the school librarian told this to my 13 year old granddaughter

[iwillalwayswonderwhy]

ALL non-fiction books are fact-checked by the publisher and are true. All are good sources for references for research papers. She is working on a paper about the Vietnam war. She interviewed me as a source since I was alive during that era.

I told her the librarian was not correct.

[Archae]

1. Just go to the first part of the non-fiction section.

Flying saucers, ancient aliens, crop circles, ghosts, etc.

"Fact-checked" my ass.

[TheBlackAdder]

2. The only thing that comes close is an Academic Peer Review (Placed in the open for all to comment).

If a publication isn't peer reviewed, then it is not checked for accuracy.

And by peer review, it has to be academia doing it, not a bunch of political hacks.

[MineralMan]

3. Now that's a poor librarian.

Since her statement is obviously not true, she should stop telling kids anything at all.

[historylovr]

4. Good grief.

That librarian is naïve. Even if publishers had time to fact check, every author has some bias or other, even if it's just the climate of opinion he or she was brought up in or where he or she studied.

[Ilsa]

5. I think you should address this with the librarian

on a one-on-one basis, and in a friendly diplomatic way, just in case your daughter "didn't hear her correctly." (I'm sure she did.) If the librarian is unpersuaded, then I'd go to her assistant principal.

[pnwmom]

6. The librarian at our school used to tell the kids that when reading fiction,

if they saw more than three words on a page they didn't know, they should put the book back and get an easier one.

I told my kids to ignore her and read anything they wanted and skip any words they didn't know. Definitely don't go looking them up!

[Jenoch]

8. Why shouldn't someone look up the

definition to an unfamiliar word?

[El_Johns]

9. They can if they want, but stopping the story to look up every unfamiliar word destroys the

flow of reading and in excess, the interest in the story.

Good readers get that way by reading lots of words they don't know & sort of assimilating the meanings by meeting the words in lots of contexts.

My parents were readers with a big library & that's how I became a good reader -- by pulling down books that were way over my head & plowing through them.

If someone had forced me to use a dictionary everytime I met an unfamiliar word I would have been very frustrated.

[FreeJoe]

11. Just click on it

i taught my kids that when they want to know the meaning of a word, they should just press on it with their finger and the definition will appear.

[pnwmom]

16. Funny, none of our paper books do that.

And we still have lots of those around.

[El_Johns]

17. Clicking on it doesn't teach them how to deduce the meaning from context on their own.

It's a skill that helps with global reading comprehension, not just vocabulary.

I knew how to use a dictionary, but I didn't often resort to it because usually I could figure it out "close enough", & eventually I met the word in enough contexts that I knew what it meant completely.

Which is how we learn language, actually.

[pnwmom]

15. It was my grandparents' library for me. And their ancient Encylopedia Britannica,

which I was lugging around in second grade. When I looked at those books as an adult, I couldn't believe I'd been trying to read them at that age. But no one told me I couldn't, and I just gleaned whatever meaning I could. Having to look up every word would have been tedious and frustrating and would have ruined it for me.

[El_Johns]

18. +1. At that age, it seemed an entry to the secret world of grown-ups to me.

[pnwmom]

14. Because it takes you out of the flow of the story and much of the fun goes away.

An important part of the fiction reading experience is getting lost in a story. Stopping to look up a word interrupts the "fictional dream."

When you're reading fiction, you can usually deduce the meaning of a word from context. By the time you've seen it a number of times, you just know what it means -- better than someone who just looked it up in the dictionary.

[El_Johns]

20. Yes, better than someone who looked it up. You forget something you looked up easily, but when

you "just know" from context, your brain is performing a different operation.

[pnwmom]

22. It's the same way children learn spoken language. Babies don't sit there asking adults

to define every word they use. How annoying would that be?

[El_Johns]

24. Yes. Babies are rewarded by interaction with people, just like kids under the best of circumstances

are rewarded in some way by interaction with literature.

Anything that makes an intrinsically rewarding activity more like "work" or "school" or "testing" is counter-productive, IMO, at least in primary school. Let kids enjoy reading and it will pay off for the rest of their lives.

[pnwmom]

32. Yes! Which is why I also didn't like the librarian's discouragement

of series reading. Goosebumps, the Magic Treehouse, etc. -- I was happy to buy my kids series books. They're like the comfort food of books. And what's wrong with kids having books that are just plain comfortable and fun? I think many lifelong book lovers start out with an addiction to a series that librarians would turn up their noses at. I remember when my son went through three weeks of non-stop reading of Magic Treehouse, until he suddenly ran out. There was nothing else to read! So I picked up the first Harry Potter and started reading it aloud, and soon he was on my lap, trying to read it along with me. By the next year (third grade) he was a librarian's dream, reading omnivorously. But it all started with the Magic Treehouse.

[El_Johns]

33. Agree. Let them read what captures their imagination. My 7 year old cousin is reading comic

books, the Marvel superheroes -- he sits in a corners and you can hear him saying the words under his breath, stumbling over the hard ones -- but the important thing is, he's motivated to get through them without anyone telling him to, and without any help from mom or dad.

At about the same age, I also read comic books -- my parents would let me buy one or two as a treat, & it was, as good as an ice cream cone.

When I was in school all the girls read series books -- Nancy Drew, Cherry Ames, all those Misty horse books, etc. No high literary value there, but a story that holds your interest when you're young. You can't read "War & peace" until you master Nancy Drew -- or its equivalent.

In my current workplace, I and another person are the only ones who can read fluently -- even the boss stumbles when reading. I had taken for granted that "most" people could read fluently enough to understand a written argument or a news story until now.

[pnwmom]

34. Now graphic novels are big, so comic book lovers can move on to them.

My husband was a comic book person, too. Was there one called Harold the Duck? For some reason that sticks in my mind.

[El_Johns]

35. I think that was for a older demographic. :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_the_Duck

[Laffy Kat]

36. Magic cards! That's what finally got my youngest reading.

Hey, whatever it takes.

[pnwmom]

37. Yeah -- my six year old was highly motivated to read the Mario Brothers manual.

[Fumesucker]

7. Limbaugh and Hannity's books are filed under non-fiction

'Nuff said.

[kairos12]

30. Couldn't finish them. Ran out of crayons. Magenta works best.

[TheMightyFavog]

10. Does this librarian even hold an MLIS?

[dembotoz]

12. dr suess tells the truth--i knew it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[kairos12]

31. Dr. Seuss rules. "Oh, The Places You'll Go."

[LWolf]

13. I doubt that was a librarian.

Some high schools hire one. Some districts hire one to oversee every school, but they don't actually work in the library serving students.

Some districts don't have any.

Most districts hire "library technicians" to staff their school libraries. It's a classified position, and it usually requires no formal library training at all; the training given is usually provided by the district, and involves how to catalog and check books in and out, not how to evaluate sources.

I know this because I was a library tech in a school library for a dozen years while I raised my kids and finished my teaching credential. I DID hold a library tech certificate from a university, and I did later take courses towards an MLS in library science, which I did not finish. The certificate was not required, though, and the position did not require ANY formal library training.

So regardless of the validity of your pov, or the employee's, please don't call the employee a "librarian" unless you know he or she IS a librarian.

[KatyMan]

19. WOW

There is a librarian at every school in the districts around us. My sister-in-law is a librarian at an elementary school for many years. You have to have a master's to do it anywhere around here.

[Karia]

40. Yes, I doubt anyone with an MLS from any era would make that error

Some school districts have cut librarian and library tech positions positions altogether, so that if the libraries are staffed at all, it is by parent volunteers.

[JanMichael]

23. My wife holds an MLIS

Your school media specialist is probably older. My mother in law was told "back in the day"....to just "change one word" when writing a report, and it would not be plagiarism.

Give people a break. The school librarians out there now are doing the best they can- the "IS" is fairly new and refers to "Information studies."

That means "the internet." It's new, in terms of research and information available. The "older librarians" are doing their best to keep up.

Sorry this was SO traumatic that it had to be posted so she or he could be ridiculed.

[El_Johns]

25. I doubt it was a librarian anyway. Librarians are generally book people, & book people know that

everything in the non-fiction racks isn't true or fact-checked.

It sounds like something a non-reader would say.

[Nye Bevan]

26. Tell your granddaughter to ask the librarian if "Mein Kampf" is all true. (nt)

[Deep13]

27. That's only true of peer-reviewed work.

Wonder where the librarian got her degree: bubblegum machine or Cracker Jacks?

[arthritisR_US]

28. The librarian should know better, revisionist

writing goes on all the time!

[Lint Head]

29. Most non fiction stories are fiction. Otherwise it would be a boring story.

[SheilaT]

38. Good grief.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that very few non-fiction books are actually fact checked by the publisher. Many non-fiction books are good sources, depending on the field you're looking at. And we don't even need to think about various conspiracy theories, or UFOs, or crop circles, or any other fringe areas.

Plus, facts themselves can be open to interpretation.

I will suggest that the more different sources you look at when researching something, the better off you'll be, meaning the more likely you are to get enough information to have a good idea of the "truth" of that topic. I put truth in quotes simply to be on the safe side.

[liberal_at_heart]

39. tell your granddaughter to stay away from the section where they place all the new, popular

publications. Sensationalism sells and libraries are no different than book stores when it comes to putting the sensational, controversial books up front. That's where you usually see the usual suspects like Beck, O'Reilly, and Limbaugh.