Published: February 23, 2009 07:29 pm      

THEREFORE I AM: School projects are for kids, not parents

When I was a kid I never liked it when my classmates' parents did their school projects for them. Now, as a parent and a soon-to-be teacher, I like it even less. If some of you parents thought second-grade projects were time-consuming, you had better brush up on your calculus, physics and English literature. It only gets tougher.

My second-grade daughter recently completed a geology project. Using Play-Doh or homemade clay or whatever, everyone in her class was supposed to create three-dimensional models of a landform of their choosing. OK, so there are the ground rules.

Now, I am the kind of guy who likes a good project — something I can sink my teeth into. Once I start something, I hate to leave it unfinished. The trouble is that I never really consider anything completed. There's always something I can find to tweak, modify or rework. Consequently, the only time I know something is done is after the deadline has passed and the project is out of sight, out of mind.

But I restrain myself when it comes to my kids' projects.

If I were that kind of parent — you know, the other kind of parent — I'd charge headfirst into doing my kids' assignments. I would spend hours scaling my landform to the precise dimensions, shading the objects with perfectly placed shadows, and scoping out the local hardware stores trying to find something, anything, that looks like an African palm frond.

Unfortunately for my obsessive-compulsive tendencies, I am not that parent, and there are two reasons why. First and foremost, I realize that (duh!) it's my kid's project, not mine. I did my second-grade landform project in 1977. It was a volcano that spewed baking soda, vinegar and red food dye all over the family kitchen, if memory serves. Mom and Dad assisted and guided, but I did the work. My daughter deserves the same opportunity to learn something that I had. Second, I don't have the spare time to spend 25 hours creating a Lucasfilm-quality model. My days are pretty full.

The other day I was in my daughter's classroom doing some volunteer work, and was able to catch a peek at other students' landform projects. The vast majority looked exactly as they should look — like second-graders made them. They were a little rough around the edges but you could tell that the kids did most, if not all, of the work and (gasp!) may have even absorbed a little knowledge along the way.

For instance, Anna decided to create a clay model of Madagascar, the African island located off the continental coast and, judging by recent popular films, home to some of the silliest ring-tailed lemurs you'll ever meet. She asked me what shape Madagascar was, so I gave her a globe and told her to find it. She did, and then she shaped her clay into an island. After it dried she painted the island green and brown to represent hills and grasslands, and she painted the surrounding area blue for what she learned was the Indian Ocean. Badda-bing, badda-boom, school project done, complete with a little schooling inserted along the way.

Most of the projects looked like Anna's — most. I could tell that on two or three of the projects, the kids probably weren't even in the house when the parents were working on them, much less actually doing (or learning) anything. Their labels were immaculate, the paint was spot-on, the clay was textured just so, and the rocks were glue-gunned with painstaking precision.

Give me a big, fat break. I didn't say anything to Anna's teacher, Anna's classmates or even Anna herself, but come on! Who's kidding whom? I'll be interested to see how I'll handle this scenario when I'm a certified teacher in about 14 months.

What will these parents do when the second-grade models are replaced with 11th-grade term papers on Shakespeare's portrayal of family dynamics and how they reflect the British zeitgeist? At least that's in English! Try brushing up on your calculations for angular momentum in a gravity field. That'll keep you busy after dinner.

What can you do? Just smile and go about your day, I suppose.

In the meantime, I've got to get back to work on my son's Pinebox Derby car. I sent it off to NASA for some wind-tunnel tests, and today I need to apply the polymer skin and the graphite-based friction-reducing mechanism. It's going to be a long night.

David Spates is a Knoxville resident and Crossville Chronicle contributor whose column is published each Tuesday. He can be reached at davespates@tds.net.