McKylie Hoff
Professor Vieregge
English 101
21 October 2014
Hidden Intellectualism Essay
In Gerald Graff’s essay “Hidden Intellectualism,” he believes that there is a mistake being made by educators because they are not manipulating the criteria to fit the student’s main focus. He comes across this by using an example of a ”young person who is impressively ‘street smart’ but does poorly in school,” (Graff p. 198) and goes on to say that “schools and colleges might be at fault for missing the opportunity to tap into such street smarts and channel them into good academic work.” (198) Now, my question to you is: Is this really the educator’s fault that these students are failing to learn the knowledge we perceive as book smarts?
My History Teacher once told me that “the teacher opens the door and the student chooses to enter it.” This means that the teacher provides the information for the student to gather and get grips on, but it is ultimately the Student’s drive that will allow him or her to use this information to turn into his or her own knowledge. I could not agree with this any more. It is your choice to learn and if you truly want to gain knowledge you will. It is not someone else’s responsibility to push you and make you better or to tap into your knowledge. It is your own personal drive that will get you were you want to go.
Although it is your personal responsibly to take information and turn it into knowledge and to engage yourself into learning, a teacher can make this process much easier and more enjoyable.
Today's classrooms are changing. Teachers strive to make the classroom more engaging, effective and geared to today's learners," said Jim Marshall, CEO of Promethean. "With the rapid proliferation of screens in the classroom, teachers need to revolutionize their content and lesson delivery. In response to the diversity of their students and the focus on personalized instruction, teachers also need to be able to quickly and easily assess student understanding and adjust the activity and instruction in the classroom to meet those needs. (Marketwired )
Today’s teachers are working harder than ever to help find these ways to make learning more fun for the kids today. They are finding ways to relate and interest these young minds. The passage above is from an article called “Introducing ClassFlow(TM) -- A Revolutionary New Platform for Teachers That Makes Lesson Planning More Efficient and Lesson Delivery More Impactful.” The article talks about the “ClassFlow a transformative, cloud-based classroom orchestration tool that enables teachers to create lessons, deliver interactive content across multiple devices, and assess student understanding.”(Marketwired) Here teachers are using technology to help interact with students to capture their attention. This is just one example of how teachers are finding ways to help interest students.

Now how many times have you heard a kid during class ask “Why are we learning this?” or “I’m never going to use this in the real world!” You may or may not use some of the information teachers give you in the future, but all information is important to your future. Now let me say that in just a little bit different way. Learning any kind of information can help you build a foundation to learn more information witch can help learn more, and at some point this cycle has to be used in your future life. Learning is a skill that can be developed by practice. To become more fluent in learning it requires you to learn some of the thing that you may think are unimportant or not worth learning. Any kind of knowledge will is important to the success of your future depending on how you use it.
In Graff’s article he talks about how you have to start with things that interest the kid and then move to the curriculum. He says “It’s a good bet that if students get hooked on reading and writing by doing term papers on Source, they will eventually get to On Liberty.” (204) In this