In my freshman year of high school there was a popular teacher who got kids all into learning by making it more real for them. This year he was teaching Classical history, and he decided that the students would better understand the importance of the Roman phalanx if the students trained to fight as one. So, after they had been training for some months, he recruited a bunch of students including myself to do battle as barbarians against the Roman phalanx in a test of their military superiority.
Our weapons were restricted to cardboard and duct tape, but we managed to find lots of reinforced cardboard tubes and such like to use as swords and spears. On the day of the battle, I armed myself with a big long spear tube with a cardboard spike at the end of it. As the phalanx began marching across the field towards us, I bellowed out my war cry and led the charge towards those dastardly Romans. Instead of trying to find a weakness in their shields, I just used my size and strength to smash through the wall of shields and break up their unit. I was of course immediately ruled a casualty and had to sit the rest of the round out, but after rupturing their defenses, my fellow barbarians were able to mop the Romans up without too much trouble.
The moral of the story? Berzerkers are way more awesome than Hoplites.