Project Parenthood

I can appreciate that children of all ages need to do special projects in conjunction with their school work. Special projects reinforce lessons by taking the abstract concepts out of the books and putting them to use in the real world. In addition, these sort of assignments can make school seem more interesting and more fun. Most every kid would like to spend time with his mom or dad, doing something unusual and creative. I can appreciate all of these things. However, I finished 18 years of school, so I would like to think that teachers should no longer be assigning special projects to me. I’m not objecting to helping my kids, I just don’t think I should be receiving homework at my advanced age. Apparently, I am wrong. Tonight we completed of my 6-year-old’s latest school project – construct your own clock.

So what would you do? Get a paper plate, some straws and a marker and help your child make a clock in under 10 minutes? So would I. However, this clock project came with rules: “1) No paper products may be used including paper plates, construction paper, and cardstock; 2) No crayons or markers may be used.” And the clock is not the first project that the First Grade Team has sent home. Earlier this year we had to construct a piggy bank under similar restrictions. When a teacher sets up rules that ban all materials that a first grader normally utilizes, I have to think that the project is no longer the responsibility of the student – it’s all mommy’s (or daddy’s I suppose). I don’t want my daughter to end up like Lisa Simpson, on the famous episode when she receives an award for her crappy project because she was the student who obviously got no help from her parents. But I also don’t want to do class projects anymore – I’ve graduated four times already.

When my daughter was in kindergarten, instead of projects it was costumes. She needed costumes not just for Halloween but for the Thanksgiving play, the 100th day of school, and, most challenging, a costume to dress as her favorite Dr. Seuss character for Dr. Seuss’s birthday. Clearly no five-year-old is constructing little costumes for herself in the hours before bedtime. The costumes were homework for the parents, and given that the kids had to wear the costumes, the pressure was really on the parents to come up with something that was not only clever, but unlikely to fall apart. When the Dr. Seuss costume request came home, I had an epiphany. All of these projects and costumes are a kind of release for the teachers. They unleash these chores on parents as payback for the years of dealing with obnoxious children in exchange for miniscule paychecks.

The most challenging part of the special school projects is trying to come up with a plan that, in theory, a six-year-old could execute herself. We are told to let the kids “use their imagination” to come up with an idea for the projects. Fine. But how long should we let them struggle as they try to piece together a clock from broken toy parts found at the bottom of the toy box? When it came time to make the piggy bank, my daughter got to choose what shape it would be (she decided it should look like a goldfish) and got to help with the construction, but the plan, the gathering of materials, and most of the execution was up to me. We ended up gluing two gladware bowls together and covering them with orange tissue paper. We added two fins, a tail and some eyes and we had the cutest fish bank I’ve ever seen. However, the entire project required hot glue, so my daughter got to crumple the tissue paper and hand it to me to stick onto the bowls. Not particularly exciting for her I’m sure.

I had no idea where to begin with the clock. Thinking back on it now, I suppose the simplest plan would have been to let her paint numbers on a plastic plate. Unfortunately, I didn’t think of that at the time. Confronted with the rules, I could only picture an elaborate clock made of clay, or one made out wood with numbers burned into it, or one constructed from sheet metal. None of these options were within my abilities, so in desperation I turned to the one medium that we are both well-versed in – cookies. For once, my pathological need to buy from every fundraising kid paid off for me, because by chance one night I had bought a set of cookie dough from a neighborhood kid. It included four tubs – red, green, yellow, and blue – of dough that was ready to be thawed out, shaped and baked. I found some number cookie cutters and had my daughter cut out the numbers for the clock. She and her sister made the gingerbread dough for the face of the clock which I then baked as a huge circle. Today I wielded the frosting, but the girls did all of the decorating, adding the numbers and candy to the clock face. It really was a collaborative effort up until the time I had to figure out how to attach hands to the stupid thing, at which point I had to dismiss my little helpers because the engineering of that part needed grown up attention. The clock looks great, but I cannot fathom what other way we could have constructed a clock that would have allowed my daughter to complete so much of it herself. I am so curious to hear what all of the other moms and dads came up with. A small part of me worries - will my daughter get an award for having the lamest clock because clearly her parents didn’t help her enough?

I have always been driven, ambitious, and an overachiever. I can completely understand the women who throw themselves into their children’s birthday parties, or afterschool activities, or school projects. When you step out of the workforce as I have and have small children that keep you close to home, the outlets for creativity seem harder and harder to find. How many times can you redecorate your house or reorganize your kitchen? When someone asks you to make a costume or a piggy bank or a clock, the urge to seize the project with both hands and wrestle with it until you have attained perfection can be overwhelming. After all, the teacher and other kids will be evaluating your work, more than likely saying how much they like it, and how often does that sort of opportunity for validation arise for the average mom up to her elbows in laundry and runny noses? To me the hardest part of these school projects is keeping my imprint on them to a minimum, but so far I think I have done a pretty good job. However, this is only first grade, and the projects are for fun. Every kid will get a check for completing them, but no grades will be awarded and no GPAs will be affected. What happens three years from now?

The Washington Post Magazine this week was “The Education Review” about college. I borrowed it from my sister this weekend, but when I sat down to read it, I really wished I hadn’t. The worst part to me was the description of professional “educational consultants” who charge thousands of dollars to “guide [families] through the application process.” Has the world really changed that much? When I applied to college I met briefly with my guidance counselor (and concluded she was a wacko), agreed on a list of schools with my parents, got recommendations from my teachers, wrote an essay about being a soccer referee, and sent out the applications. I was an honors student and had good grades, but I had never chosen my classes based upon what I thought my future college might want to see on my transcript. Something tells me that as I look back to my high school days, I might as well be looking back to Little House on the Prairie.

And so though my children are 6, 4, and 2, the anxiety is already beginning to build. If I leave my kids to their own devices in the future, when their class projects do carry a grade, am I ruining their future? Should I put the full force of my chemistry degrees behind their science fair projects so that they might win a ribbon and have something else to add to their list of accomplishments? If I say nothing when they, as I did, write a quirky college application essay on something they enjoy, am I being hands-off or irresponsible? Should I take the essay into my own hands so that the organization and style make it stand out from the crowd? Every instinct I have says no – the special projects and science fairs and essays are competitions for kids, I should encourage their independence and individuality. But everything I read tells me yes - the competition these days is between the parents, and pretending it’s not will only bring disappointment and heartache to my sweet unsuspecting kiddies.