After reading Grand Theft Education from the Sept. 2006 Harper’s

Among the many verses from U2 songs that resonate with me, here’s one from the song Yahweh:

Take this mouth, so quick to criticize,
Take this mouth, give it a kiss.

So here I am with my guard up again, unwilling or unable to work a new idea into my schema. I need to ask why I am so resistant to what I read in this roundtable discussion. Is it my own inability to ever master video games that raises my defenses? Is it the usually dormant curmudgeon in me, impatiently waiting for an age when curmudgeonliness is more seemly, that makes me dismissive of things I hadn’t already been thinking about? Is it just my deeply rooted cynicism? I couldn’t help but feel that I was being led to believe that there is a crisis related to video games and/or their relationship to literacy, and I’m not sure I’m ready to believe that. I’m not exactly thrilled with my impulse to criticism, but this article has tapped into that impulse in a few ways.

First, I couldn’t help but recall my experience in media relations, in trying to get clients into such roundtable discussions where the client’s product is in the vanguard of the inexorable march of technology in this particular direction. I just got the sense that the discussion was carefully cast and choreographed. Each participant wanted to validate the other participants’ ideas, and be validated himself or herself. There was little skepticism, little alternate frame of reference regarding whether or not there was any added value in using video games instead of any other popular activity as a basis for literacy instruction. It was a little too much of a love-in for me.

Speaking of other activities, the intro of the article made me think of offering a Mad Libs type of substitution to see if the premise about video games was unique. Did you know that many pre-teens and teenagers have spent as many as two hours a day, up to fifteen hours a week, playing sports? Or skateboarding? Or listening to Led Zeppelin albums? But if you were to assemble a team of “experts” to talk about the grammatical rules of basketball, of the narrative structure of beginning-middle-end of every game and every season, of the characterization inherent in team roles, of the thesis-based arguments that can be developed around strategy decisions or roster moves, you’d be accused of advocating something less than educationally sound. But every kid who sits in the library checking his fantasy football results on the internet is engaged in the very thinking that the panelists describe. I think we can force any metaphor to suit any particular purpose; the fact that you can do something certainly doesn’t mean that you should do it.

I was also bothered by the sense of duplicity in the instructional approaches discussed in the article. If you assume that you have to trick students into learning, that you have to make them think they’re doing one thing when they’re really doing another, then you don’t have a whole heckuva lot of faith in your students. And if you think that you have to make learning fun instead of engaging, then you don’t have a whole lot of faith in yourself or your material. I couldn’t help but wonder if students love the Grammar Mistress game as much as the teacher thinks they do. If you believe that grammar should be taught in context, then you don’t need to put it in a costume so students can’t recognize what you’re trying to show them.

There may be a crisis in literacy instruction – at the very least, there is an ongoing struggle – and teachers need to be able to recognize and use students’ individual interests, whether sports or video games or ballet or crocheting, to help them connect with the curriculum. To suggest that video gaming holds the key for igniting progress in reading and writing seems reductive and irresponsible.

To me, a more worthwhile solution is for teachers to cultivate in themselves and in their students a habit of careful observation. The more we know about our students and their interests, the better we’ll be able to serve them.