While we had a friend in high school, we can just call him Marshall. He wasn't the best student in school, but he was pretty smart in other ways, like he could never concentrate enough to actually study, but he was one of the smartest people I've ever met in other ways. For example, he might order new car parts from the Internet and install them on his car by briefly reading a manual. Students like these are exactly the intended audience for Graff's essay. One thing my friend Marshall was known for was being one of the most competitive people in the world, in a head to head foot race Marshall refused to let anyone beat him. In the essay Graff compares the real world to something similar “because here's another thing that never occurred to me and is still kept hidden from students, with tragic results: that the real intellectual world, the one that existed in the big world beyond school, it is organized much like the world of team sports, with rival texts, rival interpretations and evaluations of texts, rival theories about why they should be read and taught, and elaborate team competitions." Now teachers have never really taught high school students this sad but all too true reality, it might be helpful to teach this lesson to kids. Take for example guys like Marshall who previously would have cut off their arm