Intelligence comes in many different ways; it does not just mean having above average grades or getting a higher education. A “street smart” individual is intelligent because they have common sense and have the ability to overcome problems of everyday life through the gained knowledge of experience. English and education professor Gerald Graff from the University of Illinois at Chicago uses his article, “Hidden Intellectualism” to discuss the importance of integrating “street smarts” with academics in order to help assist students in educational learning.
Graff believes that knowledge goes beyond the academic settings and into the everyday life experiences. I agree with the past president of the Modern Language Association Gerald Graff that …show more content…
Graff uses his own childhood experience “between the need to prove I was smart and the fear of a beating if I proved it too well,” (Graff, 62) as an ongoing conflict for every adolescent who is in conflict of choosing one kind of “smart.” Graff suggests that by allowing students to express their passion about sports, music, or fashion students will hopefully then channel that same devotion into scholarly subjects.
Graff grew up in a middle class block in Chicago during the 1950s, but not far off lived the “hoods” that made it difficult for teens that were “book smart” to keep their focus in school. Since Graff was “desperate for the approval of the hoods, whom [he] encountered daily,” he was willing to keep his academic intellectualism low in order to not get “relieved of [his] pocket change along with [his] self-respect,” (Graff, 62) once again. Instead Graff and his friends would be very analytical about sports and participate in complicated yet acceptable debates about who was the toughest kid in …show more content…
He encourages me and sometimes even pressures me to obtain the highest form of “book smart” while using my observations of street smarts from him. Therefore, I agree to the extent that schools should incorporate the students’ passions into scholarly subjects to help transition the “rudiments of the intellectual life” within the main subjects in school, but not with his idea about “developing classroom units on sports, cars, fashions, rap music, and other such topics,” (Graff, 64). Schools should not create classroom units based on popular culture because some topics do not really help students undergo the “hidden intellectualism” process but instead might distract the class from the educational
Graff believes that knowledge goes beyond the academic settings and into the everyday life experiences. I agree with the past president of the Modern Language Association Gerald Graff that …show more content…
Graff uses his own childhood experience “between the need to prove I was smart and the fear of a beating if I proved it too well,” (Graff, 62) as an ongoing conflict for every adolescent who is in conflict of choosing one kind of “smart.” Graff suggests that by allowing students to express their passion about sports, music, or fashion students will hopefully then channel that same devotion into scholarly subjects.
Graff grew up in a middle class block in Chicago during the 1950s, but not far off lived the “hoods” that made it difficult for teens that were “book smart” to keep their focus in school. Since Graff was “desperate for the approval of the hoods, whom [he] encountered daily,” he was willing to keep his academic intellectualism low in order to not get “relieved of [his] pocket change along with [his] self-respect,” (Graff, 62) once again. Instead Graff and his friends would be very analytical about sports and participate in complicated yet acceptable debates about who was the toughest kid in …show more content…
He encourages me and sometimes even pressures me to obtain the highest form of “book smart” while using my observations of street smarts from him. Therefore, I agree to the extent that schools should incorporate the students’ passions into scholarly subjects to help transition the “rudiments of the intellectual life” within the main subjects in school, but not with his idea about “developing classroom units on sports, cars, fashions, rap music, and other such topics,” (Graff, 64). Schools should not create classroom units based on popular culture because some topics do not really help students undergo the “hidden intellectualism” process but instead might distract the class from the educational