I’m back in the classroom today on an unofficial workday, getting everything ready for the new year. Somebody kindly dropped off three boxes, containing a full set of the 1982 Encyclopedia Britannica.
Huh.
I’m torn about what to do with them, including whether to even keep them.
In favor of getting rid of them:
-They’re 35 years out of date. A lot has changed in the world since then, and kids reading them may get incorrect information about a lot of things.
-We have ample Chromebooks and iPads along with appropriate links to child-friendly research websites, including online encyclopedias that are up-to-date.
-Using encyclopedias effectively is a skill, and if I want kids to use them effectively, I’d need to devote some precious class time to teaching the skill.
-I don’t exactly have a ton of shelf space; there are already a lot of books in my closet that I just don’t have room to put out on the shelf.
In favor of keeping them:
-I had a set of 1982 World Book encyclopedias as a kid, and I have wonderful memories of browsing them at great length, reading random articles. They might be a good way for some advanced kids to get in a lot of nonfiction reading
-Not everything is out-of-date after 35 years. The article on Arizona is probably mostly true, as is the article on cows and many other articles.
-Even if I don’t spend the lesson time to teach effective encyclopedia use, kids can still get some use out of them.
What do y’all think? Would you want your child’s teacher to keep these, donate them to another class, or get rid of them?
I voted ditch them. It’s true nothing is out of date, but if they get one wrong piece of info that’s the one thing that will stick in their heads! Spend time and energy on the internet.
I think they should be kept in the classroom and used. If anything, 1980s vocabulary is probably an improvement over today’s, just like how students from a hundred years ago were probably more literate than today’s. Would be better than a modern-day encyclopedia, and if nothing else, it teaches them something about the past - nothing like reading about the past like directly reading/seeing it.
I think they should be given back to the person that dropped them off, with directions to the nearest Goodwill. If it was dropped off by a school official for the purpose of using it to teach students, tell the higher-ups that this is not sufficient. If they ignore that, then maybe the local news should be given an anonymous tip.
I was a classroom teacher for almost 20 years (specialist teacher now).
I never wanted anything in my classroom that was seriously out of date. (And most things from 1982 are seriously out of date now. You mentioned Arizona…AZ population in 1980: 2.7 million; AZ population today, almost 9 million. AZ senators in 1980, Dennis DeConcini and yes, Barry Goldwater; today, Flake and McCain. AZ major league sports teams, 1980: 1; today: 4…)
I do get the “fun of looking through an encyclopedia,” current or otherwise; I had a number of children over the years who would’ve enjoyed that kind of thing very much. Trouble is, printed enCyclopedias are pretty much a thing of the past for any child born in the 2000s. In my other line of work I do a lot of research, and I don’t use printed encyclopedias anymore at all. (I think the last printed reference book i used on any kind of regular basis was an almanac, and I probably stop doing that about five or six years ago.) If you’re going to spend time teaching encyclopedia use, i’d really recommend that you teach the use of digital ones–and please please please help them learn to evaluate the validity of any and all sources, printed and especially online, which in this day and age is a skill that cannot be taken for granted. I suspect you do this already… Just a plug.
Anyway, if I had infinite space, that would be one thing… But I don’t, and so I wouldn’t keep them. Cutting them up for art related materials would probably be my second choice.
The only possible use might be for the pictures. I have no idea if students still do projects on poster boards. I remember doing “About Me” projects around that time where we’d make a poster board filled with pictures clipped from old magazines. Not sure if kids still do this and a 1982 encyclopedia wont have anything on current tv shows, movies, video games, or even a lot of theme parks.
I like these “probably” statements. Turns out there are factual answers. I’m finding this, which states that 7.7% of the population was illiterate in 1910, compared to >1% illiteracy today. As for the vocabulary being “an improvement,” unless you’re waving your cane in one hand and an onion in the other, I’m not sure what that even means :).
Third grade, and not really. I mean, I’ll make time for important things, but it’s not like I’m saying, “What can I do to fill all these empty hours?”
I’m pretty surprised by the lopsided nature of the answer. I thought I’d get a lot more people who thought I should keep them. Which makes me happy, since I was leaning toward ditching them anyway.
Take it to your school library and ask them if they would want it. After they tell you what you can do with it, take their advice…if physically possible, of course.
Is there a set of encyclopedias in your school library?
If you had infinite shelf space (or have a lot of extra shelf space), I’d say to keep them. I think around 3rd grade was when we started using encyclopedias to look things up. It might be an interesting idea for your students to get an idea of what it used to take to do research before the internet (a “things were different in the old days” kind of thing).
They’re very useful in showing kids how people perceived things back then. The hardest thing for people to internalize is the concept that people in the past thought differently than we do now. It’s an important lesson and this is a golden opportunity to show it.
I see this as a reason for keeping them, for reasons like what RealityChuck mentioned.
Nowadays, if somebody mentions some person, place, or thing that I’m not familiar with, or that I wish I knew more about, I can just google it, or look it up on Wikipedia. It may occur to today’s kids to wonder what people used to do before the internet was available. Worse, it may not occur to them to wonder this, or to imagine a world without the internet. Having a set of encyclopedias there in the classroom enables them to see an answer to this question for themselves.
I’m not saying that outweighs the reasons to pitch them, but it at least ought to be weighed on the “keep them” side.
It is highly probable that everything they say about history and biography before 1982 is perfectly factually correct, Thew fact that it may not be cleansed to political correctness does not detract from its usefulness as a source of information.
I always kept a few very old copies of The World Almanac around. They are the same page length, and every new word in the current edition has to fit into a space formerly occupied by discarded (but perfectly true) data from previous editions.
The OP says this is a third-grade classroom. Are they ready for lessons on creative thinking, research and skepticism, or learning how differently people thought in the past?