“Kids are basically little learning machines."

Researchers find that kids tend to mimic their parents' smoking and drinking choices as well as their trashier comments:

"A 4-year-old girl chose Barbie-sized tobacco in the pretend store and said: “I need this for my man. A man needs cigarettes.”

A 6-year-old boy offered the doll cigarettes and said: “Honey, have some smokes. Do you like smokes? I like smokes.”"

What to do with students from the Gulf Coast?

Two articles have caught my eye on placing students from the affected Gulf Coast area in other schools. One from CNN on evacuating the Superdome residents to Houston said that they would look into placing children relocated to the Astrodome into Houston schools (I can't find the original link). This Washington Post article answers my question on how a school system could suddenly absorb a few thousand new students. Maybe they can even put N.O. teachers to work, even as volunteers (seriously, what else will they have to do in the Astrodome?)
This Chronicle of High Ed article gives props to my alma mater, Georgia Tech, for taking in Tulane students. I'm sure they were given a warmer welcome than several hundred Tech freshmen in 1998 who were housed in dorm lobbies because Tech overbooked the freshmen dorms. The other interesting point in that article is that the mayor of Chicago has announced that students from the area who are students on the Gulf coast will be allowed to attend university classes in Chicago and even enroll free if they can't return to their regular universities by midterm.