You find it, I find it, we all find it.

It is almost Speech Contest time in this part of the world and along with the other teachers I’m tasked with reading speeches and fixing small mistakes and what-nots. My Co handed me this speech today, asking me to look at it and pointing out the difficult words used. This was what she handed me:

The Statue of Liberty (Liberty Enlightening the World is a colossal neoclassical sculpture on Liberty Island in New York Harbor, designed by Frédéric Bartholdi and dedicated on October 28, 1886. The statue, a gift to the United States from the people of France, is of a robed female figure representing Libertas, the Roman goddess of freedom, who bears a torch and a tabula ansata (a tablet evoking the law) upon which is inscribed the date of the American Declaration of Independence. A broken chain lies at her feet. The statue has become an iconic symbol of freedom and of the United States.

The statue was administered by the United States Lighthouse Board until 1901 and then by the Department of War; since 1933 it has been maintained by the National Park Service. The statue was closed for renovation for much of 1938. In the early 1980s, it was found to have deteriorated to such an extent that a major restoration was required. While the statue was closed from 1984 to 1986, the torch and a large part of the internal structure were replaced. After the September 11 attacks in 2001, it was closed for reasons of safety and security; the pedestal reopened in 2004 and the statue in 2009, with limits on the number of visitors allowed to ascend to the crown. The statue is scheduled to close for up to a year beginning in late 2011 so that a secondary staircase can be installed. Public access to the balcony surrounding the torch has been barred for safety reasons since 1916.

Pretty impressive for a 1^st grade middle schooler, isn’t it. Well, no it isn’t. Any teacher under 40 should know how to use Google effectively. A little older and some don’t, but most do. Just type in the first sentence of the speech, up to about “sculpture”, and Google spits out two exact matches in the first two results. The student copied and pasted it, just removing a large paragraph in the middle, and handed it in.

Last year a student gave a piece to me that was written in Korean and translated online without even checking the results. His teacher didn’t pick it up, but I just handed it back with a note asking: “Please write an English speech, not a NAVER speech, please.”

Side note, the statue is currently being restored. Cant wait to see what it looks like new. I wonder if they are putting shackles on it to conform with the new policies in the Land of the Free?

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