I was Reading Last Night...

Yesterday at the used book store I scored on a big pile of GWS magazines ~FREE!~, and last night I was reading in one and it said this,

"I recently read parts of a book by Richard Saul Wurman, Information Anxiety which assesses the overwhelming quality of the information we are confronted with daily, and defines "Information Anxiety" as the gap between what we know and what we think we should know. He says his father taught him not that he should know everything in the encyclopedia, but that he should know how to find it."

I thought of a tool...a screwdriver, say. If I know I have a screwdriver, and I can find it quickly and easily when I need it, I wouldn't need to carry it around with me all the time.

Same with information. If my kids need to know something, say who the fifth president was, they need to know how to find the information...

What they *don't* need is a list of the presidents they memorized in fifth grade floating around in their heads. ; )

And confession time. When I thought of that last night, it occurred to me that we still have a list of the Presidents names on the wall in their room...left over from when I thought it was important to know things like that.

I told Daddy about it, and he asked why I had thought it was important in the first place (since he and I have gone more than 30 years without needing it) and I admitted that it was something *I* could show off to other people, "Say the names of the Presidents for Grandma." lol He was like, "Get RID of it!" lol

SO, even though it's Learn Nothing Day, I've learned something...although maybe it's more of a *reminder* than actual learning. Yeah, that's it. My day is still *clean*. lol