Parent's Lessons in Elementary Science

Sunday 2/29/04 Leap year.

Our son’s procrastination with his science circuit board project extended my visitation with him at his mom’s house past the planned four hours. She knew not yada how to help him. He was despondent about what he had to do: fashion a ten-piece set of closed circuits that would animate his Civil War quiz show. He had no idea how to do it. I spent hours with him, foregoing dinner, to get this circuit project completed. Troubleshooting was eating up all the time. Tools and fasteners ended up all over the floor.

As a science educator and editor of third grade science for a text book company, I knew how unrealistic this project was. A fifth grader needed tremendous parental input to make it work. My friend was aghast about this incongruity with reality, citing her sister in law, a reading specialist at a middle school in the “ ‘hood,” as an example. This teacher works in a building in which kids with single moms and without breakfast dodge drive-by shooters on their way to school. Would these kids be told to make this project? Wealthy suburban privilege in our son’s school district and competition between the college-bound conflicts with this broader social reality.

I completed it for him after his mother came home, fed him, and supervised his shower. The result was a project that was conceptually correct but that did not work. It needed a huge, size D battery pack to drive the alligator clip wires. Our son spoke of the intact family of a super-achiever classmate who drove their son’s project to school last week. Our son was completely intimidated by the bells and whistles of his friend’s fancy project. Our son saw he was not getting a project that he could remotely compare to his. He was in tears.

But he was able to demonstrate how the project was supposed to work, explaining to me how it completes an electrical cirucuit. He thus passed the performance assessment I and his mother gave him. Would he fall short in school, however? Did standards require problem-solving shop skills? I don’t think so. He certainly had not been taught them. No, Mr. Teacher of our son. A kid could not build this without a lot of help at home, Dad’s help. And I felt bad because I did not live at my son’s home, and thus could only help him at this eleventh hour.

His mom wrote a letter rebutting the unfair and unrealistic assumptions of this project, which our son took to school along with his defective project.