Poetry Friday -- Encyclopedias

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Yard Sale

by George Bilgere


Someone is selling the Encyclopedia Britannica
in all its volumes,
which take up a whole card table.

It looks brand new, even though it must be sixty years old.
That's because it was only used a couple of times,
when the kids passed through fifth grade
and had to do reports on the Zambezi River
and Warren Harding.

Der Fuhrer was defunct.
The boys came home,
and everybody got the Encyclopedia Britannica,
which sat on the bookshelf
as they watched Gunsmoke
through a haze of Winstons.

Eventually
these people grew old
and were sent to a home
by the same children who once wrote
reports on Warren Harding.

And now the complete and unabridged
Encyclopedia Britannica,
bulging with important knowledge,
is sitting on a card table in a light rain.

I couldn't resist keeping with the theme of my posts from Wednesday and Thursday.

Liz has the Poetry Friday roundup this week at Elizabeth Steinglass: Poet.

Using the Encyclopedia

Flickr Creative Commons photo by Rishabh Mishra,
and no, the ones we're using aren't this old!

On our whirlwind tour of the 50 Nifty, my students are using the encyclopedia to do some quick research on states as we travel region by region.

Encyclopedia the BOOK, not Encyclopedia dot com.

It was quite funny the day I launched them. They had chosen their state and they ran to the cart and grabbed a volume.

"How do you turn this on?"
"Hey, this book only has words that start with G!"

I had to hold my tongue carefully in reply to the first (I wanted to use the punchline from It's a Book), and I was incredulous when I heard the second. Their lack of knowledge about the way the encyclopedia works started with the fact that each volume contains a letter or few letters-worth of information!

Needless to say, we had an unplanned minilesson right there and then on the layout of the set, and then another on the structure of the articles on the states.

As we travel region by region and students repeat the research (landforms, economy, native people, settlers), every single day I have conversations with students reminding them to read the graphics, read the captions of pictures, use the bold headings as clues about what information is being presented, skim and scan for key words.

This is good stuff.

The thing I like the very most about the encyclopedia is that you can't just ask it the question and wait for it to give you what it thinks you'll want for an answer.

The thing I like second most about the encyclopedia relates to the first: you have to turn actual pages. The text sits still.

Also, when you use the encyclopedia, you don't have to wait for it to turn on, you don't have to log in, and slow Internet never concerns you.

And whether they believe it or not, everything they are learning about reading a book-encyclopedia article will make them a better reader of online articles.

Three cheers for the unsung hero -- the ENCYCLOPEDIA!