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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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The edition of The New York Public Library Desk Reference we have might be a little outdated, but the rules of ice hockey haven’t changed, nor the way in which one addresses a letter to the Pope, nor the date of the discovery of Krypton.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

No time wasted

Visual dictionaries, books of birds, mammals, local flora, the dictionary, encyclopedia, atlas, almanac—these books can be used by the hour or by the half minute. There is no time wasted when children are thinking, asking questions, fitting new information with what they already have, and all the while smiling and laughing. Have fun!

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The quote is mine (Sandra Dodd) from an article
written before Google searches, before YouTube.
I love the internet. Google Earth, bird sites,
visual searches, etymonline.com, music videos...

SandraDodd.com/triviality
photo by Jamie Griffin

Easy learning

The books that have helped us with unschooling have been things that amused or intrigued or provided answers to questions. How-to and trivia books have been popular here. Real-life combined with humor makes for easy learning.

SandraDodd.com/triviality
photo by Sandra Dodd
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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/triviality
photo by Sandra Dodd