If you read the dictionary for fun people will think you’re a geek. Perhaps rightfully so. It’s not your average person who searches through reference material to find stuff they don’t know so that they can now know it. It might not even be a normal person who does that. But, much like the accomplished athlete has spent tedious hours throwing, kicking, hitting, and catching stuff, the accomplished academic has to hone their skills with as much diligence. I always thought it was strange when other kids were excited for school to end so they didn’t have to read all summer. I come from a family where we would jockey every morning to have the cereal box in front of us for reading material. No joke. I may have become a vegetarian in part because of my familiarity with food labels. We a
lso got involved every summer with the reading program at the local library. There was always a measurement device up on the wall to record for everyone to see how much reading was getting done. And my family was very serious about it. We would check out our limit of ten books and then exchange them with each other. Many a librarian had to be convinced we really did read all those books ourselves, but read them we did. I thought of the potential for geekdom when reading Sarah Phillips’ My 2-in-1 Picture Dictionary to Scarlett. Then I looked up the summer reading program for our local library.P.S. Happy Birthday, Stina!
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1846104653/thomasnelsoni-20
I still have the same dictionary I had in high school and in college. I put an "X" by each word I looked up. If I looked a word up twice I made myself study it had to use it while speaking to someone. As a fellow teacher, I too am proud to be in the sisterhood of this Geekdom. Thanks for the post.
ReplyDeleteNo problem! I still have some of those old reading program certificates. I spent an awful lot of hours in that treehouse in the library...and in the old library before that.
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