In The Big Inning...

Remember encyclopedias? Not the ones on CD-ROM, no, I'm talking about the big sets of 20 gigantic volumes? And remember book reports or research papers in middle and high school? Where you'd have to go to the library and find those encyclopedias, and take notes? Maybe, if you were really lucky, the topic you were researching would actually be the subject of some esoteric book. Of course, mostly like the whole class had reports on similar subjects, so even if there was a book that seemed useful, and it happened to be owned by your school's library, it was probably checked out by the busybody who had memorized the Dewey Decimal system and found it first.

So, you go back to the encyclopedia, and find the couple of paragraphs on your chosen subject matter, and try to think of a way to turn 15 sentences into 15 pages. For me, these were some of my least favorite parts of school. I'm sure I was learning something, but it certainly wasn't about my report topic, because I don't believe I can tell you any specific detail about any report I wrote. In fact, I can't even tell you the subject of any report I wrote. That stuff really sunk in, eh?

There's an argument to be made that what we were really learning was the methodology of report writing. And I can kind of buy into that. Of course, I do specifically recall that a good fifty percent of the time was spent teaching us how to write citations, as if this was the most important thing we could possible know about writing research papers. They always made such a big deal out of it, but it always seemed so overblown and arbitrary. Depending on what type of resource you used, different citations had different formats. So you'd write the author and then a PERIOD. Don't forget the PERIOD! Then the title (underlined, of course, unless it was information you obtained from the back of a cereal box, in which case the name of the cereal was in italics). PERIOD. The pages you obtained the information from. PERIOD. The publisher, and the city of publication. PERIOD. (Who gives a living crap about the city of publication?) And on, and on, and on. So much time wasted - it's not like anyone memorizes that stuff, anyways. Just use your "Rules of Style" and copy it out of there.

At any rate, the other half of the time was actually spent writing the reports. And, to be honest, judging from the number of people I encounter on a daily basis who have no idea how to write grammatically correct sentences, nevermind coherent paragraphs, it was clearly a necessary part of our education. Oh, I'm sure some people learned about the history of sub-Saharan Africa, or the life and times of Ernest Hemingway's cats, but for the most part, I believe they were trying to teach us how to write. Of course, the skill many of us learned was how to write in a bloated fashion, taking meager amounts of facts and turning them into long-winded blathering. Pity the poor teacher that had to read those things.

The other skill we may have learned was how to research, but that was made fairly obsolete by the time we got to college, and had libraries that actually possessed more than a couple hundred books. (And, multiple different encyclopedias.) But even that skill has become useless, because now there's the internet. When I was a kid, the internet was just becoming popular, but it certainly wasn't pervasive enough to be useful for a report. Now, I'm positive that by just searching for "Ernest Hemingway's cats", you could likely find a pre-written report just there for the taking.

Really, think about it. How easy would your homework have been with the internet available? I'm certain that report writing would have become a breeze. Certainly, the researching part would have been pretty trivial - just Google your topic and start clickin' on the links. Maybe you wouldn't quite find the depth you needed for a doctoral dissertation, but given the crap they accepted in high school, it would have been more than enough. And, if you're lucky, you probably could find something pre-written. Now, if you have half a brain, you'd rewrite it so it sounded like you - I have to believe that any teacher worth his or her salt had a fairly honed "stolen from the Internet" detector.

In many cases, it wasn't worthwhile to copy your homework, as you either needed to show your work, or you needed to actually study the problems so that you knew the answers for the test. I'm thinking of things like vocabulary and math/science problems. But I'm also willing to bet that there's a pretty big market out there for answer-sheets to exercises in most textbooks. If there are cracks for video games, you can bet there are PDFs somewhere that contain all of the solutions to the most popular textbooks, with the answers written out. If not, well, maybe I should get to work.

And how easy would it be to cheat? Just IM your friends back and forth, split up the problems, and you're done. Then, it's off to play online poker for the rest of the evening, while telling your folks that you're doing your homework on your laptop. Man, I can only imagine the possibilities had the internet been around when I was a kid. Although, I'm certain it'll have some horrible ramifications - for one, writing ability is going to decline even further, despite it being more necessary than ever with the advent of email. I can see it now: Book reports ending with "TTYL". Term papers titled "Sub-Saharan Africa 4 Ever". Paragraphs ending with ";-)" to indicate sarcasm. Hmm...maybe I am better off having gone to school in the disconnected age.