For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnston for March 05, 2020

yeah, John, seriously?

Translation: “I thought you were going this for me!”

No, Liz. He’s not going to do your homework. He did this way back in his school days. He’s just showing you where you can find the information which is very helpful because you now know where they are and don’t have to do a time consuming search. Be thankful. Funny that I never once asked for homework help. I liked the challenge of doing things myself. My kids? They pulled a Liz. I

Guess I got spoiled at her age. Mom was certified to teach Secondary and would look through the sources with me to be sure that she knew I knew how to use them and then back off and let me pick and choose what materials to use. When I was “All Done” she would look it over for any gross errors and suggest corrections. It was up to me to do rewrites and deal with my teachers over any other errors in spelling or grammar. Once things started needing to be typed she got me a decent typewriter.

So reminds me of me Economics homework from 20 years ago. There were a few paragraphs I did not understand, and my dad for help. He just said read it again. And again, and again. By the 15th time, I was in tears, and still did not understand what I was trying to read.

I had co-corkers like this. Eventually they learned not to ask me for “Help”.

Liz, don’t feel bad. That ploy never worked for me either. The best I could get (if lucky) was a quick grammar and spell check. Later on, when the report had to be typed, my mother would type it for me exactly as I wrote it (errors and all)!

He did help you. He helped you by finding the books you needed. My Mom did this to me when I was younger.

LOL! He just did, Elizabeth. You now have all the information you need to research your subject and write your report! Good luck!

We just used our World Book Encyclopedia. Didn’t have Nat Geo books. But I also would go to the library and ask the librarian where to find books on (fill in the blank). Used them, too… I thought Nat Geo was mostly photography anyway.

I was home with the mumps when my class was introduced to fractions. We had work sheets (books didn’t leave the school back then) and when I asked my dad for help, he snarled, “If you can’t learn it from a book, you’ll never learn it.” Needless to say, math has always been difficult for me. Later, I learned he was a high school drop out.

How did we ever survive without Google?!

Lynn’s Comments: Situations like this really date the strip. Nobody uses an encyclopedia any more. In fact, I still spell the word the way I learned to spell it in the 50s—encyclopaedia.

One time, I asked my dad to help me with a book report project. It was a Sunday evening. When I asked, he asked me, “When is it due?” I told him “Tomorrow.” "He asked, “When did you get the project?” I told him when, which was a couple of weeks ago. He sat back & said, “You got yourself into this mess; you’ll get yourself out.” That put a firm end to my procrastinating…and I managed to squeak a B out of my project.

I wonder if Canadians need a passport to go to Australia?

I would proofread and give editorial suggestions regarding my kids’ homework, but they had to do their own research. How else would they learn? My parents would not lift a finger, or even make helpful suggestions when it came to my homework. Their reasoning was that everything was so different from when they were kids that their help would be counterproductive or just plain wrong.

Wow - the dark ages before the internet.

Ah, young folks of today. The clueless shall inherit the earth.

I’m of two minds on this. He pointed her to a source of information but the exercise is probably not about that. It’s about selecting, arranging, and presenting a coherent view of the topic. She almost certainly needs help with those. Maybe others had different experiences, but I remember having to write essays with little instruction about how to do the whole thing. Given the unpopularity of essay writing I think my experience was typical.

I improved my writing immeasurably after I left school, so that in my last year of working I was tasked with (and received an award for) a project that was mostly a matter of document architecture. Sometimes even nerds are heroes.

when she said “help me” it meant “do this for me!”

Aside from history, ency’s are useless. When in grade school, I was interested in how radio worked. Folks had a set, so soon learned how coherers worked and how to build them. However, that didn’t seem quite right. To be up to date, magazines (now the internet) are the tool. Still have the first three issues of Popular Electronics (1954) where I got a real start in electronics. (Note: Coherers predated even the crystal sets!

He did help you no go and do what he said and write “YOUR” paper it’s not his it’s yours and YOU do the work.

By the word “index” in the National Geographic, he means the spine of the magazine because that’s where it is listed what countries they are covering in each issue. My kids used that magazine a lot when they did their projects, even if just for the maps. One thing that was the best about National Geographic was the most updated maps, that’s for sure.

One year, their uncle bought The Encyclopedia Britannica for them also. They used it a lot for history, geography and for english essays… But in the end, when they wanted to make the information more recent, they still had to go to the library and get newer books on their topics…I must say that our kids went to really nice and new schools so the books they got in their libraries were new too…but that was 35+ years ago, so I hope those books have been replaced with even newer ones…

Hard to believe at this point that she’s going to become a teacher.