And so ends another school year...

For the past few months I've been tutoring a young lady here in Baltimore, a recently resettled Meskhetian Turkish refugee who (as you can imagine) is struggling a bit with life as a 9th grader in a large American public school. She absolutely kicks ass in math and science (and dreams of going to Hopkins to become a doctor), but government class is much more difficult and so has been the focus of our weekly study sessions. As always, I feel like I've probably learned more than I've taught, and revisiting subjects like Brown vs. the Board of education and the electoral college in her company is kind of amazing given the discrimination and persecution she and her family have faced.

I thought we were in the home stretch with the end of the school year upon us, exams wrapping up, etc and was planning to do something fun this weekend since the pressure to study would finally be lifted. Until my phone rings tonight, and its Lutfiya, and she's calling with a question before her last exam (government, of course!) tomorrow:

"Dana, what is the Declaration of Independence?"

Crap! So much for my tutoring skills since I seemed to miss covering this one, uh, sort of important piece of American history. If only I could smash all the episodes of HBO's John Adams into one night and have her watch them before the test tomorrow...