What is the best hardcover dictionary for a high school student?

[Anonymous]

You English teachers are depressing me. If the kid wants a hardcover dictionary, why not just recommend one?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:You English teachers are depressing me. If the kid wants a hardcover dictionary, why not just recommend one?

Because we have worked with hundreds of kids over the years, and we have learned when technology enhances the learning process (and also when technology hinders the learning process, but this isn't one of those cases). The online dictionaries are better because they are updated frequently, and also because a student can quickly compare multiple dictionaries online if he/she chooses. Furthermore, if a student is only comfortable with a hardback, he/she is going to "lose out" in a world/classroom in which his/her peers/competitors are adept at utilizing technology available to them in a deft, speedy way at any time and any place. The kid who can only use a hardback will be at a disadvantage that is only likely to increase as the years go by and the rest of the world (including academics!) embrace new technology. This is ESPECIALLY important for a student with learning disabilities or special needs; such a student cannot afford to waste precious time by failing to enhance these essential skills of contemporary academia.

Similarly, feather quill and bottled ink were once very effective tools in the writing process, and schools put time and careful effort into teaching students to use these tools. When technology rendered the earlier tools obsolete/less effective, schools stopped emphasizing the skills students would need to use the older tools. Teachers would not have carved out time/resources to devote to the extra time/storage the older, obsolete tools had once required in the classrooms. Students who insisted on using the quill and ink anyway could still write, I'm sure, and produce beautiful calligraphy, but this would become a handicap in a classroom in which teachers and classmates expected writing to be faster and neater, and in which no accommodations would be made for clunky, time-consuming, near-obsolete tools. The student who didn't keep up with new methods would be out-of-step and at a disadvantage, and this would only increase with time.

As a bibliophile, I have a collection of old dictionaries on a shelf in my home, but I don't use them in my own writing, and I don't want my students to use them, either. Buy the hardback if you want it for aesthetic/nostalgic purposes, but show your child how to access and use online dictionary sources.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:You English teachers are depressing me. If the kid wants a hardcover dictionary, why not just recommend one?

I'd like to also add that I did recommend two online dictionaries in an earlier post, and then I also included the web link for a third.

[Anonymous]

OP here -- dictionary now ordered through Overstock.

Thank you to the helpful posters on this thread.

For the others -- it is good to know DC's 504 Plans over the past seven years have addressed his needs. He has used technology in the classroom (BYOD) when it has best helped and used hardcover texts as well. Thank you for your input.

[Anonymous]

I know this is old but people if the kid wants a book give him one! My son's English class has one dictionary . I am looking to buy some for the class. Some kid do not have cell phones. My son can get one when he gets a job and pays for it. Some kids in his class have phones but no internet at school. The teacher is like "figure it out" so I got my son a paperback dictionary. Rich people with kids who get phones at 10 need to know that not everyone has to take a selfie every 10 minutes. At least 2 kids just sit there when the vocab part of class comes up because the teacher thinks the kids should have smartphones.

[Anonymous]

I'm an ESOL teacher and my students aren't allowed to use their phones during the day except during lunch. I like the Oxford dictionaries myself.