My Educational Resistance September 13, 2011

With the release of Resistance 3 for the Playstation 3, I decided to reflect on my best memory that the series provided me over the years.  A little background on me, I have a BA in English and a few years ago after I got out of college my parents were on a power trip which insisted I set my life goals to do everything but what I was good at.  They wanted me wasting my time applying to graduate schools even though I had spent my entire life in school by that point and was completely sick of it.  After twenty-five years of schooling all I wanted to do was to work and earn money.  I didn’t need to have a good paying job, I just wanted something that I could do and would enjoy doing it.

Two years ago I was working as a permanent substitute teacher for a high school English class.  The class’s permanent teacher had quit after just a month working there.  When something like that happened I would get a call to fill the teacher spot until an accredited teacher could be hired.  I would be allowed to create an acceptable lesson plan and give it to the students so they’d have something that could be graded while a teacher was being hired.  One fond memory I have of the experience around the time I was working there was the day Resistance 2 was released.  In my educational experiences I knew I had very little room to do things that excited me so any chance I got I would usually submit a college paper about video games or talk about them in a class discussion if they were on topic with what we were going over.  I really enjoyed the Resistance series and that day I decided to mess with my students a little bit.

That day on the blackboard I wrote this.  I took a picture of it before class started with the intention to post it up on Insomniac’s official message boards, so here it is so you can have a chance to look at it for yourselves.

This quote was taken from the opening cinematic for Resistance: Fall of Man, a launch title for the PS3 and a killer app for the system. I am a huge fan of documentaries on the History Channel and Discovery Channel I thought the writing in the first game matched that style very well, which is exactly what they were going for.  I asked the students if they knew where the quote could have come from.

I was pretty certain the students would not be able to identify where the quote came from, but I wasn’t expecting them to. The method behind my madness was I wanted the students to tell me the quote was a fake, and could not possibly have happened. Instead for the whole day the students were telling me that the quote had to come from a historical documentary. They recognized the name Nathan Hale as the namesake of another high school in the district, but they had no idea that the Nathan Hale the school was named after has been dead for about two-hundred years.

I was disappointed to see these students couldn’t tell the quote was a fake. The Americans had never launched an assault on England. The dates were all wrong for any kind of war they could have confused the battle with.  They really had no idea who the real Nathan Hale was or what he had done for the United States of America.

Nowadays I like to tell people I probably learned more from watching the History and Discovery Channels and playing video games than I ever learned in my schooling, but where does that leave the people in the school systems not fortunate enough to have a person who knows what they’re doing as a teacher when they aren’t privy to further educational outlets like that?  There are still some students who probably don’t even have general access to a computer, to say nothing of having Internet access, which is considered by the UN a basic human right nowadays.

These students would eventually get a full-time teacher and I was reassigned.  I got out of substituting around a year ago when I discovered I could make a lot of money fixing computers after years of my parents doing their best to prevent me from learning that.  Every once in a while I have a positive memory of my experiences like this one, but I don’t think I’ll be going back to it.  it just wasn’t right for me.