Photo courtesy of Joseph Garnjobst
Students at Camden-Frontier Elementary School hold up their dictionaries.
Hillsdale's Eta Delta chapter Eta Sigma Phi has been blanketing the schools of Hillsdale County with dictionaries in a blitzkrieg of books funded by the Hillsdale Kiwanis Club. The dictionaries are provided by The Dictionary Project, a non-profit organization that has distributed over 1.8 million dictionaries to third-graders across America.
“The Kiwanis club provides the money to purchase the dictionaries, and Eta Sigma Phi provides the volunteer hours to distribute the dictionaries. It's a very nice community / college collaboration,” said senior Hannah Dixon, the student coordinator for The Dictionary Project.
Over 600 dictionaries were distributed during the months of November and December of last year as Hillsdale Students traveled to 14 schools in Hillsdale County. Five hundred and ninety students and 33 teachers received the books, which contain more information than might be expected from a traditional dictionary.
“It's a student dictionary, the first part is the words and definitions, and in the back there's supplemental information. There's the Constitution, there's the Declaration of Independence, there's multiplication tables, Roman numeral lists and a sign language and braille chart,” Dixon said.
The dictionaries also include information on the nations of the world, brief biographies of former Presidents of the United States and a special bookplate with the Greek alphabet and its English transliteration.
“So they can use it for language arts, for reading and writing, and then they can use it in a government context or a history [context],” Dixon said.
Joseph Garnjobst, assistant professor of classical studies and adviser of Eta Sigma Phi, first became aware of the organization after reading an article in the Washington Post. Garnjobst presented the project to the honorary, which has been distributing dictionaries since 2003.
“I thought that would be an activity that we could do in Eta Sigma Phi, and we started that the next spring,” Garnjobst said. “We handed them out to the third-graders at Gier [elementary school].”
The project has persevered at Gier for two academic years, but this year expanded to include all of Hillsdale County, thanks to the financial support of the local Kiwanis Club.
“They pay for the whole thing, we still pay some administrative cost because we put the bookplates in there, but that's around $100,” Garnjobst, who is also a member of the Hillsdale Kiwanis Club and on its board, said.
“We started at the beginning of fall semester making sure we had all the schools in the county. We kept finding little one-room school houses and Christian schools that [neither the college students nor Kiwanis members] knew existed, and I set up times, and then sometime in…early November we started distributing, and we did between two and five [distributions] a week,” Dixon said.
Volunteers were responsible for not only distributing the dictionaries, but also giving a short presentation on the dictionaries, and on the value of classical studies to the third-graders.
“It's really cool to look back at the pictures and see just how much the college kids enjoy interacting with the third-graders,” Dixon said.
“I would always go in and explain who we were and what we did as classics students, and what we studied, and then tried to connect that to why it all mattered. So I would draw a timeline on the board, and ask them what stuff they thought was old. We got some funny answers, like ‘Elvis.' We were thinking a little older.”
Dixon stressed that the project's success is due to the volunteers who have helped the distributions and that the program is designed to encourage general literacy, not necessarily an interest in classical studies.
“The goal again is to get people excited about learning, and exited about reading. That's what I would like to see out of it, more than more kids wanting to be classics majors.”