Sly Guy

I've always prided myself on being a step ahead of my kids. Junior came home with an assignment in his Spanish 2 class to write ten things about himself in Spanish. Although this is his second year of Spanish, I didn't think he'd been paying much attention through his first year because he never uses Spanish at all. So imagine my surprise when he goes to the computer and less than fifteen minutes later he brings me the assignment all typed up in what looks like real Spanish (I have no idea if it was correct seeing as how I don't speak Spanish). Imagine my joy when I realize that my son is a genius and has learned Spanish so well that he didn't even need a dictionary for this assignment. I asked him to translate it and he tells me to look on the computer. I look and see the Spanish sentences and tell him I want to know what it says in English. He looks at me like I'm retarded and clicks this translation thing on the right side that I hadn't previously noticed to turn the Spanish words back to English! He didn't translate anything--the computer did it! How did I not know that you could do this? How did my son miss the part about school where he's supposed to learn things for himself and not just find a way around it? He really wasn't being sly--he didn't think he'd done anything wrong. He found a way to do the work using the least possible effort. I've heard that the translations are often way off but I tried it out in Russian and got the following--Моим именем будет Linda и я пытаюсь выучить русского. I know how to write "Linda" using Russian characters but I had to copy and paste the sentence from the translation thing just to get it on here. Obviously, blogger supports foreign text but I don't know how to get to it. Anybody? On a side note, I usually don't direct attention to other blogs but the "Vroom, vroom" post by my BIL Ben was priceless. Who knew you could drive a car that cost $1 using a screwdriver to start it? They are taking frugality to a whole new level and it's impressive.