A Classroom Set of Encyclopedias for Less Than Three Dollars and Fifty Cents

Teachers are always looking for things that will help them with resources for their classroom and while talking to an English teacher in the middle school I near my home I was interested in her description of one teaching problem she was having. She said that when she starts teaching how to use an encyclopedia, she passes out one book from the classroom encyclopedia to each of the children in the class or to groups of two students. She then starts to talk about how to use the encyclopedia, but because each child has a different letter she has to talk in more general terms.

I immediately had an idea and asked her if she could put off doing that particular lesson for about two weeks and I would solve that problem for her for under $5.00. She said that would be fine, but doubted it could be done. I had three possible solutions. One solution was to look at thrift stores where there might be encyclopedias for sale, but where I could ask if I could get them for free for a teacher. Another solution was to check with the "school book depository" which is where old books are taken to be discarded or sold. The last possible solution takes a little more discussion.

At a local grocery store, there was a promotion for customers to purchase Volume A for just 9 cents with the purchase of at least $5.00 in groceries. At that time my wife and I just happened to be doing part time extra work cleaning the parking lot of that particular mall with this grocery store. We would be there every night just before closing. All we really had to do is spread out our normal grocery purchases and each purchase at least $5.00 in groceries we would have purchased anyway and the Volume A of the encyclopedia. This meant that we should be able to get 14 Volume A's in a week. We also asked our relatives to purchase Volume A for us each time they went to the grocery store. They did! In two weeks we had just over 70 brand new Volume A's.

Two English teachers at the school got 35 Volume A's that were brand new to use with their classes. We just gave them to the teachers and this cost us less than $7.00. Some readers of this article may wonder if this is unethical in any way and I can offer this explanation: The book company produced thousands of extra Volume A's for this promotion, so their cost was much lower per book to produce; the grocery store participated because each customer was required to spend at least $5.00 and in many cases you would most likely spend over $5.00 because you rarely could get to an exact $5.00 purchase; and each child may now be more interested in having an encyclopedia in their home and since these books would be used with over 100 students per day for a few days and every year for many years, the exposure for that publisher to potential new buyers of their encyclopedia was in the thousands from just these two teachers.

You should have seen their faces when I brought the New Books to their classrooms. It was near the beginning of the school year, but both teachers felt like it was the holiday season. Some students even made comments in class, that it was so nice to have brand new encyclopedias to work with that they even felt special. As the students opened them, the books had that new feel and smell. The binding had that stiff feel when you first open a new book and you experience that wonder of your first glance at the pictures. It was great!

These opportunities don't happen often, but they still do happen, you have to be prepared. It is good to think through the ethics of such opportunities. I would not want any teacher to do something that had an unethical aspect and my wife and I did discuss this one before we decided it was near the edge, but fell on the side of acceptable. Later I did find out that at least three students had their parents begin shopping for some time at that grocery store and did in fact purchase a full set of the encyclopedia. Each additional volume was about $6.00 at that time. I don't know how this compares to the ratio of Volume A promotional sales to the sales of the full encyclopedia that the publisher wanted but I felt better that it did produce some sales for the publisher. The teachers did not make any suggestion about purchasing a set of encyclopedias for the home, but did point out that encyclopedias were available in the "media center" and there were even older sets from which students could "check out" one volume at a time to help them do research from home.

Even with the internet today, it is still nice to open a "real encyclopedia" and hold it in your hand, to put on your desk, or to read just before falling to sleep and beginning to dream about places in far off lands and subjects you have just experienced through books.