The Dreaded School Projects

I hate school projects that Eric brings home. It's not that I resent being involved in my child's education. Quite the contrary, I'm very involved. I volunteer in his classroom, show up for parent-teacher conferences, occasionally e-mail his teacher, and I’m on him Every Single Day to do his homework. I care about how he does and want to see him succeed. I think he views me as his tormentor because of this.

Every day I make sure Eric completes his homework (which is no less than spelling and 20 minutes of reading, plus anything else that may come home); but what is most trying on the nerves is...... "homework drama". This is when my child falls onto the floor whining or stomps off to his room declaring that he just doesn’t want to do one more minute of school work. And who can blame him? He’s a second grader who has just spent nearly 7 hours at school and didn’t get a recess because it’s too cold (or wet or icy or snowing or raining) outside, and our brilliant school does not open up the gym to let these youngsters burn off pent up energy but instead has them play board games in their classroom, then sends them home to do more work.

So about 2 weeks ago Eric brought home a project assignment. Here’s an excerpt from the take-home page:

“We would like each student [yeah, right] to construct a dinosaur for the [display] case. Materials you can use: empty cans, cartons, containers, paper towel rolls, paint, markers, etc. The dinosaur should be able to stand alone.”

I think I would welcome these projects if I didn't already have a daily homework battle going on with my kid. These projects are like pouring salt on a festering wound. If I were an uninvolved parent I could be scoring some serious points with my kid by anteing up for the project, but since I'm already in his face about getting his homework done, these projects just add to our misery. I guess I'm one of those parents who think that daily homework for first and second graders is just not right. Add third grade to that as well. I suppose saying that makes me unpopular but so be it. It's the way I feel.

So back to the Dinosaur Project. Here's my observation about that: I just don’t have a child who can take a pile of crap and make a dinosaur out of it. No way. Since I know this truth about Eric, this led me to employ that old parental strategy of "picking my battles." Doing his reading and spelling will net him decent grades and get him promoted to third grade. This dinosaur will not hold him back one way or the other. Instead, I opted to borrow someone else's idea from a craft site and then let Eric choose between the options I found. So Mom found the idea, Eric whined while cutting out the teeth and mouth, and Dad spray painted it. We all did the project together without killing each other. WooHoo! That's the goal in our house, anyway.

~ Behold ~

A Milk Jug T-Rex