Class Projects Aren’t What They Used to Be

I want to issue a disclaimer before I launch into what is basically one long complaint against school projects: I loved school, did well, and was one of those kids who carefully drew and colored special covers for even the most ordinary reports.

But now I am a parent with three students in schools ranging from elementary to middle and I’m about projected and art-worked out of my tree.

Take your basic book report. I recall those as one- or two-page neatly written reviews of books I’d read. Today’s book reports are much more visual and complicated (although, in my opinion, not necessarily better).

They can take strange and wondrous forms, like dioramas, in which you convert a shoe box into a proscenium of sorts, turning it on its side and drawing a scene on what used to be the bottom of the box. Next, you draw, color and cut out the book’s main characters to complete the scene.

The only writing is on a card that’s attached, which carries the title and author’s name. The effort that goes into these can be enormous, from finding the shoe box to helping those little hands draw and carefully cut out the characters. Getting these projects to school intact can require a large shopping bag and extra tape and glue.

Then there’s the book report as poster. Actually, almost anything can be done as a poster. My newest favorite is a poster that’s a collage of your child’s life, divided into three segments: the past, the present and the future.

Your children cut out pictures that show things they do (or are), or used to do (or be), or want to do (or be). They then make lists of these things, glue them to the back of the poster, and write a statement of affirmation about themselves (no kidding--could I make this up?), and attach that to the bottom of the collage.

I just helped my youngest son complete this project, cutting and gluing and pasting, working with him on future goals and trying to figure out what “affirmation” is. Turns out he knew--he had to write all the good things about himself, as his brothers cackled in the background.

The Life Collage (as I like to call it) was due on the same day my middle son had to construct an arthropod model. (For those who have forgotten elementary-school science, arthropods are part of the invertebrate world and include such creatures as spiders and shrimp).

As I helped my youngest son complete his final pasting, my mother finished sewing the last eyeball onto my middle son’s spider--we decided a soft sculpture, complete with pipe cleaner legs and knotted-yarn eyes was the way to go. Just how many adults does it take to complete these projects?

My oldest son, now in middle school, had his own worries. He was in the midst of constructing a social studies dictionary, but had misplaced the notebook in which he had written terms and definitions. An hour later, we’d located that sucker. Now all he has to do is illustrate the dictionary and draw a cover.

Lest you think he is overdoing it, I learned at Open House night at middle school that no effort is too great on this project. His social studies teacher held up some of her favorite examples of past dictionaries, and Picasso would have been hard-pressed to do better.

But we’re hopeful at my house, and we were fresh from a victory over the geography mobile our fifth-grader had handed in the week before. After painstakingly coloring and cutting out six of the world’s continents (you get to leave out Antarctica), he had even done the extra-credit topographical maps complete with special keys, before punching holes in each continent and attaching them with strands of different-colored yarn to pieces of hangers in varying lengths.

Still with me? At any rate, he’d received an A on this project, which should have made him ecstatic, except that another child, who had figured out how to gracefully bow the hangers, had received an A-plus.

And so it goes. The teachers assign, the students attempt, the parents assist. I sure hope the kids are learning from these projects. I know my pasting skills have improved enormously.