I was at LitCon last month and the meeting rooms all had names that follow a theme depending on where they’re located. Can you guess which room I found myself in based on the picture below? Hint: the theme was past presidents.

Did you guess William Howard Taft? Correct! I was amused by this because when I was in elementary school, maybe 5th grade, I drew Taft’s name for my presidential report. And the only thing I can remember learning about him turned out to be a myth. You may have heard that he got stuck in a bathtub in the White House. Turns out that story doesn’t hold water. He did indeed have a very large bathtub made, but it was so large he couldn’t possibly have gotten stuck in it.

Was he a good president? I don’t know. I only read about him from the “T” edition of the encyclopedia and I was focused on looking for synonyms for words so that I could “paraphrase”. LOL. Too bad I didn’t have ChatGPT then. Well, I’d probably remember even less then.

Between my bogus California report and the lackluster report on Taft, I never made my students do a report where they had to choose the topic from a hat!