I enjoy helping my daughter with her homework. It’s a way of spending time with her, sharing what I know with her, as well as teaching her some learning strategies. But, as most parents come to realise, there’s a big difference between helping kids with their homework, and doing it for them. For instance, she knows better than to ask me how to spell a word, because the only answer she ever gets, ever has gotten and ever will get is: “How do you think it is spelled?” What I hear instead is: “Mum, do you spell [evidence] e-v-i-d-e-n-c-e?” or at worst “e-v-i-d-e-n-s-e?” Sometimes I correct her if she doesn’t spell the word right. Other times, I tell her to look up her spelling of the word in the dictionary and see where it takes her. No, not the online dictionary, the hardcover one. Like I grew up doing.
Why? Because I am a hopeless pedant? Perhaps. But also because there are some real, if subtle, benefits to using the book. With both the book and the web dictionaries, if you look up the word “correlate,” you encounter not only the word “correlate” and its definition as a verb, but you find its definition also as a noun. You see that the word has derivatives such as “correlation” and “correlational.” You learn that the word originated in the mid-17th century. And you encounter words that can be found near the search word.
But when you look up, say “correlate” in the New Oxford Dictionary of English (a wedding present from a friend of ours), you come across a number of interesting things. You might notice that there are a great many words beginning with “co” that surround it. You might begin to wonder what “co” has going for it that it introduces so many words. You might even just notice that the book itself is very heavy [roughly 3 kilos] and contains 2176 pages and a very many words, each of which is available for use, at no additional charge.
Searching through the pages of a dictionary forces us to rehearse the alphabet – not just in searching for the first letter of a word, but in the order of the subsequent letters as well. We are forced to actually scan many other words before settling on our target. By not arriving immediately at an answer, we allow serendipity to enter into the game; how many times have you looked up a word and followed your eyes along to the meaning of another word they stumbled upon along the way?
Speaking of games, our family loves to play Boggle which allows players to search for words among a collection of random letters. One of the great features of the game is that, unlike a printed word search, there is no specified list to find. As a result, you can bump into a series of letters that be a word, that can be made plural if you can connect it to an ‘s’, or that can also be made into another form.
I will hand it to Dictionary.com for including many valuable features. It includes a separate list of “nearby words” you would encounter before or after yours. It also shows sample sentences that demonstrate how the word is used. It includes synonyms, some word origin and history, as well as a button for hearing how the word is pronounced. Also on offer is the ingenious “Visual Thesaurus,” that shows a map of your target word and its synonyms, and a game that challenges a user to identify the correct definition of words found on standardised tests. But your eyes will also have to fight their way through all these features as well as a dizzying array of animated ads, banners, social media gadgets and games to reach the definition you’ve set out to find.
Take pity on our children. Their developing brains and emerging minds are bounced around like pinballs, sprung between bumpers and shooters of sights and sounds. We need to help train our children, their minds and personalities, to take things one step at a time, to accept learning as a process, to follow their noses, but not to be lured off anywhere someone else wants them to go. Let’s help them to focus. They will have the rest of their lives to tap, swipe, click and surf.