Once again, it is the close of another school year, and those last gasp projects are rearing their ugly heads. One child had a book report, but the "project" part of it was to design/redesign a board game so that it reflects your book in some way. Child #2 read a fun book called "the Lemonade Wars", so he decided to redesign Monopoly into a Lemonade Stand type of game. This required redrafting the rules, altering the Board and recreating the Community Chest and Chance Cards as "Cloudy Day/Sunny Day" cards instead. We even made little and big lemons to substitute for houses and hotels.
Needless to say, this is another one of those "kid projects" where it also becomes an adult project as well. I enjoy some of the creative aspects of the project, but I hate when the child runs out of energy, or it gets too close to the last minute, and somehow, it becomes my project as well. Child #2 did a good job writing up the rules and the cards based on aspects of the story, but I ended up being the technical help of formatting and pasting the information on the cards, feeling as if I was Martha Stewart on Speed, trying to get this thing finished, while the child asked if he could watch TV yet, while I felt the vein on my forehead throbbing in frustration.
Sometimes, projects at school seem to have very little point. The writing aspects of a book report are lost in the Book Report + Diorama/Sock Puppet/Mobile addendums that get added on, that seem to teach the children very little other than project management, and how many times we can get mom to drive us to Michael’s for some other doodad.
In my dream world, school projects would mandate that every teacher assigning a project would have to make a new (no recycling from year to year) sample version for the kids to eyeball and bench mark. This way, teachers would have a decent estimate of how long any such project should take before assigning it, and think about what skills this project was supposed to instill as they did it, first. Likewise, i think before we make a kid do a report or PowerPoint or poster, we should actually teach them a lot about good design ahead of time, so we are grading kids based on all aspects of a project, especially content. Otherwise, a kid may not know what good/bad design of a slide or poster might be. Lord knows this causes lots of contention in our household as I try to hold my kids to a higher level of performance (ie. please use a ruler; please cut that out using the paper cutter so you get straight, non-jagged edges) and they argue, because they are kids, for the "good enough" standard of performance.
I want teachers to go beyond rubrics, and to really teach our kids about presentations- they will have to do this the rest of their lives, so best to learn early how to avoid "Death by Powerpoint", how to entertain and inform, how to catch the eye; to appreciate good design. Without these lessons, we somehow are leaving it to parents or to kids somehow falling across these skills like the sneakers they abandon in the hallway- a mere accidental occurrence.
I am aching for summer to begin at this point, just to be through with the great debates every night over homework, test, quiz and project management. I want to stop feeling like the Parole officer wielding popsicle sticks and a glue gun in one hand, Model Magic in the other. I want to see my kids have some time to kick back, but also start to understand a few things about standards. I want my kids to realize how many teachers look at neatness as the sole metric of quality, and that neatness sometimes counts even more than content, no matter how ridiculous that can seem.
But most of all, I am equally as ready to be out of school as they are this year. I hope we can work on some skills over the summer, and I can finally convince them that neatness and organization are the true secrets to academic success, sometimes even more than what you know. And I want to learn how to hide my disappointment in a school system that is more concerned with appearance over substance, 9 times out of 10.
Photo graciously provided by topher76, through a Creative Commons license, some rights reserved
1 response so far ↓
Anita B // Jun 21, 2008 at 9:33 am
As a former high school English teacher (turned stay-at-home mom), I would like you to know that I completely agree with you and did everything in my power to lay out all directions in a hand out AND bring in an example of what I would like them to do. If I had several choices to choose from, I would make one of each and bring all of them in. I wish more teachers would do this because of the problems you discussed. And they also should have deadlines for various stages of development to keep kids on track. We all know kids are procrastonators (most of them) and grading them on their progress helps with the last minute parent rush. Yes, even high-schoolers do this!
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