In Praise of the Optional "Family Project"

I so distinctly remember being in the fourth grade, playing out in the front yard, and hearing my mom call out, “You better come in! Your father started working on your mission!"

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!

As a “homework professionals” we have many strategies for helping without doing. I like to ask a lot of questions, both at the planning phase, and as the project progresses. I have learned, “So, how do you plan to attach those wheels?” is one of the most critical questions I can ask: they almost always intend to just glue them, even when they are supposed to turn! Some questions are practical: “Have you thought about how that’s going to fit inside that box?” Others are aesthetic: “Would you like to use the hot glue gun so all that tape doesn’t show?”

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.

Why does homework only count when you have to turn it in?

When we work with students on homework, there's a clear trend. Only work that involves putting pen or pencil to a piece of paper they have to turn in is "real work." When they are "required" to do silent reading, they only do it when they have to write down their times in a reading log that gets turned in. And studying for tests? Those conversations go something like this:

"Did you study for your science test tomorrow?"

"Can you quiz me?"

(After quizzing on three terms or topics, about which the student knows nothing) "Why don't you study and then someone can quiz you."

"How can I study if no one is quizzing me?"

When forced to "study" without someone to test them, they will page through a book (even a math book, just perusing, no working). Or, if they have a study guide (usually filled with terms they should define and questions they should answer), they'll call it studying when they stare at paper. Often, they won't even write on the study guide unless we force them to ("But we don't have to turn this in!  It's just for us! To study!" they'll complain.)  Even things as simple as studying for spelling and vocabulary tests are activities that require just looking: students stare at the lists as if some kind of magic will imprint the information onto their brains. We have to cajole them to write the words out, make flashcards, or otherwise engage the material in a way that might push them to learn.

And this is why my girl was in her room crying on Thursday night.

She had lost her morning TV for the next week and just by a hair. She has a spelling test every Friday, so Thursday nights we go over the words -- words that have gotten progressively harder as first grade has progressed. Every week, I ask her to study the words during homework time at STAR (her after school program). Almost every week she forgets. She missed 2/10 on the last test before Winter Break -- dropping that last t from both "stretch" and "scratch." So, this week, the first week back to school, I reminded her that she had to study.  She finished her entire homework packet at STAR on Monday. Her assignment (from me) for Tuesday: write and practice the spelling words (they are working on long A so the 10 main words were pretty easy, like "skate" and "take," with a few irregulars like "right," then a sentence: "We skate on the path," and three bonus words: "deliver," "shouted," and "tiptoed").

My overall goal, as you can imagine, is too teach her how to study -- and to teach her to responsible for her own studying, instead of reliant on someone else to quiz her in order to prepare for an exam.

When I asked her to write the words out on Tuesday during homework, she said that the STAR coaches wouldn't let her just write the words because it wasn't "really" homework, so I wrote a note: "Dear STAR, Please let Quinn write out her spelling words so she can study them during homework time. Thank you."

At that point, I felt like I as the only one in the world who could even conceive of the idea that reviewing her spelling words was actual homework.

And so the week went:

Tuesday night: did you study your words? No, she forgot.

Wednesday night: did you study your words? No, she skipped homework because she had basketball and wanted to go to story time (plus, she was done with her homework anyway).

Thursday night: did you study your words? She grinned, "I wrote them."  Then she added slyly, "I just copied them." Sure enough, in her folder was one scrap of paper, with each word (not the sentence, not the bonus words, just the first 10 words) written once.

I flipped the paper over and started to quiz her. She got the first 10 right. I read the sentence. She hesitated, "Shoot, I didn't study the sentence or the bonus words."

I warned her then and there that there would be a consequence if she did not get them right.  She got the sentence. After a tense moment, she got "deliver." She even got "shouted" after a long whispered debate about "is it o-w like 'shower' or o-u like 'about?'" And then she spelled tiptoed with an extra letter: "tiptoued." Had she even written the word ONE TIME over the course of the week, she would have gotten it, but she didn't.

I told her no morning TV for a week (she usually nabs about 15 minutes of "Lion Guard" or "Liv and Maddie" each morning while she eats breakfast) and asked her to write "tiptoed" 5 times.  About halfway through, the tears started pouring out, and then she went to her room to really sob.

In part, kids just don't get how to study. In part, they are just deeply resistant to doing it. That my girl chose not to write the sentence or the bonus words, when she knew that both I and her teacher expected her to know them, is case in point. She was not studying to learn or to improve her knowledge of the words, but to satisfy the bare minimum of what she had to turn in to me.

The challenge for us, as educators and parents, is to convince kids that studying, even when you don't have to turn anything in, is useful, and that reviewing material can refresh your memory and improve your grades. My girl is clearly not there yet. She stuck, both too lazy and too cocky to want to study. But, we're in for the long haul and I'm hopeful that by the time she gets to middle school, I won't be repeating the same debates we have with our middle school students.  I'm hoping that, by then, she will have realized, for herself, that there's a benefit to studying, even when no one else can see the work that you're doing. Fingers crossed!