Confession

I withheld some helpfulness tonight. Whenever I can, I give step-by-step directions and let the patron do all the clicking. Tonight we had lady doing her kid's project on Egypt while the child jumped up and down and talked to the computer game she was playing. Momma wanted to know how to print out hunks of info from the internet so she could print it as the child's project.

"Well, if you just print all that, that's plagiarism; that's stealing. Probably, the teacher wants your daughter to write the picture captions in her own words."

I walked away. The daughter kept summoning me back: "She want you." I showed her how to cut and paste into a Word document, but I just couldn't do all the extra stuff I might do, like generating suggestions of ways to tackle the problem, since: A) I don't like grown-ups doing homework for their kids and 2) I don't like to support plagiarism.