A line by English poet Alexander Pope has long impressed me: “Be not the first by whom the new are tried / Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.”
I entered the computer-Internet crowd with some trepidation, wondering what advantage computers held over electric typewriters. At the time, the early ‘90s, my colleague Bruce Papier raved about the infinite possibilities of the Internet. He often bought programs for his computers and passed on to me several reputable dictionaries and encyclopedias that came bundled with the purchases.
“Don’t you think you’ll be needing them? What if you want to read up on Evita Peron, or find out whether the uropods of crawfish are of the north side or the south?” I asked him.
Bruce insisted that all the information he’d ever need could be found on the Internet. He reminded me that at the time, estimates were that 65,000 new Web sites were appearing each day on the net.
Being “not the first by whom the new are tried,” I agree that it’s overwhelming the amount of information on the web, but what Bruce didn’t explain to me is that one needs to know the right questions to ask, how to phrase them, and where to look. Remember, this was before the word “Google” became a verb.
Imagine that you’re searching for a listed phone number for a John Smith, who lives in New York City. Likely his number will be there, but you’ll need to sift through hundreds of names and numbers to find the right one. If all we have are a first and last name, where do we start?
Back in the classroom this semester, I issued an extra-credit assignment in which the students were to answer some 30 general-interest questions. Unlike the algebra teacher who declares, “If you don’t show the work, the assignment is wrong, even if the answer is correct,” I told my students simply to provide the answers, to show the product rather than the process. It’s interesting to learn exactly how the students found the answers —most of them used the Internet — but the emphasis for this assignment was “just the facts, Ma’am.”
Over the years, this kind of exercise, which I’ve modified every year, yielded some interesting results. In the pre-computer days of public school teaching, one student said he simply handed the 30 questions to the school librarian and placed a dollar in her hand. Others scoured dictionaries and encyclopedias.
The slightly revised batch of questions I distributed this month can easily be answered on the Internet. But there are limits. “I got the answers on the net” is not a satisfactory accounting. We don’t just simply “go to the computer” and expect instant answers.
The research topics are of the kind we students of Immaculate Conception School were expected to know, even if few of us had read any of the works. Once, an anonymous student stumbled over an oral question posed by Sister Mary Thelma. “Certainly, Arthur, you should know the answer to that one,” she said. “Well, Sister, that author’s only 4 years old and won’t be writing that poem for another 37 years.”
That was no excuse.
Nor is it an excuse in my current class. One of the questions my students fielded was, “Who wrote ‘The Waste Land’?” Some students correctly answered “T.S. Eliot,” but a few answered “Grover Smith.” As for the question, “Who wrote ‘Catcher in the Rye’?” several correctly identified J.D. Salinger, but others ascribe the popular novel to someone named Robert B. Kaplan. And, according to some students, “Measure for Measure” was written not by Shakespeare but by Kenneth Colley.
In an attempt to learn why such far-out answers got submitted, I did a search of my own. One of the sites lists Colley as a lead in “Measure,” as Duke Vincentio. A search for “Grover Smith” reveals he wrote a critical review of Eliot’s work. And R.B. Kaplan’s name appears as an author of a “Cliff’s Notes” version of the Salinger novel.
Emmet Fox takes credit for having delivered “The Sermon on the Mount,” one of the 30 questions on the sheet. And how does Fox deserve such accolades? It turns out he’s written an interpretation of the Biblical account. The reference to Fox in relation to the Sermon on the Mount is one of 1,580,000 sites on the Internet.
Unless a Web page bounces up and announces, “Shakespeare wrote ‘Measure for Measure,’” it’s understandable why someone surfing the net may run across a number of names, each one a plausible candidate for the authorship of a particular work.
I shared this concern with daughter-in-law Connie, whose familiarity with the ‘Net astounds me. “You can’t just grab the first name that appears on a Web site,” she said, “you need to ask the questions clearly and make some judgments in finding the answer.”
She searched for the first half-dozen items on the assignment sheet and came up with the correct answer, in minutes.
For beginners, searching is akin to a scene in the movie “Class Action,” featuring Gene Hackman and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio as a father and daughter on opposites sides on a civil lawsuit. The trial judge rules that the defense, representing an auto corporation, needed to provide “all relevant documents” to the plaintiffs. Accordingly, the daughter’s firm delivered several truckloads of data, with the implicit message: we dare you to find what you’re looking for in that pile.”
When faced with literally thousands of “pages” of prospective answers, aren’t we net surfers also being dared to find the information we need? Mercifully, because the questions are for extra credit only, no student will suffer for their answers, some of which are grossly incorrect. The needle-in-a-haystack pursuit appears to need some refining. And if that doesn’t happen, we could just go ahead and regard Kenneth Colley as the playwright for “Measure for Measure.”
Besides, for centuries, people have been saying that Shakespeare couldn’t even spell his own name, spelling it “Shaxper” instead. Therefore, for some, it’s an easy leap to insist that the Elizabethan poet wrote no plays at all.