Joe and Mikhail
My tutor and I started probably like most, picking a book I was interested in reading. Now for me, I was interested in what was going on in the civil rights days in the Bay Area. Naturally I want to read about Huey Newton and the Black Panther Party. However, all the books were checked out or missing. So my tutor suggested something else that was in the same section, a book by Eldridge Cleaver. We decided to read the introduction and the preface and then decide if we wanted to continue with the book. I told him that when I read and come to a word I don’t know, I write it down and look it up later. He agreed that was a good idea and we decided to meet next week with my review of the book.
When we met again the following week I had some words with a few definitions. My tutor then suggested that instead of writing the definitions on separate pieces of paper in a notebook, that instead I should write them down in a composition book. That way all my words would be in one place. Creating my own dictionary of vocabulary words that I could look over whenever I wanted to. What a great idea!
Then I told him that there were words that I could not find in the dictionary. The book also mentioned a couple of people I had never heard of. People like Thomas Paine, Nat Turner, and Sun Tzu. There were also terms that he also referred to such as Marxism and Jim Crow. He told me that all those things we could find out about in one place. A place bigger and easier to use than any library. The Internet!
We went on-line and checked out a couple of search engines. Anything you want at your fingertips. Just type it in and Voila. However, you cannot just believe anything you read, so he told me of another place that was on the Internet, wikipedia.org. This place is like an encyclopedia on the Internet. It was an awesome place for information. For the vocabulary words that I did not find, we went to a website called dictionary.com. There you can get definitions from the Internet. That was pretty cool too.
By the end of the day I was full of information and had other ideas on which books to read next. All the information I got that day made me want to read Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice even more. Now I am not just reading this book, but learning what inspired it.
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