. Roosevelt admitting to his listeners that he is no better than anyone else and he needed the listeners of his broadcast to leave his credibility unquestioned, because he knew that alone he could not defeat this Nazi power.
Intellect is a power that leads us to express our smartness. In the essay “Hidden Intelligence” by Gerald Graff he argues that the intellectual world is “much like the world of team sports, with rival interpretations … rival theories… and elaborate team competitions”. He attests from his own experience that intellect does not only exist in the scholarly form of thinking which is known as academic smart, knowledge can also take the form of street smart. He also demonstrates that there are some students are not academically good at school but they are very smart (by explaining a situation about a 14 years boy who does not show intellectual side because of fear of bullying but practices hidden intellectualism). It seems that the students who
Schools should have a more hand on approach with bullying so that children can understand that what they are doing is wrong. Now any approach of changing the schools is not going to fix problems right away. But if we start and make a little