It's No Contest: Boys Will Be Men, and They'll Still Choose Video Games

It's No Contest: Boys Will Be Men, and They'll Still Choose Video Games

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...-2004Dec4.html

By Patrick Welsh

Sunday, December 5, 2004; Page B01

Jake Stephens, a senior in my AP English class at T.C. Williams High
School, is hooked. "The narrative is so exciting you lose all track of
time," he said to me last week. "Three hours can go by and it seems
like 15 minutes. Once I'm into it, it's hard to think of anything else;
all my focus is on finishing the story line."

Was Jake talking about "All the Pretty Horses," the novel I'm currently
having my students read? I wish. Personally, I find Cormac McCarthy's
coming-of-age cowboy tale enthralling, with its tragic love story,
graphic violence and lyrical writing. But Jake probably thinks it's
pretty tame. He's seduced by a different kind of narrative -- the
car-stealing frenzy of one of his favorite video games, Grand Theft
Auto: San Andreas.

I've known for a long time that a lot of the boys in my English classes
are more interested in connecting with their Xboxes in the evening than
with the next three chapters of Toni Morrison's "Song of Solomon." But
ever since I observed their mounting hysteria over last month's
"premiere" of Halo 2, the new combat game from Microsoft, I've been
trying to find out what's behind the lure of video games. As the boys I
teach have endeavored to enlighten me, I haven't known whether to
laugh, cry, or go find a new job. What they told me has me wondering
how what I teach can possibly compete with the fast-paced razzle-dazzle
of this ever-evolving entertainment form and worrying about the young
guys who spend so much time divorced from reality and the life of the
mind as they zap away the hours before their video screens.

I had to chuckle at the image of otherwise reasonable boys keeping a
vigil outside the Best Buy store in Potomac Yards until the doors
opened at midnight on Nov. 9, when they could charge in to be the first
to snap up Halo 2, which added $125 million to Bill Gates's company
fortune on its debut day alone. But I didn't think it was so funny when
some guys skipped school that day to stay home and try to beat the
game. Senior Steve Penn (who wasn't one of the skippers) told me that
the following weekend, he played for six hours straight (minus bathroom
breaks) at a friend's house. When he got home at 1 a.m. on Sunday, he
went at it for two more hours, fell asleep, got up at 7 and fired up
the game again. "My mother had to remind me to change my clothes and
take a shower," he said.

Steve, like Jake, is a good student; he even finished "All the Pretty
Horses" (which he said he appreciated because it "wasn't sappy") a week
before it was due. I'm not especially worried about the boys who manage
to balance their passion for video games with their responsibilities to
school and to themselves. But I have to wonder what effect this
widespread, intense obsession with the games is bound to have on the
boys who can't, or don't, manage that balance, the boys whose time and
concentration the games suck away. And suck them away they do.

I'm not the only one to see it happening. T.C. girls have told me that
at parties they are often totally ignored as the guys gather around TV
screens, entranced by one video game or another. "Girls sit around
watching the guys play until they get fed up and drive off looking for
something else to do," says junior Sarah Kell, for whom the games range
from "stupid and boring" to "disgusting." (Most girls tell me they find
the games silly.) "We try to tell them they're wasting their time, but
they just keep going. Some guys stay up playing until 3 in the morning
on school nights, and then they try to do their homework."

I figured I would finally discover what all the excitement was about
when I went to a Halo 2 party at a friend's Internet company recently.
But as I wandered among the four offices where teams of three to four
guys -- bright, highly educated guys in their mid-twenties and early
thirties -- were competing, I kept asking myself: "Is this all there is
to it?" I'm not sure what I was expecting, but certainly it was
something more than a game where you shoot at moving objects until you
get 50 "kills."

I know that Halo 2 aficionados will say that's a gross
oversimplification. And as one who gave up video games after several
failed attempts at Pac-Man in the early '70s, I may be the last person
who should be commenting on them. Like many others, though, I find the
rampant violence, misogyny and sexual and racial stereotyping of some
games beyond offensive, and wonder about the negative messages they're
sending to young people.

But my more immediate concern is how to get books back on the playing
field. I became an English teacher because I love literature and wanted
to share it with students. Literature, however, demands that we enter
into an imaginative world slowly, through the written word. It forces
us to re-create this world in our minds, through the power of our
imaginations. When my students finish "All the Pretty Horses," I'll
show them some scenes from the 2000 movie. I know that the students who
really got into the reading will say, as kids in previous years have
said, that the world the movie creates -- even enhanced by the star
power of Matt Damon and Penelope Cruz -- can in no way compare to the
richness of the world the book allows them to evoke for themselves.

But I also know that many of the boys won't care one way or the other.
They won't have engaged with the novel on the level that really makes
an imagined story come alive. Entering the fictional world of a novel
takes a different set of skills from getting to the "next level" in a
video game -- as I found out during my pathetic attempt to steal a car
when I played Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas last week.

As much as I love "All The Pretty Horses," I admit it can't compel the
focus or generate the kind of excitement that guys find in Halo 2,
Madden '05, Grand Theft Auto or any of the other new generation of
games. Whatever vicarious experience a novel or even a movie can offer,
"gamers" say it can't approach a video game's intensity of experience.

"A video game is like a novel -- it has a plot, a setting and a theme.
But it's the interaction that a novel doesn't have that makes the video
games so intriguing," said Steve Penn, in a patient effort to enlighten
me. "With a video game you're seeing the action happen in front of you;
you have some control, which creates an illusion that you're in the
game."

Jake Stephens feels the same way. "It's like reading an exciting book,
except you feel you are in the book," he says. "Once I start a game
like San Andreas, I am so into it that I sit in class thinking about
how I can get to the next level when I get home."

I have to confess that when I was in high school, reading novels wasn't
too high on my list of priorities, either. So maybe, you say, I
shouldn't worry about my students. They'll come around to literature
later. But the video craze apparently isn't something that wears off
with adolescence. In fact, it seems to intensify in college.

Old Dominion University freshman Nick Pratt said that as soon as Halo 2
came out, some guys skipped classes for three straight days to play the
game in the dorms. Duke freshman Sarah Ball told me she can walk down
the hall of a male-only floor in her dorm and hear video games going in
every room. "Lately they've been having Halo 2 tournaments," she
reports. "There will be wall-to-wall bodies in a room, the lights are
off for that video game ambience. I stuck my head in once to ask a
friend a question and got death stares."

Video games have taken over the lives of some guys in her dorm, says
University of Virginia freshman Remy Kauffmann. "I've never seen
anything like it. It's hard to have a conversation with these guys. If
they're not playing, they want to start up a game."

"One of the reasons so many kids bomb out of college in their first
year," says Silver Spring educational psychologist Bill Stixrud, "is
that without parents to set some boundaries, they can't control the
video games and other electronic entertainment available to them." How
often do you think that happens with a good novel?

T.C. Williams senior L.J. Harbin has played his share of video games,
especially the ones involving cars, like Gran Turismo. He agrees that
the games take time away both from studies and from the development of
physical abilities. "There are more and more couch potatoes -- guys who
are 30 to 40 years old and organize tournaments. Some work just to pay
for their addiction," L.J. says. "I know two guys who are Halo fanatics
and both chose the game over their girlfriends. They would rather be
sitting on their butts pushing buttons than doing something with their
girlfriends."

T.C. Williams football coach Greg Sullivan says that he sees fewer and
fewer kids playing outside when he drives around Northern Virginia.
"They are inside playing video games," he says. "More kids are finding
real sports too demanding."

I know we all need entertainment and downtime, and I've certainly
thrown away a few hours in my life myself. I would love to have back
all the time I've wasted watching professional football games. And I
take a little solace from the predictions of cyberspace gurus at places
like MIT, who say that video games are creating a new art form -- the
interactive narrative -- as revolutionary as the printing press or the
invention of movies. Interactive narratives will put us right in the
story and allow us, at the push of a button, to choose from many plot
lines, they promise.

But while we're waiting for the next Orson Welles or Francis Ford
Coppola to come out of Silicon Valley or MIT, I see a whole generation
of boys being manipulated by mercenary video game designers who aren't
terribly interested in creating high art. I worry that video games are
contributing to the growing gap I see in the academic achievement of
boys and girls and to the disproportionate number of boys being labeled
LD and being put on Ritalin.

A recent Japanese study compared the brain activity of children adding
single-digit numbers to that of children playing Nintendo games. It
found that the Nintendo games stimulated only the temporal lobes, which
regulate basic sensory activity, while doing the simple math problems
stimulated not only the temporal but also the frontal lobe, which
governs impulse control, goal-directed behavior and memory. "Young
brains grow on a 'use it or lose it' principle," says Stixrud, who
fears that video games may be stunting the brain development of young
children. He sees kids in his practice who have developed sleep
disorders because they spend three or four hours a night playing
electronic games.

Tomorrow, I will give my first-period class a test on the final section
of "All the Pretty Horses." There are some great boys in that class,
and I hope they've been able to take the time and find the solitude to
give themselves a chance to get into the novel. If they don't like it
after a solid effort, so be it. I won't argue over questions of taste.

But I will be royally bothered if they've been cheated out of a chance
to experience the beauty and power of the book because a marathon of
video game-playing dissipated their time and blunted their
sensibilities.

Pat Welsh has taught English at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria
for more than 30 years.

In article .com,
Fred Goodwin, CMA wrote:
It's No Contest: Boys Will Be Men, and They'll Still Choose Video Games

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...-2004Dec4.html

By Patrick Welsh

Sunday, December 5, 2004; Page B01

Jake Stephens, a senior in my AP English class at T.C. Williams High
School, is hooked. "The narrative is so exciting you lose all track of
time," he said to me last week. "Three hours can go by and it seems
like 15 minutes. Once I'm into it, it's hard to think of anything else;
all my focus is on finishing the story line."

....................

Tomorrow, I will give my first-period class a test on the final section
of "All the Pretty Horses." There are some great boys in that class,
and I hope they've been able to take the time and find the solitude to
give themselves a chance to get into the novel. If they don't like it
after a solid effort, so be it. I won't argue over questions of taste.

But I will be royally bothered if they've been cheated out of a chance
to experience the beauty and power of the book because a marathon of
video game-playing dissipated their time and blunted their
sensibilities.

You might consider that the book has beauty and power; someone
else might consider it irrelevant trash. Both are right, for
themselves.

Frankly, I dislike the great bulk of the present Politically
Correct "literature". I consider it nothing but propaganda,
designed to mold children's minds so they will consider the
essential hyperegalitarian religion (I know they do not call
it such) of the educationists and their humanist cohorts.

I find even such classics as the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_
as somewhat boring and loaded with unnecessary description.
Someone else may find such as well to their liking. When
it comes to modern writers beloved of English teachers, I
consider it literature in the sense that a blank piece of
canvas is considered art, or even worse.

English teachers should not teach politically correct novels
for their "value", but should recognize the propaganda and
teach the children to do so. Those children might then
notice the propaganda in the video games.

Pat Welsh has taught English at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria
for more than 30 years.



--
This address is for information only. I do not claim that these views
are those of the Statistics Department or of Purdue University.
Herman Rubin, Department of Statistics, Purdue University
Phone: (765)494-6054 FAX: (765)494-0558

Fred Goodwin, CMA wrote:

It's No Contest: Boys Will Be Men, and They'll Still Choose Video Games

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...-2004Dec4.html

By Patrick Welsh

Sunday, December 5, 2004; Page B01

Jake Stephens, a senior in my AP English class at T.C. Williams High
School, is hooked. "The narrative is so exciting you lose all track of
time," he said to me last week. "Three hours can go by and it seems
like 15 minutes. Once I'm into it, it's hard to think of anything else;
all my focus is on finishing the story line."

Was Jake talking about "All the Pretty Horses," the novel I'm currently
having my students read? I wish. Personally, I find Cormac McCarthy's
coming-of-age cowboy tale enthralling, with its tragic love story,
graphic violence and lyrical writing. But Jake probably thinks it's
pretty tame. He's seduced by a different kind of narrative -- the
car-stealing frenzy of one of his favorite video games, Grand Theft
Auto: San Andreas.

I've known for a long time that a lot of the boys in my English classes
are more interested in connecting with their Xboxes in the evening than
with the next three chapters of Toni Morrison's "Song of Solomon." But
ever since I observed their mounting hysteria over last month's
"premiere" of Halo 2, the new combat game from Microsoft, I've been
trying to find out what's behind the lure of video games. As the boys I
teach have endeavored to enlighten me, I haven't known whether to
laugh, cry, or go find a new job. What they told me has me wondering
how what I teach can possibly compete with the fast-paced razzle-dazzle
of this ever-evolving entertainment form and worrying about the young
guys who spend so much time divorced from reality and the life of the
mind as they zap away the hours before their video screens.

I had to chuckle at the image of otherwise reasonable boys keeping a
vigil outside the Best Buy store in Potomac Yards until the doors
opened at midnight on Nov. 9, when they could charge in to be the first
to snap up Halo 2, which added $125 million to Bill Gates's company
fortune on its debut day alone. But I didn't think it was so funny when
some guys skipped school that day to stay home and try to beat the
game. Senior Steve Penn (who wasn't one of the skippers) told me that
the following weekend, he played for six hours straight (minus bathroom
breaks) at a friend's house. When he got home at 1 a.m. on Sunday, he
went at it for two more hours, fell asleep, got up at 7 and fired up
the game again. "My mother had to remind me to change my clothes and
take a shower," he said.

Steve, like Jake, is a good student; he even finished "All the Pretty
Horses" (which he said he appreciated because it "wasn't sappy") a week
before it was due. I'm not especially worried about the boys who manage
to balance their passion for video games with their responsibilities to
school and to themselves. But I have to wonder what effect this
widespread, intense obsession with the games is bound to have on the
boys who can't, or don't, manage that balance, the boys whose time and
concentration the games suck away. And suck them away they do.

I'm not the only one to see it happening. T.C. girls have told me that
at parties they are often totally ignored as the guys gather around TV
screens, entranced by one video game or another. "Girls sit around
watching the guys play until they get fed up and drive off looking for
something else to do," says junior Sarah Kell, for whom the games range
from "stupid and boring" to "disgusting." (Most girls tell me they find
the games silly.) "We try to tell them they're wasting their time, but
they just keep going. Some guys stay up playing until 3 in the morning
on school nights, and then they try to do their homework."

I figured I would finally discover what all the excitement was about
when I went to a Halo 2 party at a friend's Internet company recently.
But as I wandered among the four offices where teams of three to four
guys -- bright, highly educated guys in their mid-twenties and early
thirties -- were competing, I kept asking myself: "Is this all there is
to it?" I'm not sure what I was expecting, but certainly it was
something more than a game where you shoot at moving objects until you
get 50 "kills."

I know that Halo 2 aficionados will say that's a gross
oversimplification. And as one who gave up video games after several
failed attempts at Pac-Man in the early '70s, I may be the last person
who should be commenting on them. Like many others, though, I find the
rampant violence, misogyny and sexual and racial stereotyping of some
games beyond offensive, and wonder about the negative messages they're
sending to young people.

But my more immediate concern is how to get books back on the playing
field. I became an English teacher because I love literature and wanted
to share it with students. Literature, however, demands that we enter
into an imaginative world slowly, through the written word. It forces
us to re-create this world in our minds, through the power of our
imaginations. When my students finish "All the Pretty Horses," I'll
show them some scenes from the 2000 movie. I know that the students who
really got into the reading will say, as kids in previous years have
said, that the world the movie creates -- even enhanced by the star
power of Matt Damon and Penelope Cruz -- can in no way compare to the
richness of the world the book allows them to evoke for themselves.

But I also know that many of the boys won't care one way or the other.
They won't have engaged with the novel on the level that really makes
an imagined story come alive. Entering the fictional world of a novel
takes a different set of skills from getting to the "next level" in a
video game -- as I found out during my pathetic attempt to steal a car
when I played Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas last week.

As much as I love "All The Pretty Horses," I admit it can't compel the
focus or generate the kind of excitement that guys find in Halo 2,
Madden '05, Grand Theft Auto or any of the other new generation of
games. Whatever vicarious experience a novel or even a movie can offer,
"gamers" say it can't approach a video game's intensity of experience.

"A video game is like a novel -- it has a plot, a setting and a theme.
But it's the interaction that a novel doesn't have that makes the video
games so intriguing," said Steve Penn, in a patient effort to enlighten
me. "With a video game you're seeing the action happen in front of you;
you have some control, which creates an illusion that you're in the
game."

Jake Stephens feels the same way. "It's like reading an exciting book,
except you feel you are in the book," he says. "Once I start a game
like San Andreas, I am so into it that I sit in class thinking about
how I can get to the next level when I get home."

I have to confess that when I was in high school, reading novels wasn't
too high on my list of priorities, either. So maybe, you say, I
shouldn't worry about my students. They'll come around to literature
later. But the video craze apparently isn't something that wears off
with adolescence. In fact, it seems to intensify in college.

Old Dominion University freshman Nick Pratt said that as soon as Halo 2
came out, some guys skipped classes for three straight days to play the
game in the dorms. Duke freshman Sarah Ball told me she can walk down
the hall of a male-only floor in her dorm and hear video games going in
every room. "Lately they've been having Halo 2 tournaments," she
reports. "There will be wall-to-wall bodies in a room, the lights are
off for that video game ambience. I stuck my head in once to ask a
friend a question and got death stares."

Video games have taken over the lives of some guys in her dorm, says
University of Virginia freshman Remy Kauffmann. "I've never seen
anything like it. It's hard to have a conversation with these guys. If
they're not playing, they want to start up a game."

"One of the reasons so many kids bomb out of college in their first
year," says Silver Spring educational psychologist Bill Stixrud, "is
that without parents to set some boundaries, they can't control the
video games and other electronic entertainment available to them." How
often do you think that happens with a good novel?

T.C. Williams senior L.J. Harbin has played his share of video games,
especially the ones involving cars, like Gran Turismo. He agrees that
the games take time away both from studies and from the development of
physical abilities. "There are more and more couch potatoes -- guys who
are 30 to 40 years old and organize tournaments. Some work just to pay
for their addiction," L.J. says. "I know two guys who are Halo fanatics
and both chose the game over their girlfriends. They would rather be
sitting on their butts pushing buttons than doing something with their
girlfriends."

T.C. Williams football coach Greg Sullivan says that he sees fewer and
fewer kids playing outside when he drives around Northern Virginia.
"They are inside playing video games," he says. "More kids are finding
real sports too demanding."

I know we all need entertainment and downtime, and I've certainly
thrown away a few hours in my life myself. I would love to have back
all the time I've wasted watching professional football games. And I
take a little solace from the predictions of cyberspace gurus at places
like MIT, who say that video games are creating a new art form -- the
interactive narrative -- as revolutionary as the printing press or the
invention of movies. Interactive narratives will put us right in the
story and allow us, at the push of a button, to choose from many plot
lines, they promise.

But while we're waiting for the next Orson Welles or Francis Ford
Coppola to come out of Silicon Valley or MIT, I see a whole generation
of boys being manipulated by mercenary video game designers who aren't
terribly interested in creating high art. I worry that video games are
contributing to the growing gap I see in the academic achievement of
boys and girls and to the disproportionate number of boys being labeled
LD and being put on Ritalin.

A recent Japanese study compared the brain activity of children adding
single-digit numbers to that of children playing Nintendo games. It
found that the Nintendo games stimulated only the temporal lobes, which
regulate basic sensory activity, while doing the simple math problems
stimulated not only the temporal but also the frontal lobe, which
governs impulse control, goal-directed behavior and memory. "Young
brains grow on a 'use it or lose it' principle," says Stixrud, who
fears that video games may be stunting the brain development of young
children. He sees kids in his practice who have developed sleep
disorders because they spend three or four hours a night playing
electronic games.

Tomorrow, I will give my first-period class a test on the final section
of "All the Pretty Horses." There are some great boys in that class,
and I hope they've been able to take the time and find the solitude to
give themselves a chance to get into the novel. If they don't like it
after a solid effort, so be it. I won't argue over questions of taste.

But I will be royally bothered if they've been cheated out of a chance
to experience the beauty and power of the book because a marathon of
video game-playing dissipated their time and blunted their
sensibilities.

Pat Welsh has taught English at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria
for more than 30 years.
------------------------------
Video games offer tremendous excitement and "progress" of "things
happening" without the "player" having to actually develop or
engineer any of it. The actual player contribution is virtually
trivial!

I saw a bunch of gamer boy couch potatoes whom you imagined could
not be pulled away from it, go wild for neolithic woodcraft when
presented with a real life scenario of having to hunt and gather
for a living. Similar results are also achieved when presenting
these cheated children with a wooodworking shop to build what they
liked, or a junkyard and machine shop with welding training. What
we are no longer doing is offering kids a real-life outlet for
creativity, we shut them into dead apartment rooms where the only
window out of it is a CRT.

Notably this is as true of boys as girls!! We just don't see the
quiet indoors pursuits of girls as just stultifying, WHEN WE SHOULD!
Steve

Herman Rubin wrote:

Frankly, I dislike the great bulk of the present Politically
Correct "literature". I consider it nothing but propaganda,
designed to mold children's minds so they will consider the
essential hyperegalitarian religion (I know they do not call
it such) of the educationists and their humanist cohorts.
---------------------------
That's just because you're a rightist Fundy bigot.
Steve

"R. Steve Walz" wrote:
Herman Rubin wrote:

Frankly, I dislike the great bulk of the present Politically
Correct "literature". I consider it nothing but propaganda,
designed to mold children's minds so they will consider the
essential hyperegalitarian religion (I know they do not call
it such) of the educationists and their humanist cohorts.
---------------------------
That's just because you're a rightist Fundy bigot.

Actually, from his postings, I think he is just an elderly libertarian
Jewish bigot.

lojbab

Herman Rubin wrote:
I find even such classics as the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_
as somewhat boring and loaded with unnecessary description.

I used to have trouble reading details and description
myself, but I now appreciate them much more. In a
well-written novel, such details reflect some of the
themes of the book.

'The Iliad' anyway lists a lot of details presumably
because it was meant to capture history, and
the individual accomplishments and fate of
those in the battle. A good translation will
be in good poetry too, though I'm guessing
it's impossible to capture the Greek original.

I first learned parts of it in junior high with a highly
simplified text that focused only on the main
story. Images and a brief study of Greek mythology
were also included. That was all very helpful to me,
and it was the first time I really got hooked on literature.

C.

Bob LeChevalier wrote:

"R. Steve Walz" wrote:
Herman Rubin wrote:

Frankly, I dislike the great bulk of the present Politically
Correct "literature". I consider it nothing but propaganda,
designed to mold children's minds so they will consider the
essential hyperegalitarian religion (I know they do not call
it such) of the educationists and their humanist cohorts.
---------------------------
That's just because you're a rightist Fundy bigot.

Actually, from his postings, I think he is just an elderly libertarian
Jewish bigot.

lojbab
--------------------
His Judaism is politically irrelevant.

Libertarians are actually just Republicans who imagine they are "pro-
freedom", when actually, like Rightist Republicans and Fundies, they
are ONLY in support of freedom for the rich to rob the poor, and for
people of similar Fundy religious bigotries to their own.

To be a Fundy you don't have to be a Xtian, or a Muslim fanatic. The
most ridiculous thing about the war on terror is that if Republicans
were honest they'd admit that they believe the same **** as the
Taliban! And as for antisexual Fundies, that's every single ****ing
mainline Xtian denomination! There's no difference.

Kill All Fundies Everywhere!!
Steve

In article . com,
lariadna wrote:

Herman Rubin wrote:
I find even such classics as the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_
as somewhat boring and loaded with unnecessary description.

I used to have trouble reading details and description
myself, but I now appreciate them much more. In a
well-written novel, such details reflect some of the
themes of the book.

Not really; it is more distracting.

However, some of the modern research on the places
mentioned in the _Odyssey_, and how the information
was deduced from the text, might be interesting.

'The Iliad' anyway lists a lot of details presumably
because it was meant to capture history, and
the individual accomplishments and fate of
those in the battle. A good translation will
be in good poetry too, though I'm guessing
it's impossible to capture the Greek original.

I first learned parts of it in junior high with a highly
simplified text that focused only on the main
story. Images and a brief study of Greek mythology
were also included. That was all very helpful to me,
and it was the first time I really got hooked on literature.

Why should anyone read a "simplified" text? Middle school
students should be able to handle that vocabulary and
already know that much history, and about Greek mythology.

C.



--
This address is for information only. I do not claim that these views
are those of the Statistics Department or of Purdue University.
Herman Rubin, Department of Statistics, Purdue University
Phone: (765)494-6054 FAX: (765)494-0558

Herman Rubin wrote:
In article . com,
lariadna wrote:

Herman Rubin wrote:
I find even such classics as the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_
as somewhat boring and loaded with unnecessary description.

I used to have trouble reading details and description
myself, but I now appreciate them much more. In a
well-written novel, such details reflect some of the
themes of the book.

Not really; it is more distracting.

"Most of the big shore places were closed
now and there were hardly any lights except
the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat
across the Sound. And as the moon rose
higher the inessential houses began to melt
away until gradually I became aware of the
old island here that flowered once for Dutch
sailors' eyes-[the] fresh green... of the
new world. Its vanished trees, the trees
that had made way for Gatsby's house,
had once pandered in whispers to the last
and greatest of all human dreams; for a
transitory enchanted moment man must
have held his breath in the presence of
this continent, compelled into an aesthetic
contemplation he neither understood nor
desired, face to face for the last time in
history with something commensurate
to his capacity for wonder."
--F.Scott Fitzgerald



However, some of the modern research on the places
mentioned in the _Odyssey_, and how the information
was deduced from the text, might be interesting.

Yes, I agree. In my experience,
however, classes were not
interdisciplinary. Perhaps that
has changed.


'The Iliad' anyway lists a lot of details presumably
because it was meant to capture history, and
the individual accomplishments and fate of
those in the battle. A good translation will
be in good poetry too, though I'm guessing
it's impossible to capture the Greek original.

I first learned parts of it in junior high with a highly
simplified text that focused only on the main
story. Images and a brief study of Greek mythology
were also included. That was all very helpful to me,
and it was the first time I really got hooked on literature.

Why should anyone read a "simplified" text? Middle school
students should be able to handle that vocabulary and
already know that much history, and about Greek mythology.


You have already mostly
answered the question--keyword, focus.

In my case, there were only short
selections because we had a huge
literature textbook with numerous
other selections in it.

C.

Fred Goodwin quoted:
It's No Contest: Boys Will Be Men, and They'll
Still Choose Video Games

Jake Stephens, a senior in my AP English
class at T.C. Williams High
School, is hooked. "The narrative is so exciting
you lose all track of
time," he said to me last week. "Three hours
can go by and it seems
like 15 minutes. Once I'm into it, it's hard to
think of anything else;
all my focus is on finishing the story line."

So he is interested in story lines. Perhaps he
would be interested in doing an assignment
where he compares the story line of a video
game to the story line of a book. Are there
other elements of the book that he doesn't see in
the video game and vice versa?

Was Jake talking about "All the Pretty Horses,"
the novel I'm currently
having my students read? I wish. Personally, I
find Cormac McCarthy's
coming-of-age cowboy tale enthralling, with its
tragic love story,
graphic violence and lyrical writing. But Jake
probably thinks it's
pretty tame. He's seduced by a different kind of
narrative -- the
car-stealing frenzy of one of his favorite video
games, Grand Theft
Auto: San Andreas.

Has this teacher actually asked Jake if he
considers it pretty tame? Maybe he just prefers
the city to the country, or maybe that is the
current interest of young people.

Perhaps we should ask students if there is
a difference between the violence in such a
novel and the violence in a video game. Is
there some purpose for presenting it in the
book? In the video game, is the goal just
to kill the bad guys (maybe a sort of training
for becoming a soldier)? In the book (sorry, I
haven't read that one), does one see any
personal consequences of the violence? Do boys
feel that they should learn about the personal
side of violence? There is something to be said
for suppressing personal feelings in battle, but
how do boys (and girls) feel about that? Should
we learn more about those we fight? What does
it mean to respect the enemy? Or should we
focus on ending the war in certain cases?

If the students actually don't like the particular
book being taught, why is that? Perhaps they
can suggest the kind of book they would
actually like to read.

Like many others, though, I find the
rampant violence, misogyny and sexual and
racial stereotyping of some
games beyond offensive, and wonder about the
negative messages they're
sending to young people.

But my more immediate concern is how to get
books back on the playing
field.

If that is true, and from what I have heard, there
seems to be truth to it, it seems that the more
immediate concern should be teaching about the
messages of violence and sexual and racial
stereotyping in videos and in books without
condemning the students if they are not educated
about such issues. Exactly how to approach that
could be challenging, but if it is an issue, it
should not be ignored.

And why does this author and girls find these
games silly? Perhaps they should share
such feelings in the class--it might give boys
some insight. (I'm generalizing when I say 'boys'
--I realize that some girls might play violent
video games as well.)

But it's the interaction that a novel doesn't have
that makes the video
games so intriguing," said Steve Penn, in a
patient effort to enlighten
me. "With a video game you're seeing the
action happen in front of you;
you have some control,

Why would boys need to feel that kind
of control, I wonder? Do they feel that they
lack control in other ways, or is it simply a
natural control that they are gaining that all
young people need to gain? Would girls become
more confident in some ways if they too played
similar kinds of games?

I have to confess that when I was in high
school, reading novels wasn't
too high on my list of priorities, either. So
maybe, you say, I
shouldn't worry about my students. They'll come
around to literature
later. But the video craze apparently isn't
something that wears off
with adolescence. In fact, it seems to intensify
in college.

I agree with that, but it seems that some students
need to be a little more well-rounded. There are definitely
some computer games that require more skills
than just killing others. Perhaps the quality of
video game should be analyzed as well. Maybe
a boy should think about writing his own video
game--would he focus more on war or diplomacy
winning, personal feelings and respect, learning
about other cultures, etc.? Multimedia, movies,
etc., have the potential to be art or good learning
tools just as do novels and history books.

C.