About Say Smart Stuff
Note from the author, Lisa Patten Schuler:
When my daughter, Grace, started high school a few years ago, she came home from her first day of classes and said, “Mom, why does it feel like everyone knows so much more than I do? How come they all say smart stuff about things I know nothing about?”
She’d always been a good student, so I asked her what she meant. She explained that while she felt confident about the reading, writing and arithmetic part of her new teen world, she was thrown by the topics her more-traveled and better read classmates tossed around with ease. Classic movie titles? Was Pele really the best forward ever (and by the way, who the heck is Pele and what sport did he play)? The difference between artists Manet and Monet? My girl was coming up blank and feeling like a rube.
So, we decided to find one of those “Dummy”-type reference books to get her all the answers she needed to say smart stuff too. We looked and looked, and while there are many reference books out there if you know what topics you want to learn more about, when you don’t know what you don’t know, you’re going to strike out (which as we learned from our baseball research, was worse than walking).
We made lists of everything we were curious about and started doing some research. After a while, we had so many topics we wanted to know more about that we couldn’t handle finding the answers ourselves. So, we roped in our good friend, Makenzie Willis, and she became our researcher extraordinaire and started finding answers, too. Pretty soon, we were up to 400 pages of cool facts and figures about topics we just wanted to know more about and “Say Smart Stuff” was born.
There are a few things we’d like to put out there right up front. Most important, “Say Smart Stuff” is subjective. It gives you enough information to sound somewhat knowledgeable on dozens of topics we find interesting. It is not an exhaustive anthology of every topic in the world, nor meant to replace the World Book Encyclopedia or your favorite internet search engine. It is designed to graze the surface of many subjects that we believe people who are graduating from high school, college or are early in their careers should have at least heard about.
If there are topics you want to see included in an upcoming version, click on the Make Your Case tab and share your thoughts. You just may see your idea in an upcoming edition.
Now, go forth and be smart — or at least sound it!
Make Your Case
We know “Say Smart Stuff” is nowhere near comprehensive yet, however, we had to
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