I am Bitter that We Ignore the Game Aspect of Learning!

(Left: snippet from an article featured in this month’s Real Simple magazine by Adam Bluestein called “Go ahead and. . .” This article discusses several rules that parents should ‘lighten up’ on, including letting their kids play video games.)

Jim’s Academic Memoir, Volume 1:

I didn’t really care about school until my first semester of college. Up until then, nothing really sparked my interest. I enjoyed writing, but only to document my own escapist fantasies of places far from educational systems. I look back on most of my K-12, and the most lucid times for me were moments of sheer emotional acceleration (oh god, my girlfriend dumped me!) and the moments of ‘recess’ where I was given time to ‘play’: to depart from the orderly classroom and depart from skills and drills that only seemed to frustrate me, separate me from my peers. I got decent grades only because my parents wanted me to, and because every once in a while I would get rewarded (ice cream party for those who completed their multiplication tables in less than 15 minutes!).

I cared about school in college when I felt motivated to excel at the game of life. The game became ‘how can I get an A in this class?’ Sometimes I was engaged in the class; sometimes I could care less. Still, it was a game: show up to the class every time, do the work, ask the instructor what you can do to improve your work, show a consistent and strong effort, and make sure to always show that you are concerned about your grade (whether you are or not). Gee would say that I was acting out a certain identity, and was playing within the academic space. I excelled at the academic game. (I assume we all did to get this far)

But I got tired of playing the game. To me, it was (and still is) tiresome at times to play the academic game in graduate school: playing the game doesn’t matter if you don’t actually feel invested in what you want to study. Honestly, I felt like I could go through the motions, get my PhD, and still not have any real purpose or direction in what I am doing. This terrified me, so I turned to the only solace that I had during my K-12 days: games. I went to football games, basketball games, watched games on TV, played video games, played card games—games, games, games. What I thought was leading me away from my academic study led me straight towards what I needed to pursue: games. And then I found James Paul Gee.

A Response to Gee

Games work for me. I am a kid that Gee is talking about in this book. I didn’t grow up in a household that that was highly academic. My dad was a plumber and my mom did the books for the business. I wasn’t a very good reader, but I could kick ass at Super Mario Bros. I found a way to pass my classes by being afraid of what my parents would do to me if I failed a class. But I saw other kids, the kids typically from lower income homes, that resisted any display of intelligence to authority figures in school. I can see now that they were resisting this identity the school was trying to impose on them or the school was trying to separate them from the mediums they best learned through. As Gee states, “children will not identify with—they will even disidentify wth—teachers and schools that they perceive as hostile, alien, or oppressive to their home-based identities” (36-37). As I stated in an earlier blog, I was pretty bitter when my junior high teachers confiscated my basketball cards. Even then, I was angry that schools devalued my true home-based identity as a sports playing, baseball trading, video gaming kid. It only mattered whether I could memorize terms that I was not invested in. At least rebellion against the system made kids feel like they had some sort of power, control, action in their education. Hence, we will reject what seems unreal, inauthentic to our identity and our preferences to learning. To detention, young man!

Sadly, because of the hegemonic forces at work socially and economically, we will forfeit engagement with learning to get a degree in order to get a job. And on graduation day, you will hear people mutter, ‘I never want to read another book again.’ And why would many of those low income students want to keep participating in this game?

Academics were on the right track with multiple literacies that appeal to more than one sensory mode. But Gee takes it further: that the process of learning needs to be embodied (“academic language[. . .] is not really lucid or meaningful if one has no embodied experiences within which to situate its meanings in specific ways 44). Students need simulator spaces which to engage and make learning applicable (“knowing the general meaning [of words] is nearly worthless, unless you can recognize the word’s applications in specific cases” 41). He argues against types of education that is not only alien to students’ sensory modes, but to the experiential world of those students. To me, Gee makes sense. Yet, many academics still don’t get it.

A Brief Note Written in Anger

After reading this book and thinking about my experiences in academics, my theory is that instructors don’t want to learn the embodied discourses that students bring to the classroom because they spent so damn long learning the traditional modes of learning that they can’t handle the fact that some kid can show principles of literacy in a video game. Especially in an English department, stale academics are so hesitant to change or deconstruct the canon because they spent so damn long studying Milton. Just now, academics are sort of warming up to the idea that graphic novels can be considered ‘literate’ reading; but video games are still scoffed at. Its that power differential that we (the liberal and socialist academics) perpetrate by not seeing the popular tools students engage everyday (television, movies, comics, digital media, video games, internet sites, etc.) as spaces where critical thinking and learning are taking place. If teachers are using these popular modes as tools, I think they are going to connect with students and experience embodied learning. If they are not, perhaps they are afraid of being uncomfortable with the material (just as students have had to endure years and years of uncomfortability with Shakespeare).

Questions (because I haven’t asked many)

-How do we realistically bring video games into the classroom? Systems and games are expensive, and many games are time consuming? Will video games just remain a good metaphor for learning and will be encouraged as a supplemental activity (see above article)?

-Do students even want these home-identities to cross over into the educational system? I wanted simulatory activities to become more part of learning, but some just want school to be school and stay the hell away from home life. Then, how do issues of sovereignty play into the polemic between traditional education and embodied literacy? Do students want their education to be separated from cultural processes, do they just want the skill and drill (ex: international students who just want a degree to work a certain vocation in their home countries)?

-(This one is for Paul) What does Gee do to our notions of discursive knowledge? If he says that meaning is born from the experienced, this seems to imply that meaning is born from the non-discursive and our understanding of symbols are then non-discursive.

(Supplementary note: Two educational events that I remember most in my K-12 years were 1) when I played the Oregon Trail game on the Apple IIe lab we had at our elementary school, and 2) when my sophomore high school History teacher simulated a stock market trade to teach the class about stock trade and the great depression. That’s it. Those simple simulatory activities have stuck with me for several years—way more than any grammatical workbook ever did.)
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