The value of trivia

So what IS trivia? For school kids, trivia is (by definition) a waste of time. It’s something that will not be on the test. It’s “extra” stuff. For unschoolers, though, in the wide new world in which EVERYTHING counts, there can be no trivia in that sense. If news of the existence of sachets ties in with what one learned of medieval plagues in Extraordinary Endings of Practically Everything and Everybody, there are two pointers that tie microbiology to European cities in the Middle Ages, and lead to paradise-guaranteed pilgrimages to Rome. Nowadays sanitation and antibiotics keep the plague from “spreading like the plague.”


Image (a link!) borrowed from The World of Playing Cards
SandraDodd.com/triviality

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If everything counts...

So what IS trivia, then? For school kids, trivia is (by definition) a waste of time. It’s something that will not be on the test. It’s “extra” stuff. For unschoolers, though, in the wide new world in which EVERYTHING counts, there can be no trivia in that sense.

SandraDodd.com/trivia

The quote is from
Textbooks for Unschoolers
or
Triviality

photo by Sandra Dodd

It's all information

Respect trivia.

For school kids, "trivia" means "won't be on the test."

In the absence of tests, where all of life is learning, there IS no "trivia." There is only information.

Principles of Learning (chat transcript)
photo by Sandra Dodd, of tile in Austin
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Enough trivia?

Enough trivia will create a detailed model of the universe.


SandraDodd.com/trivia
photo by Trista Teeter (click it)

It's all information

Respect trivia.

For school kids, "trivia" means "won't be on the test."

In the absence of tests, where all of life is learning, there IS no "trivia." There is only information.

Principles of Learning (chat transcript)
photo by Sandra Dodd, of tile in Austin
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Little bitty bits

The whole world is made of little bits of information. Yesterday, at my house, Holly asked who first did "Dream Lover." I was thinking someone like Dion, or Bobby Vee, and while I was thinking she said "Bobby Darin," and I said no, not first.

Spoiler: I was wrong.

She pulled the computer out of her pocket, looked the song up, and played the beginnings of a couple, on Spotify. "That one!" I said, to the one by Dion. It listed Ben E. King, among others, so we figured (falsely) that it was his first, THEN Dion, then Bobby Darin.

Does it matter? To us, it does. To music history, and royalties, it matters. As to political correctness and the basis of assumptions, it ties in to all sorts of socio-political, economic, maybe geographical aspects. Trivia is what knowledge is made of. Enough little bits form a rich whole.

We could each explain why we thought what about whom, in all that. Those explanations would lead to other trivia, stories of other songs, writers, and musicians.

Any interest can lead to all interests. Let curiosity flow.

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These will (while they're there) link to recordings at YouTube, but if you have Spotify or another music service, you can find recordings by these and many other people. There are other songs with similar names, too. I will embed Bobby Darin's version, because he wrote it, but it's not the one I knew as a kid.



"Dream Lover," Bobby Darin (composer), April 1959
"Dream Lover," Dion, November 1961
"Dream Lover," Ben E. King, February, 1962

Notes on Wikipedia and SongFacts:
"Dream Lover" is a song written by Bobby Darin and recorded by him on April 6, 1959.
Dream Lover by Bobby Darin

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Trivial posts about trivia
(or profound reflections on very real learning)

Wheelbarrows

History, science, gardening, tradition, the physics of simple machines, color, art, children's games, materials, geography...

No matter what topic you choose, what collectable objects you favor or trivia that appeals to you, following that interest will lead you to many "facts" and "truths." Trivia perhaps, but enough trivia will create a detailed model of the universe.

Wheelbarrow things
photo by Sandra Dodd

If everything counts...

So what IS trivia, then? For school kids, trivia is (by definition) a waste of time. It’s something that will not be on the test. It’s “extra” stuff. For unschoolers, though, in the wide new world in which EVERYTHING counts, there can be no trivia in that sense.

SandraDodd.com/triviality
photo by Sandra Dodd

Enough trivia

Enough trivia will create a detailed model of the universe.


Joy said "That is a poem," about the text above, when it appeared here. I decided to create a new page for this poem to link to.
SandraDodd.com/trivia
photo by Sandra Dodd

Books? Old books?

The edition of The New York Public Library Desk Reference we have might be a little outdated, but the rules of ice hockey haven’t changed, nor the way in which one addresses a letter to the Pope, nor the date of the discovery of Krypton. (Some of you thought it was just a Superman thing, didn’t you? Nope—1898, the year before aspirin.)

(Before the internet, people had reference books, and even then they seemed like trivia. Trivia can be the interesting door that leads to strange, new knowledge.)

SandraDodd.com/triviality
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Trivia

A huge amount of learning is taking place, and the child's internal model of the universe is starting to form up. You can help!

SandraDodd.com/trivia, in a quote that links to SandraDodd.com/piaget
photo by Colleen Prieto

Words, ideas, pictures and knowledge

About words, and learning:

As they got older, and war games, movies about history, and international celebrities came over their intellectual horizon, so did trivia about the borders of countries.

What's with Tibet? Taiwan? When did Italy and France settle into their current borders? Why does Monaco have royalty? The Vatican really has cash machines in Latin? What's the difference between UK and Great Britain? Is Mexico in north or central America? Were Americans REALLY that afraid of and ignorant about the Soviet Union in the 60's?

In answering those questions, the terms and trivia of history, geography, philosophy, religion and political science come out. The words are immediately useful, and tied to ideas and pictures and knowledge the child has already absorbed, awaiting just the name, or the definitions, or the categories.

SandraDodd.com/words/words
photo by Sandra Dodd
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Trivial connections

Sometimes to understand a joke, people have to know three or four different things already. Sometimes a piece of humor ties together LOTS of trivia/learning in ways other things can't do.

SandraDodd.com/trivia
photo by Megan Valnes
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Trivia is knowledge

Trivia is knowledge that connects things to other things, and ideas to images, and sounds to places.

SandraDodd.com/connections
photo by Janine

Who reads how

Written when my kids were teens:

Kirby reads like a lawyer. He can skim a rules book or instructions for a game, and explain simply and clearly to others. If he forgets a detail, he'll be able to find it easily.

Marty likes humor and history.

Holly's main reading is on the internet, but she likes name books, and other non-fiction and trivia. One thing she doesn't use the internet for is definitions and spellings. She likes my old full-size American Heritage Dictionary, and will sprint upstairs to look something up on the slightest excuse.

Three Readers—SandraDodd.com/threereaders
(It's all one paragraph in the original.)
photo by Sara McGrath

History in your hand

By seeing the same old things in new ways, you might discover a world of riches in the same old stuff you already had. Take, for instance, a deck of playing cards. What might seem too mundane and common to you isn't so common to someone else. And maybe your parents or grandparents thought cards were sinful, but playing dominoes or something else was okay. My dad's family was that way.

Playing card games has social benefits and leads to learning and all, but playing around with the cards themselves leads to dozens of things too! Compare aces and art from different decks. Consider the manufacture of cards, the traditional colors, the etiquette of card tables, shuffling, cutting, directions of play.

Cards connect to history, art, statistics, logic, geography, religion, law, entertainment, paper manufacturing, printing technology... well they don't connect to more things than everything else does, but they're an easy way to see how things connect!

Some of this is from SandraDodd.com/game/cards
Image from a Wikipedia article.

Other images and fun trivia are here:
History found in Playing Cards, on the Thinking Sticks blog
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Something old, something new...

Something old, something new; Something borrowed, something blue. That's traditional advice for a bride, to create good luck by what she wears to the wedding. For those in places where that little verse is foreign, then it's history, and cultural trivia. As an unschooling tool it could be a checklist of things to look for, when you go for a walk, or see a video, or a painting, or while folding the laundry.

Disposable Checklists for Unschoolers
photo by Sandra Dodd, in Corrales, New Mexico;
Sandia Mountains in the distance, with clouds

Trivia

Carousels, merry-go-rounds... American-made carousels go counter-clockwise. In the UK, they call that "anti-clockwise," and theirs go clockwise.

Is that worth knowing? Maybe not, but I think it's interesting.

Where I live, in the U.S., horses don't have names on them, except at Disneyland, pretty much. The "King Arthur Carrousel" in Disneyland was made in Canada, over 100 years ago—before Disneyland. I don't know whether the Canadian builders used two "r"s in the name, or if Walt Disney liked the alternative spelling. If you think any of this is interesting, you can read more here, about the one at Disneyland.

I took the photo above, at a fair in England. Lol is a nickname for Laurence, there (and old guys are named Laurence, not so many young kids), so that horse was named after someone who was called "Lol" instead of "Larry," and not named after laughing out loud.

How many small facts and connections can one person hold? I don't think there's a limit.

It's easier to learn a thing if you already know something else kind of like it. Connections!

It's All Information
photo by Sandra Dodd

Associations

Billy the Kid reminds me of my grandmother. She lived in Lincoln County, New Mexico, in the nineteen-tens and a while after, when the events were more recent and richly local. She had been places he had been, and collected articles and booklets about him.

Louise's children remember one castle by giant ice cream cones they had there, and another by lollies.

Any association that help us recall or connect ideas is a useful part of our personal web of knowledge. In school, it is possible to cheat. In school, there is "trivia." In the real world, though, learning is learning.

SandraDodd.com/reallearning
photo by Louise Mills

Ideas and trivia

Learning isn't in fancy books or computer games, it all happens in the ideas children have, in the trivial facts they fit together to come up with their view of the world—past present and future. You don't need a lesson or a unit to show a child what's wonderful about woodgrain, ice crystals on the windshield, or birdsongs. Five seconds worth of pointing and saying "Look, these trees were not native to North America" might possibly lead to an hour long discussion, or a lifelong fascination. Bringing something interesting home, browsing in an antique shop, listening to new music on instruments you've never heard—all those build neural pathways and give you a chance to be together in a special place.

Quote from the 1998 article "All Kinds of Homeschooling"
photo by Holly Dodd
of art by Holly Dodd
which happened to catch a rainbow
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