My father was not one to involve himself in my schoolwork. He did not come to conferences or open houses, he did not help with homework or proofread essays. When it came time for college, he refused to contribute financially (or fill out financial aid forms) unless I signed a paper promising to care for him in his old age (I declined).
And yet, there was something about that pile of cardboard, waiting to be transformed into a three-dimensional model of Mission Delores, that it seems even he could not resist.
There is something so compelling about a school project, especially when you're too old to have to do them anymore! I see the siren song of projects affect adults all the time. Just last week I had to interrupt two different tutors who had taken over a 7th grader's extra credit African mask. There they were, bent over in focus, carefully maneuvering the glue gun, while the student sat nearby, doodling. "She’s afraid of the glue gun!" one tutor exclaimed. "The way she was doing it was so messy!" cried another. But she has to be her work, I argued. She has to be involved. In fact, she has to be charge: it’s her project!
Sometimes those questions elicit just the response I'm looking for (a search for a bigger box, a dash for the glue gun); other times it doesn’t. We also learn to drop suggestions as projects progress, “So, I think it might sturdier if you placed the first cubes in the center and worked outward” or “I think if you want an A, you should type those captions and then glue them on.”
But it’s a fine line. I can't tell you how many projects have walked out of here, captions typed and proofread, but cut out jaggedly and glued on crooked. I can't tell you how often I have bitten my tongue as a project, brilliant at conception, devolves into a mess due to procrastination or a student just running out of steam and attention to detail. So many projects that really could have been so beautiful!
And, it turns out, it’s even harder with your own kid. My girl just wrote a Dr. Seuss inspired poem for a school contest. I confined myself to asking questions: Are you missing a rhyme there? Do you think it should maybe have a ending? But oh! The clever rhymes that came into my head! The small ways that the meter could have been perfected. So many suggestions right on the tip of my tongue! We could have had a winning poem for sure!. But, my girl cares nothing for meter. I could only fix it by fixing it myself and, somehow, I resisted
And so this week it was like the school felt my pain. We got an extra credit project: "Leprechaun Trap- Family Project"! An official family project! And so on this past rainy Saturday afternoon, we settled in. We gathered craft supplies and constructed a box. She chose can of leftover spray paint and I sprayed while she built the sparkly stairs.
The trapping mechanism was key. She wanted the leprechaun to climb some stairs, then step on a platform that would lower, pulling the door shut with some string. I got the general idea but pushed for specifics. How will the string pull the door? "The platform will go down and pull the string," she responded. I couldn’t picture it (and my experience with kids said that she didn't really know either - I suspected there was some magically thinking at play here), so I tried to figure out how to make such a mechanism work. I set the newly painted box on the table with the lid hinged at the top. “No Mom," she told me, "The lid goes on the bottom.”
I told her my idea about how to get the trap to close. I suggested attaching the back of the platform to the back of the box, so it would fold down when the leprechaun stepped on it, pulling strings and pulling down the lid down. No!, she insisted. She wanted the platform strings to go through the top of the box, wrap around, and pull the door up. Once I got my head around it, she was right; it would totally work. And, wielding the box cutter, I was able to help her execute the design that she had in her head.
Mechanism complete we pulled the strings to close the box, and I was proud. She was stuck,"How do we keep it closed! He can walk off the platform and the door will open!" I thought that, you know, once a magic creature is caught, isn't that it? You don't have to hold him. Isn't it the act of catching him, even momentarily, that matters? Um, no. The box needed to stay closed. "Velcro?" I suggested. "Magnets," she declared. And, so with the magic of magnets, the trap stays closed.
And by the time we finished, she smiled, "Mom, I think I'm about halfway with the engineering." I'm still not sure what that meant, but I think she was proud of herself.
So, sure, without the rain, we might have struggled to find the time to get this trap together. It would have certainly been less fun to build at 9pm the night before it was due. And sure, she's an only child and I'm sure one more project, family or otherwise, is just not what a lot of families need on top of sports practice and chores and everything else. But I’m super grateful for this explicit family project. I think it built up my strength to resist "helping" too much on future projects that are meant to be hers and hers only. And not only did we both have a good time, we both learned a lot about traps and about working with each other. Family project=success.
And now it should only take about 6 months to get the glitter out of the living room rug.
