Believing in Books

Friday night, after I tucked my daughter into bed, I was sitting in the comfy chair in our library room across the hall from her bedroom, where I always sit and read or plan or grade papers while she's falling asleep. I was thinking about a question my students had had that day, about platypuses. So I reached one arm down next to my chair, pulled up the one-volume New Columbia Encyclopedia that I've had since I was twelve (3,000 tissue-paper-thin pages of information in tiny print), quickly and easily flipped to the paragraph on platypuses -- and found exactly what I was looking for. The Platypus article said that they shared a primitive order of mammals only with the echidna, and I was curious, so I flipped to the Echidna article and read about those primitive spiny anteaters. On that same page was a long article on Echinoderms, so I happily read for a while about starfish and sea urchins and sea cucumbers, too.

Last night, I was too tired to plan or grade or read for information (and novels generally wait for school vacations), so I reached for my favorite book of poetry -- Always A Reckoning, by Jimmy Carter. (Yes, Jimmy Carter writes beautiful, evocative poetry about things like growing up in the deep South in the 1940's, or how a flock of geese flew by and reflected city lights beautifully one night when he and his family had been searching in vain for constellations through those same city lights, from the roof of the White House.) Other nights, I might read too many selections from my large collection of Chicken Soup for the Soul books (yes, I like that sort of thing), or browse through the perceptively told anecdotes in one of Vivian Paley's books about teaching kindergarten, or one of several books on urban high schools that were excelling through the use of "best practices" before the Internet.

In the video that we watched in class, on that high school in Philadelphia that apparently relies almost entirely on project-based-learning through web 2.0 resources, a young woman (Student? Teacher?) was quoted enthusing about her school. In explaining what it wasn't, she managed to use the words "books" and "worksheets", together, twice in a row. Yes, she's just one person -- but not really, since the editors and producers of the video decided to include her comments. Apparently, they didn't mind protraying their school, for the world, as a place where people equate books with worksheets.

I hope that the students, teachers, and schools of the future, as they continue to explore and enjoy and benefit from all of the new opportunities brought by the Internet, never lose sight of the beauty and wonder of books! The web is a great place to go when you want to know a lot about a topic, but for my simple question about platypuses, a book was perfect. I found what I wanted to know quickly and easily, without having to guess which of many articles might turn out to be written by a second-grader and which might turn out to be written half in Latin by a Ph.D. researcher on monotremes. There were no advertisements, and I didn't have to follow a zillion links to find what I was looking for. I did choose to "follow a link" (turn a few pages) to learn about a related topic (echidnas). And, I did this all from the comfort of my favorite green armchair, with nothing to plug in or boot up, and no email black hole to fall into, and no feeling that as long as I was online I ought to be working on this course as well. . .

When I browsed to the article on echinoderms, on the same page as the article on echidnas, I made use of perhaps the very best feature of traditional print resources, and the one feature that I think the Internet may never be able to replicate because it either "overdoes" it or "underdoes" it. I could probably have followed links on platypuses for a long time (Too long!) on the Internet, and I'm sure they would have led me eventually to the echidna, just as my book did. The patypus links would not have led me to echinoderms, though. There is something wonderful about the way that you can stumble upon fascinating unrelated information by flipping through a reference book or wandering the shelves of a public library, that just doesn't happen yet (and perhaps never will) when you follow links or Google something or shop at Amazon.com. Similarly, when I listen to NPR or read my Time Magazine, I hear or stumble across information on topics that I'm not all that interested in -- movie reviews and pop culture stuff and such -- that I would never set up my RSS feed to send me, but that it is still nice to know at least a little bit about.

Don't get me wrong: I think the Internet is a wonderful resource! And someday, when I want to know a lot about platypuses, I'll look there. In the meantime, I really love my library room, and I hope that books always maintain an important place in our schools and our society.