Deborah Woehr

My son’s report card came in the mail earlier this week, and I’m happy to say that he has passed his science class. I have no way of knowing how well he did on that final because the school’s Internet viewer closed the first semester grade reports. We all breathed easier for a few minutes. Then my youngest announced that his teacher was going to be calling me.

She had assigned the class a major project, which requires them to write a term paper on an American state of their choosing. He chose Pennsylvania because that’s where my husband and his family come from. I got the packet in mid-January, which had a timeline of the due dates of each segment of the project. The first segment isn’t due until the end of this month. The whole thing is due in mid-March.

So, I figured we had plenty of time to gather some good information before we started. While the Internet is a great tool for research, it isn’t everything. For instance, you don’t get the same sense of the culture from a Wikipedia article as you would from an article written in The Philadelphia Inquirer.

My mother-in-law contacted her relatives back east to have them mail travel and historical information to us, and my sister-in-law was going through her vacation stuff. We had planned to get started next week.

His teacher was upset with him because she had wanted him to work on a timeline for some brochure that is to be included with this paper. Fine, I said. I’ll have him do it this weekend. She wants him to work on this project for 30 minutes per night, in addition to the boatload of homework she assigns to him each night.

I hung up the phone, thinking that I never had this much homework when I was in elementary school. Fortunately, he enjoys school and learning.