Had a great conversation with one of my nieces recently. We were coloring and I asked her how school was going and if there was any exciting news to report from second grade. She looked up from her page, paused, crinkled her face thoughtfully and said, “No. Not really. Nothing to report.” We continued coloring.
A few seconds later, a gasp and then: “Oh wait! We learned about encyclopedias.”
Then a strange expression washed over her face that I couldn’t quite identify at the moment, but later realized was the “Oh crap! I forgot I was talking to Aunt Carole and she’s going to ask a follow-up question and I don’t really have any more to offer” look.
“Yeah? What did you learn about them?”
Silence.
“Can you tell me what an encyclopedia is?”
Tentatively, and in the tone of a question with her voice going up slightly at the end, “It’s like a-a-a dictionary???”
Poor kid. It’s tough having an annoying aunt like me who always wants to talk about school and stuff. But what’s the point really? Why are they teaching kids about encyclopedias? I can’t even think of a house that has a set. I’m sure they still have ’em in libraries, but do people actually use them?
I guess they do, but take for example my post earlier this week about lightning bugs: I Googled “lightning bugs” and in .17 seconds had nearly half a million links. They’re not all reputable references of course, but I found a few and I had citable answers to most of my questions in under two minutes. Even if I had an Encyclopedia it would have taken that long to walk over to the bookshelf, blow off the dust and pull a volume down. Wouldn’t time be better spent teaching kids how to use critical thinking skills to comb web results and find reliable reference material?
Eh. Oh well. Back to coloring.
1 comment:
encyclopedias still are a valuable tool to educators who do not have nearly enough access to technology
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