Published: October 07, 2009 09:58 am      

World Book

By The Town Crier



School has been back in for about a month now and the Town Crier has purposely avoided mentioning it in consideration of the delicate emotional state the kids are in as they have to switch from carefree summer days to structured, alphabetical seating and … gulp … homework! Takes a couple of weeks to get back into the swing of things. Adults go through the same shock to the system every Monday.

Of course, back to school, like most things in life, isn’t all bad. There are friends you missed all summer. There is the start of fall sports and marching band. Sometimes there is a new student that’s really cute. And if you get a good teacher even the class work doesn’t have to be a complete drag. Granted, it is pretty tough being inside on these cool, cloudless fall days, but in the end, that just makes Friday afternoon all the sweeter.

School has been in session long enough now for the first project assignments to go out. There are still poster paper displays with Greek god cutouts listed on them, or shadow shoebox dioramas of library books with tiny cut out trees and Polly Pocket dolls dressed like Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan. And if you go to school supply aisles in the department stores they still sell those three panel stand-up cardboard displays used for science projects that show, through colored marker art, the life cycle of an oak, or the water cycle of evaporation, cloud formation and rain. These days mainly rain.

But more frequently the students come home with thumb drive memory sticks and work on a multi-media Powerpoint presentation that combines text, pictures, music, animation and even movie clips, designing a presentation that shows and tells about the importance of the Renaissance for example. Technically they’re more advanced than any of those “Math Magic” 16mm movies starring Donald’s uncle, Professor Ludwig Von Drake, they showed years ago. Or the “Jiminy Cricket is going to make it to 103 years old — thanks to playing safe for you and me” films. Of course now we know the only people who live that long on a regular basis are people on the coast of Japan who eat a lot of sushi and seaweed, or live in primitive villages in the hinterlands of Turkey and eat half a gallon of goat yogurt a day. And 103 years in a primitive village in the Turkish hinterlands just seems cruel to me.

The main tool for research these days is, of course, the computer. Thanks to Google and Yahoo search engines, if little Sally needs to write a paper on the Renaissance all she has to do is type in “Renaissance” and hit “return” to get instant access to various research papers that scholars spent years on as they worked for their PhDs, taking the time to learn ancient Latin, gothic German and antique French so they could read the research in the original languages which had been hand inked over decades by lonely monks in an unheated monastery 1,500 years ago. And then, little Sally, using the cut and paste tool, can digitally snip out a paragraph here or there and put it into the power point document without ever having to read any of it. Learning has never been easier.

Prior to the computer and Internet age there were these things students used to get information from that were called “books”. They were heavier than a laptop, often smelled musty, and if you cut and pasted anything with them you got a one-week suspension. The book version of the Internet was called an “encyclopedia” and many homes had a complete set of them. Mine did and thank goodness for that. Otherwise I would have just had to make up history, and that is definitely not conducive to good grades.

There was a cadenza (a big, clunky cabinet thing) in the foyer (the little area where the front door was) and along the bottom shelf was an alphabetical line of the multi-volume World Book Encyclopedia put out by the Field Enterprises Educational Corporation. It had copyrights for every year going back to 1917 and their symbol was an open book with a quill pen over it. For you youngsters out there, a quill pen is kind of like an old fashioned wireless mouse.

Encyclopedia sets were sold a few volumes at a time over a period of months, sort of like a subscription. It was a great way for the family to afford it but until the set was completed your class papers were limited to whatever volumes you had. I didn’t do a paper on Wisconsin cheese making or WWI hero Sgt. York until eighth grade. There were 20 volumes out of 26 letters of the alphabet, so even with W-X-Y-Z combined and U-V you still got more value out of a huge S volume. And once you had the complete set, you still weren’t finished buying. There were annual updates with the year in review to keep everything current.

The year in review books were filled with overview essays and entries into new gains in science and technology, the arts, deaths of famous people and what the latest score was in the ongoing Cold War with the Soviets. For example, we might be leading 3 to 1 in Chile thanks to a CIA backed coup, but they just got an infield double in Czechoslovakia. The only thing that confused me about the annual publications was that the 1977 issue actually covered 1976 information. They put the year the book came out on the cover, not the year it had a review of. I constantly got mixed up and had things happening in the future in my term papers.

The Internet is a great time saver and gets you to a variety of sources from all over the world. And, once little Sally has copied her text about the renaissance, without even changing the search bar she just clicks from “Web” to “images” and she’s got a museum’s worth of pictures to select from for her presentation. There’s the Mona Lisa grinning. There’s Don Quixote charging windmills. There’s the Medici’s poisoning each other. There’s Joan of Arc burning. Isn’t the renaissance wonderful? Click and drag the artwork to your document, add some .mp3 lute music and voila’ you’ve got an A+ project for sure.

Fast and easy. Once again America leads the way as the most convenient nation on Earth. It’s a 20-minute project that would have taken 2 hours with those old fashioned World Books. But thinking back, the extra time wasn’t because they were hard to use, it’s because you didn’t open the encyclopedia and turn exactly to that one page that had the subject you were looking for. If little Sally were looking up “renaissance” in an encyclopedia she would have to flip through it alphabetically to find the subject. She might turn a little too far and there would be an article on Revere, Paul. She might take a couple of minutes to see about his midnight ride and also learn that he was a silversmith of such renown that his pieces are still treasured today as masterpieces of the art. She flips pages again and gets closer but goes a little too far in the other direction. Sally sees a picture of a real Reindeer. It’s a lot bigger and more moose-like than the Rudolph puppet on the TV Christmas special. The only real similarity is that they both have fuzzy antlers.

Then, at last, little Mary gets to the renaissance pages and there are pictures of famous masterworks, a photo of famous cathedrals and a map that covers the period with nifty cartoon characters of Galileo and Shakespeare. If Mary wants to include artwork in her paper, she’s going to have to hand copy it out, studying the details of Europe as she tempera paints the background and then crayon colors the historical figures to cut out (with real scissors) and paste (using school glue rendered from cow hooves) onto the poster board. Her project took longer but she was forced to pay more attention to all the material, kind of like those learned monks back in the renaissance. And during the search, little Sally was exposed to some other information totally unrelated to the task at hand and maybe learned a little something extra. Just for the sake of learning.

I guess doing a research paper on computer is like flying somewhere. You get there quickly and directly. Years ago I went on a video job to Dallas. Our job was to film some aircraft at the Dallas airport. We took a direct flight in the evening from Atlanta to Dallas, spent the night at the airport Marriott and the next day filmed some planes and then caught a flight back home. Did I go to Dallas? Yes. Did I go to Dallas? Not really. My feet never walked on Texas soil. There’s definitely something to be said for taking the scenic route to get somewhere. For me and a lot of other students, researching through the encyclopedia, or any book for that matter, is like a walk in the woods to get where you’re going. It takes longer and you’re more tired when you get there, but you never know what you might see … or learn about.

Website of the week: www.worldbook.com