Jan 29 2008
Look it up!
…after 30 years, I still haven’t formulated a firm opinion on that time-honored parental tradition. You know the one: where the kid comes up to Mom or Dad asking what some multi-syllabic word means, and the traditional parental response instead of answering is “look it up!”
I believe the justification is that the kid will learn it better if they have to look it up themselves. (Feel free to share in the comments if you’ve heard other reasonings for this response.) Is this actually true? Is it better to have a “look it up” answer instead of looking it up together, parent and child? Or what about just telling them the meaning? Or telling and then together looking it up?
I know for me as a kid that was a frustrating answer to receive, so I usually (stubbornly) didn’t look whatever word it was up–though I’d read the dictionary voluntarily at other times. On the other hand, it was great practice for determining meaning from context; quite often I’d figure out at least most of what the word meant without ever looking it up. So even though I was stubborn and frustrated, I can still see benefit that I learned because of, or perhaps in spite of, the resistance to looking it up.
I’m curious how universal my own experience is with these things. Do other people not have the “frustration” emotional response? Did you receive a different answer than “look it up” when you went asking about word definitions? If so, what do you see as the pros and cons of your experience? Do you consider the resistance model of “look it up” interaction to be beneficial, or are there more cooperative or interactive approaches that will also result in increased vocabulary?
Like I said, I can’t say I’ve made up my mind on whether the “look it up!” tactic is a sound one. I remember being frustrated with it on the receiving end, and can’t really say whether a different approach would have resulted in more vocabulary learned. After all, I’m certainly not lacking in the density of my word-forest or the delight with which I populate(d) it.
I eagerly await the opinions and experiences of you, dear readers, from either or both perspectives on this issue.
(Note: this entry is not picking on any friends of mine who may have recently used this phrase, honest; though I did get inspired by one such reference into thinking about the topic, which inspired the post. So thanks for the thoughts!)
I always presumed “look it up” was code for “I don’t know”.
But I did not grow up in the most erudite of families. Daddy is an adequate physicist, but linguistically we tended to stick to Central Virginia colloquialisms.
I try to use a mix of ‘here’s the answer’, ‘let’s look it up’, and ‘you could look it up and find out’ with Dru, though I think I lean toward the second of those three options the most.
The idea being to make him feel empowered to discover things, while at the same time letting him know he’s not alone in that quest, that I’m always on his team, and won’t withhold that knowledge.
I can’t remember my parents doing this, to be honest. Well, maybe if they didn’t know the answer they’d tell me to, but then I’d look it up and tell THEM, heh.
Of course, that could be why I’m a librarian today, and why when my kids ask me a word I give them about four definitions — and then I show them how to look it up.
And there, I guess, is my response to frustration — don’t tell, show.
I got either, “look or up,” or, “let’s look it up,” (depending mostly on how busy my parents were at the time I asked) and it worked well on me–I became comfortable with looking things up. I’d think that, like so many parental decisions, the best approach varies with the child.
And, like so many parental decisions, whatever you do is liable to be wrong and leave the child traumatized and in need of years of therapy.
I think my parents generally just told me, since they knew I was capable of looking it up (I would look stuff up all the time, I liked reference books even then). I was frustrated when I got it from other people, though, because I knew how to look it up and wanted to talk about it with someone when I asked.
As I grew older, my parents would ask me to “look it up” more frequently. Initially I was frustrated (I was a lazy learner in 5th grade). But once I noticed that my parents were wrong more often then not, and my mother was annoyed by this, I figured out how powerful knowledge was.
Hrmmmm, so that’s where I get it from. *laughs* I got tired of hearing “look it up” from my own mother, so I tended to learn the word from the context if I didn’t just dig it up in the dictionary myself.
I’ll just keep reading these responses and see if I can handle this better in the future. With a little less frustration.
“Look it up” can also be a reaction from a frustrated parent who is tired of doing things for the child that the child is capable of doing themselves.
My folks would usually tell me to look it up, but they would help with the process if I couldn’t find it. That stage didn’t last long, since usually my questions were more complex than just a word or I would just figure it out from the context and move on.
If/when I become a parent, my answer will be “Let’s go look it up!”, and as they mature I’ll have them do more of the looking.
I often got the “look it up”. I was frustrated often and early on as a child with this and many other stock answers from parenthood. To me it was dismissive of my curiosity and of me as a person. I would have prefered to look it up with the parent and discussed it. The other answer that frustrated me was when they gave me the definition as an afterthought, not even asking why I wanted to know, or acknowledging me.
I got the “look it up” from about age 10 on.
Then I took German. And then I took Latin. And once I had both some German and some Latin under my belt, my mother (MA in linguistics) would talk me through figuring out the meaning of the word etymologically. After about the 5th time, I just went to the frakkin’ dictionary on my own if I needed the meaning of a word.
If it wasn’t just a word, my father would help me through reasoning it out, help me look it up in whatever book we had that had the information, or do his best to explain it. (MS in either applied math or theoretical physics, not quite sure exactly which.) My father was cool. He let me stay up to watch “L.A. Law” with him sometimes, and never argued that I had to go to bed if the baseball game on TV was still going.
Nah. I have a 9 and a 12 year old and I either tell them the answer or we look it up together. I always thought that if they don’t know, then asking me is one way they could find out and looking it up another but in either case the answer is what it is (although I often point out to my kids that my answers are not to be assumed to be infallible).
And it goes both ways-I often ask my kids what something means and if they don’t know we figure it out together. The most recent example was my utter befuddlement when my 12 year old daughter asked me to not get “all in my grill”. ??? This has since led to her mortification as I now try and incorporate as much current slang into my chats with her as possible and she keeps correcting my usage or choice of words (”No!It’s all up in my kool-aid, not my crystal lite!”) Heh.