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Indian Village: My homework or yours?
Filed under: Activities: Babies, Day Care & Education
Last Sunday night I woke up fretting. I tossed and I turned. No matter that Monday was a holiday and that I could sleep in as long as my kids would let me. No. I had a couple of big problems that had been vexing me all week, and they had finally reached critical mass.
Did the Gabrielino Indians use Spanish moss or willow leaves on their huts? Also: How the heck was I going to build a plank canoe out of Popsicle sticks?
My daughter is in the fourth-grade of a California public school, and like her peers, she has a mid-year project that involves learning about early California Indian tribes, culminating in the building of an "authentic" Indian village. We had about a month to gear up for this project. She did several in-class reports that helped her learn about her tribe, the Gabrielinos. She was also given a large piece of cardboard and two pieces of yarn. This, her teacher said, was help start her Indian Village. This is a major project, her teacher told the class. Make it good. It counts for a large percentage of your semester grade. Gulp.
My daughter fretted about this assignment for several weeks before melting down completely. So I stepped in to see what I could help with and found out what I probably should have realized all along: There's no way a normal 10-year-old can handle something like this without serious adult back-up. We had a lot of work to do.
I'm a writer. Put me in a library and leave me alone for six hours (or these days just leave me alone with Google) and what can't I find? And then I revert to my old newspaper reporter days. Let's go interview a Gabrielino elder! Let's go find the two sacred springs still in existence not far from here! My daughter, a bookworm, is apparently following in my footsteps. If this project were about writing a report, it would have been a cakewalk. A perfect grade guaranteed. You'd be able to publish that thing.
But this wasn't a written report. We needed to know just enough detail to differentiate this tribe from other local tribes. This project was more about building an authentic Indian Village and less about actual written information. This project called for craftiness. Not research. My kid's not crafty. I'm not crafty. To this very day I am unable to cut a neat circle or square out of construction paper.
I had to wonder: What's the point in this? To stress out Mom and/or Dad? Couldn't we have achieved the desired goal of learning about local Indians through reading and writing? Wouldn't they rather have an expertly-researched and well-written 25-page paper on the Gabrielino tribe? Please?
Nope. They were going to force me to Papier Mache tinfoil mountains in my kitchen and tacky glue little rocks together.
But apparently there's something to this idea of forced involvement that works. This was to be a family affair. So after three days of work, $60 spent at a craft store, several hours mitigating the efforts of the younger sib to make disproportional crockery and weapons, and an afternoon spent consulting with my Martha Stewart friend Audrey, and we had our Indian Village. My daughter made at least 60% of the artifacts and helped me glue them onto the board.
The best part? I'm so bad at crafts our village actually looks like a 10-year-old did the whole thing herself.
Did the Gabrielino Indians use Spanish moss or willow leaves on their huts? Also: How the heck was I going to build a plank canoe out of Popsicle sticks?
My daughter is in the fourth-grade of a California public school, and like her peers, she has a mid-year project that involves learning about early California Indian tribes, culminating in the building of an "authentic" Indian village. We had about a month to gear up for this project. She did several in-class reports that helped her learn about her tribe, the Gabrielinos. She was also given a large piece of cardboard and two pieces of yarn. This, her teacher said, was help start her Indian Village. This is a major project, her teacher told the class. Make it good. It counts for a large percentage of your semester grade. Gulp.
My daughter fretted about this assignment for several weeks before melting down completely. So I stepped in to see what I could help with and found out what I probably should have realized all along: There's no way a normal 10-year-old can handle something like this without serious adult back-up. We had a lot of work to do.
I'm a writer. Put me in a library and leave me alone for six hours (or these days just leave me alone with Google) and what can't I find? And then I revert to my old newspaper reporter days. Let's go interview a Gabrielino elder! Let's go find the two sacred springs still in existence not far from here! My daughter, a bookworm, is apparently following in my footsteps. If this project were about writing a report, it would have been a cakewalk. A perfect grade guaranteed. You'd be able to publish that thing.
But this wasn't a written report. We needed to know just enough detail to differentiate this tribe from other local tribes. This project was more about building an authentic Indian Village and less about actual written information. This project called for craftiness. Not research. My kid's not crafty. I'm not crafty. To this very day I am unable to cut a neat circle or square out of construction paper.
I had to wonder: What's the point in this? To stress out Mom and/or Dad? Couldn't we have achieved the desired goal of learning about local Indians through reading and writing? Wouldn't they rather have an expertly-researched and well-written 25-page paper on the Gabrielino tribe? Please?
Nope. They were going to force me to Papier Mache tinfoil mountains in my kitchen and tacky glue little rocks together.
But apparently there's something to this idea of forced involvement that works. This was to be a family affair. So after three days of work, $60 spent at a craft store, several hours mitigating the efforts of the younger sib to make disproportional crockery and weapons, and an afternoon spent consulting with my Martha Stewart friend Audrey, and we had our Indian Village. My daughter made at least 60% of the artifacts and helped me glue them onto the board.
The best part? I'm so bad at crafts our village actually looks like a 10-year-old did the whole thing herself.
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ReaderComments (Page 1 of 1)
3-03-2007 @ 10:42AM
SKL said...Sorry, but I don't believe in parents doing their children's homework. The child should be graded on her own effort. If she refuses to try, she can take a zero. If she only gets a B or C because other kids' parents helped them, at least she can take pride in the fact that she earned every point of her grade on her own. If enough kids were unable to successfully complete the project, the teacher can learn a lesson from that. The most I would do is write a letter to the teacher saying her assignment was unreasonable for my 10-year-old, and that my kid did the best she could, and she expects the teacher to grade accordingly.
Reply
3-03-2007 @ 11:06AM
BBT said...I take your point SKL, but it just doesn't jive with how the world works. Throughout college and high school, my sibings and I divided our assignments so that the science kid got the projects, the math kid did the math, etc. In college, I charged $75-$225 to write others' papers. For the science papers, which I wasn't good at, I paid someone to write it for me.
Now, at work, my coworkers and I do one anothers' assignments according to who is good at what.
My point is that school is the only place where the work you turn in is expected to be your own. And obviously, many teachers don't expect that. "The real world" cares about efficiency, and it is most efficient to do only what you are good at and hand the rest off to others, while taking tasks off their hands which you are better able to complete.
Reply
3-03-2007 @ 11:55AM
Ann Adams said...We had one of those and we turned it into a family project. Rebecca did most of the work but the rest of us helped with ideas. We created a small village using material we already had around the house for the most part plus pipe cleaners, etc.
It's a middle of the road approach. I won't do it for her but I will help.
The teacher had specified no "kits" of missions for the kids who were assigned the missions. Every single project came from a kit. Rebecca's didn't.
Reply
3-03-2007 @ 2:06PM
rachel said...These kinds of projects really bother me, I can remember being asked to build a model of and write a report on a historical building in our county when I was in 3rd grade, but at least then it was specified that the parents had to help as we were expected to use tools and go to the historical society and museums and stuff. It seems like the projects kids are expected to do are getting harder and harder, and parental imput is being downplayed and discouraged outwardly while in actuality in this age of the "helicoper mom" projects done completely by parents are probably more common.
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3-03-2007 @ 4:41PM
Stephanie said...I think a limited (emphasis on limited) amount of parental participation can be a good thing on these kinds of projects. It's a way for parents to be involved in their children's education.
I don't want projects that are beyond a child's skill, though.
Reply
3-03-2007 @ 6:48PM
SKL said...BBT, what about honesty? To me that's more important than getting a top grade, and that's what I intend to teach my kids. I never cheated or got parental help on my homework and I was always a top student, so I don't believe it's necessary to sacrifice honesty in favor of grades. Remember, if you teach your kids to lie to others, they will lie to you as well, and there may be serious consequences.
However, I agree that being great at teamwork is more useful in life than trying to be great at everything independently. Teachers should provide opportunities for group work. Parents can make that suggestion when their kids come home with a project that is obviously not meant for an individual child to do alone. Teachers have no right to assign homework to parents, but a group project is fine, as long as the kids are officially allowed / encouraged / given time to work in teams.
I also think projects that require outside travel and/or purchases are totally unfair, because not all kids have parents who have the time or money to spend on each kid's social studies project. Remember, while you may only have one kid, other parents may have half a dozen kids plus a job. If a school seems to have a policy of requiring homework of parents, the parents should protest.
We had an interesting third-grade project that emphasized the importance of working together. The teacher took an artwork and divided it into squares. Each student was asked to copy one of the squares. Then all the squares were put together to reproduce the original artwork. It was interesting to see that the best artists' squares were often the ones that didn't fit properly into the overall artwork. It was a good lesson in the balance between individual work and teamwork.
Reply
3-03-2007 @ 7:02PM
Mamacita said...Begging your pardon, BBT, but that is NOT how the world works. It may be how your world works, but it is not honest, it is not wise, it is not considerate, it is not true, and it is not ethical. My children did their homework themselves, and I expect my students to do their homework, themselves. Projects? I might have bought the supplies, but every single detail of that project was done by a child. If a child can't cut very well, or draw very well, let the project reflect that, too.
Dishonesty in the area of schoolwork leads to dishonesty in the workplace.
Dishonesty, meaning: I put my name on it but I didn't really do it myself. Somebody else did it for me, and I'm claiming it.
Shame on parents who do their children's work for them, and think it's okay. Shame on adults who take credit for the work of others.
As a teacher, I need to know exactly what the student is capable of doing, all by himself. That's what students are evaluated on: their skills and abilities and organization and effort. As a parent, I would back the school 100% in punishing my child if he/she were ever caught claiming ownership of intellectual property that was not rightfully theirs.
As a citizen, I genuinely and sincerely hope that businesses and workplaces of all kinds reward employees who do their own work, and that those employees who prefer to ride on the tails of the actual workers get what they are earning: to wit, nothing and a kick out the back door.
Shame on anyone who does such things and feels justified. Shame.
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