Respect your Grandparents, they did our projects!

I spotted this on Facebook a while back:

Yip but it should say "Respect your Grandparents" when it comes to projects, children don't suffer parents suffer,especially if they had dreamy and disorganised children.

Generally late in the evening when all libraries had been closed for hours I would cry my eyes out:

"My teacher is going to kkkkill me and I am gggg ooo innnggg to get 0."

It must of been shortly after one of these scenes that a fortunate travelling encyclopaedia sales man knocked at out door.  My parents bought the entire set, you had to because they were clever, the books were in alphabetical order.  It was a beautiful beige leather bound set. They smelled really good and the new crisp pages felt so good to turn.

Encyclopaedia was our internet, if we were fortunate to have a set.  It always seemed that after some years a few would go missing, if you were doing a project on lizards invariably the one with  "L" in it would be gone.

My enterprising Mother would spend hours going through old magazines cutting out and filing pictures in alphabetical order so that I would have pictures for my projects.

When the encyclopaedia did not have enough information it meant a trip to the library.  I loved hanging out in the fiction section but the reference section was not my favourite.  The books were big and heavy.  You were not allowed to take them home so you had to sit and copy the information by hand.  There were no photo copiers back then.

I wonder what percentage of projects are actually done by children entirely on their own?