Due diligence

Well, Laura made some progress on her project today. She has to cover at least five areas of the Mandan culture in her project; she’s been taking notes on houses, religious life, clothes, games, and I forget the fifth area. She got her games section written today. We actually had to have a little discussion about how changing one word in sentence does not mean you have successfully put the ideas from your source into your own words… they don’t seem to be covering plagiarism very carefully in the fourth grade. Finally I told her just to read her source material, then turn it over so she couldn’t see it, and then write her description. This worked considerably better (I recommend this method to any students reading too). I haven’t had the heart yet to tell her she’s going to have to rewrite the one section that she pretty much lifted from her original source; we can fix that tomorrow.

Will had something funny happen today, although he won’t appreciate this for a really long time. When babies are born, you can write to the White House Greetings Office and request a letter from the President welcoming your little newborn into the world; I read this in a parenting magazine when Laura was a baby, so I requested one for her, and she has it right there in her baby book, signed by Bill and Hillary. When Will was born, I requested one for him (although I wished it could’ve been signed by Bill and Hillary too instead of George and Laura). It didn’t come and didn’t come. So I emailed to request it again. And still it didn’t come. Finally, I wrote another paper letter, and some months later, they sent his greeting. He was born in April, and his letter arrived just before Christmas that year.

Well, he got another one today: “Welcome! The day you were born will always be a special day, celebrated with love and joy.” I don’t know whether I should be impressed with the Bush White House’s diligence—not just one, but two—or whether just to laugh about its arriving two and a half years later. I guess they get a lot of mail over there.