Boy Have I Got A Bar-Tale For You! Or A Bar-Lecture. Depends On Who You Ask

So, my READ-411 class requires us to tutor a kid between the age of 12-18 for our final assessment. And it's literacy that we're tutoring, we're diagnosing these same kids of reading dependent behaviors and, using our textbook and classroom discussion notes, treating them with strategies. Let me just model what I'm trying to say. Get it? Model? *Sounds of cackling in the background* If your kid has trouble connecting to the material they have to read, make use of prior knowledge and choose texts that the kid finds interesting. Which is a pretty small thing to do, but it touches on both cognitive and textual confidence. I think it's been going well so far. One of my close friends allowed me to tutor one of his many younger brothers and I brought Dunkin Donuts once. Well, it was for that same friend's birthday and he was home with his very, very, very kind family, but I still showed them appreciation for  allowing me to do this. So there are Saturdays and Sundays sacrificed on either side of the spectrum, and all that leads to a session jam-packed with progress! He has trouble with vocabulary, so I was helping him with context clues and a syntax surgery and my favorite: writing down difficult words and finding out their definitions after reading. When all of a sudden, the word "malevolent" came up! And while I reached for the dictionary, my kid yells out, "World of Warcraft spell. It casts a lot of damage on your enemy. My guess is that it means causing extreme damage unto others." I was speechless. This wasn't the first time he used prior knowledge, but it was the first he mentioned video games! He turned out smashing the ballpark into bits, malevolent does mean wishing to do evil on another. And since we are basically on the final minutes of our hour together (this kid makes adequate progress during our tutoring sessions), I asked him about it. He told me that 'immolation' is another word that pops up in the text. It's a spell that does insane amounts of damage via inferno. Which is the definition of immolation, to set on fire completely. I, being quite a video game connoisseur myself, was jumping up and down in my seat, overjoyed at the discovery. I knew my friend and his brothers played video games, but there was something about them understanding something because of it that hit me hard pretty deep. Parents and teachers and the mass public pleas of 'video-game' haters all advocate the uselessness of video games. That they rot the brain and give out unhealthy ideas of violence. This is not so. Yes, I admit, there are video games that I play that have blood and gore in them. But what I focus most of all is the story of a game. The characters that are introduced. What moral decisions I have to make, what universes can I save or destroy, and the more grand and unique the plot, the more likely I am to buy it. Video games give people (adults and children alike) the power of controllable imagination. Even if there are limits to the control, it's the creationist aspect of the human soul that it appeals to. There are many video games that zoom in on critical thinking in order for players to proceed and complete the objective. Having a purpose blocked by so many obstacles is a life lesson in itself. A game like Portal, set in a world composed of puzzles, forces players to think outside of the box. To think up of creative solutions that differentiate from one another in each puzzle. No guns, no violence. Just good old fashioned puzzle-piecing. Left 4 Dead, despite having flesh-eating zombies and guns, encourages teamwork. The main goal being surviving until the end of several campaigns; the objective is the exact opposite of the title. Do not leave people behind. Each level requires a role many characters have to play in order to progress. The more people you leave to die/less people you have, the more likely you are to be overwhelmed by the undead. So keep those teammates alive, unless you're like me and you back-stab them in the very end *evil laughter* The amount of curses I get online for doing that is staggering. This and many more. I love video games. A lot of people do as well, many go to this school. Many cook your breakfast, lunch, or dinner (depends on how much $ you are willing to spend). Many guard you while you sleep. To know that education can be connected to video games so well warms my wee little heart. Nevertheless, we ended that tutoring session on a good note. And a plethora of arguments concerning which games are better than others.