Do you remember having to do a report on a foreign country in intermediate school?
I remember in Miss Ishida’s 7th grade class we had to pick a country to report on. I picked Argentina while my friend Stanley took Chile.
Paula said her foreign country was Paraguay.
I remember that we were given a certain amount of time to do the project – probably like 4 weeks. Back then, I knew nothing about project management so I waited until the last week to get started. When it came to crunch time, I remember setting up the “A” (for Argentina) volume of World Book Encyclopedia in our handy book holder:
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And copying the story word for word.
Sometimes I would actually do research. See, we had 2 sets of encyclopedias: World Book Encyclopedia and Encyclopedia International. I would look up the subject in both and pick the one with the shorter article to copy. That was about the extent of my research.
I did get a good grade on my Argentina report and I actually learned a few things about Argentina – like what their top export product was and it’s climate and geography. And since my friend did neighboring country Chile, we compared notes and I learned some stuff about Chile.
I don’t remember having to give the report in front of the class – which was more stressful than writing the report itself. I think we just had to write it up and put it in those cool colored transparent report covers. The kind that used the long, triangular plastic piece that you slid on the crease of the folder to hold the pages together.
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Okay, so I didn’t get an “A” for my report. But I did pass and was never accused of plagiarism.
Do you remember having to pick a foreign country to do a report on in intermediate school? Do you remember what country you picked? How did you “manage” your project? Did you go the the library to borrow books on the subject? Then write it up from scratch? And include an outline or table of contents for extra credit? Or did you “cut and paste” the old fashion way like I did (copy word for word)?
