Wikipedia isn’t really that evil, I think

April 3, 2008

After school today we had a meeting about summer reading. In our district, we cannot really call it “Summer Reading” so we make it due 2-3 weeks into the school year. This really isn’t feasible anymore given all of the higher ed institutions who require summer reading for incoming freshman. Ladies & Gentlemen, get with the program. How do we keep minds fresh and continue to learn if we don’t require our students to use them? When was the last time you didn’t read something over breaks? Come on. Give me a break! Seriously, our district believes breaks are breaks. No work. Now this is an issue for me, a life long learner who reads voraciously (this past weekend I read the 464 page Change of Heart by Picoult), and how do we model this good behavior for our students if we tell them to just shut down over summers. No work. Just veg out. Ha! Not me! So we had a meeting about books today. I will admit I have never read Cry, the Beloved Country. But I need to. We picked it for our AP Language summer fiction read, but Ron Bromund and I realized that that book wouldn’t work for American Studies, so Ron came up with a new book: Jeff Shaara’s Rise to Rebellion, which floored me. I read several reviews, and I loved what I saw. I immediately talked with a colleague who read this book while walking the Minute Man Trail outside Concord. I bought it after school.

…. ok I think I rambled enough. I will get to the title of this email. Wikipedia. The last four years my perspective when it came to my students was DO NOT USE WIKIPEDIA. If my students cited it, they got a zero on that. It was a do and die situation. Last year I began to realize perhaps the students who began there and went off to other places was ok. Then today, someone in our meeting asked if we should put a note on the summer reading instructions that says no Wikipedia. I didn’t believe I did it, but I stopped them right there. Um… Wikipedia isn’t the best source (I can write that Abraham Lincoln is our school football coach if I want!), but if you go there and scroll down, then use the citations and links to get elsewhere, then fine. Use it. Ugh. I said it. Wikipedia isn’t evil. It’s a good repository.

Posted in AP Lang, American Studies, Summer Reading, books, literature, wiki