School Projects

Let’s face it: the whole school “project” thing is really out of control.

Kids as young as 7 are frequently assigned tasks that even a teenager couldn’t perform without the help of a parent. The time and effort put in by everyone in your household almost always outweighs the educational benefit to the student. Materials are rarely provided at school and never consist of items the average person has on hand (unless you are the average collector of miniature mission bells). This means you will have to drive all over hell’s half acre to find the makings of an Island, a church, the pyramids, a Greek tragedy mask, or whatever project your child’s sadistic teacher has dreamed up this time. No matter what anyone tries to tell you, these projects never end up being something your child can do on his own.

I don’t know any California fourth grade parent who hasn’t experienced a wave of panic and/or dread when she picks up her kid from school and he says, “We’re starting our California Mission projects mommy but don’t worry we have a whole month to work on them and the teacher says we’ll do most of the work in the classroom.” To teachers, the statement, “we’ll do most of the work in the classroom” really means they’ll let the kids mess around with it for a few hours while they grade papers they don’t want to take home that night. Little hands-on supervision is given and accordingly, little work is accomplished. In fact you’ll never know how much work has actually been done until two days before the project is due, when little Billy brings home three messy note cards and an indecipherable sketch of an unidentifiable mission. He’ll sweetly tell you that teacher told him he’ll be allowed to work on this at home so he can finish on time.

After yelling at Billy, you realize you have only 48 hours to build a model of a mission and write a comprehensive report to go with it. Don’t come unglued! You are not the first parent to find yourself in this position and unfortunately you are not the last. Millions have gone before you and happily have left behind a few tips. The Hip Homemakers have put together a guide to numerous websites that will practically write the report for you:

http://www.pressanykey.com/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/pak//camissions.cgi

http://www.papermodelsonline.com/missions/ (See ad this page)

http://www.classbrain.com/cb_mr/cb_mr.htm

http://www.mymission.org/

http://www.ca-missions.org/links.html

http://www.term-paper.net/

by Hip Homemaker Comments