The other morning, I watched a student haul some sort of class project out of his mother’s car and lug it into school. The scene should have provided a sense of satisfaction, given that student initiative and performance are things I value and like to take pleasure and pride in observing. Instead, it produced a sort of involuntary recoil, engendering painful images of my own history with school projects--both as a student and as a parent. It also raised a question I feel I never fully resolved, one which can be uncomfortable for all of us: how much help should a parent give to a son or daughter--in homework, in projects, in life?
For many parents (the good ones I suppose), the opportunity to work together with a child on a school project provides an unsurpassed opportunity for spending time together in casually intimate conversation about creativity, planning, craftsmanship, and the importance of good tools. For me, it provided an opportunity for disaster, usually involving injured thumbs (mine), bruised egos (mine), mucilage everywhere, and a small, plaintive voice saying, usually at midnight, “Dad, I have to turn this in. I’m going to get graded on it. Why don’t I just finish it myself.”
As with all parental failings, I can trace this one back through my own childhood, which is replete with strange, incomplete, and unattractive school projects--except for the ones that I had my father do. My father was a kind and generous man, a scientist by training, who was always willing to help out with a project simply because he’d get fascinated by the challenge. I’d work with him for an hour or so and then go watch television while he spent hours accomplishing elaborately configured and precise feats of engineering. One I remember involved a small cart that traveled on HO railroad tracks down a ramp, at the bottom of which a steel ball would drop perfectly into the cart demonstrating a number of laws of physics, mostly having to do with acceleration. It was about a hundred times more complex than anything any other student did, a fact not lost on my Science teacher who was dubious about its origins, and graded me accordingly.
One of the few projects I actually completed on my own, about which I am still most proud because I thought of it myself, and made it myself (there’s a lesson here, parents!), involved constructing a model of Mt. Olympus out of a cauliflower. I don’t know where I got this idea, for I’d never worked in vegetable matter before, nor have I since. I actually began this project early so that I’d be done in plenty of time, which turned about to be a problematic decision for reasons that will soon be clear.
I got my cauliflower from the vegetable man who used to come to the house (this was the fifties), and immediately painted it in Olympian hues using paint I found in the basement. The top was white (snow-capped peaks), and the mid-section blue (sky). The paint sort of ran together, though, and suffused into the nubbly surface of the cauliflower, giving the whole affair a kind of sickly, milky-blue cast. I glued it to a plywood board, and then glued cotton balls to the top to simulate cloudsThe glue was wicked up by the cotton balls, and the clouds ended up being a lot more crusty than wispy. I affixed small paper pennants to toothpicks and stuck them into the top of the cauliflower, each announcing the name of a particular deity, and thenused my woodburning set (for the first and only time) to burn my name into the wooden base, along with the title: “Mt. Olympus. Home of the Greek Gods and Goddesses.”
Having finished the whole thing well ahead of its due date, I carefully stored it in my room, putting it on the radiator cover near the window because that afforded me the chance to look at Mt. Olympus proudly as I lay in bed. This particular placement also gave me a chance to observe firsthand a different scientific principle, which is that vegetables decay quickly when subjected to a lot of heat. By the time I brought the Home of the Greek Gods and Goddesses to school, it had a very bad smell and had become extremely oozy and slimy. The good news was that there was absolutely no doubt in Mrs. Pawlek’s mind that I had completed this thing all on my own, with no parental help. She was very kind about it all, though it wasn’t allowed to remain in the classroom with the other kids’ projects that were to be displayed on Back to School Night.
But back to the future. My own incompetence with projects seemed to exist in inverse proportion to the complexity of the conceptions my children would come up with, and whenever they proposed something--like an exact replica of the Globe theater, or something that would receive radio signals--I’d wish I had a job that would allow me to suddenly leave town on an important business trip. However, everyone got through this phase, somehow the projects got done, my children actually graduated, and I--though I miss the days of having kids around--feel deeply relieved that no one will ever again ask me for help on a school project, nor will I ever have to build one myself.
But the deeper question is, how much help should a parent provide? As a school administrator, I feel as though I should be able to provide some guidance to parents on this topic, but it is a tough one. In general, I think, it’s better to leave kids to their own devices (a generally impossible task for a parent), unless it’s clear that they enjoy your help, you’re not doing too much of it yourself, or (as in my case) parental assistance ends up impairing the quality of the work. But I’d also say you should try to steer them clear of cauliflower.