On the other hand, being the competitive person who excels in science projects is often a very good predictor for being able to handle the tedium of a scientific lab job.
Even showing a lack of interest in their pointless projects is a life lesson in priorities and individualism.
For example, most of my help was to make sure she took 10 different containers and placed them in different locations around the house to increase the probability of getting a few decent crystals. I discussed redundance with her in the context of explaining why some of her friends were not getting results from their single try. I think that these practical thought patterns are extremely valuable, better than creating a miniature jaded adult...
The point of school is to learn to think + learn to face adversity & failure....
> The trouble is that no one else was able or cared to do it so fast, so the deadline has been slipping for a couple weeks now, with our best crystals going to school and back a few times, getting scratches and broken bits instead of nicely growing undisturbed. A bit discouraging.
The thing is, the "no one cared" is very unlikely. Those other kids did cared. But they were doing the project as kids do - loosing attention or doing it ineffectively. Forgetting and trying re-over. Having it at bad place and thus having it grow slowly etc. And all that is part of actual doing-projects learning. It is not bad pedagogy to have kids deal with these issues and have them slowly to figure it out. It is bad to then expect the similar result as your daughters had, when the most important decision making was done by you. Or judge those kids as "dont cared".
And this is an actual issue - a kid doing the project the way that is age appropriate and in fact independent ends up labeled as not caring kid. And I think there is value in kids figuring stuff out truly independently.
If you teach your kid the lesson that life sucks and trying is for suckers, don't be surprised when they believe it and don't get anywhere in life because they never try.
If you want to be a cynic don't have freaking kids.
In the working world we call this mentorship. It’s surprising to me that the practice is controversial when applied to children that have so much more to learn.
As such I love DIY science like this.
Regarding crystals, I have scanned in and cleaned up two projects relating to crystals:
http://underlandia.com/index.php/2017/09/24/things-of-scienc...
http://underlandia.com/index.php/2020/08/21/things-of-scienc...
I bet there would be a strong demand for a modern "Things of Science" - youtube is great and all but having a kit put together is a boon for parents
Of course, I'd not want to do her work for her, but more than equally, I'd be quite happy to have a '5% We-encouraging' in her vocabulary when it comes to her explaining herself. What parent wouldn't, if they can?
These can be two different things:
1. Constructive help from parents has (at least) two components. First, it shows your child you care. This may seems small, but it’s not. Second, and I think this is what a lot of HNers would appreciate, is to help your child to develop good processes. There is a lot that goes into this, and it can be parent-centered or child-centered, but having your child reflect on process and (ideally) implement some good processes can really set them up for later in life. Imho, parents should have to write a short narrative about what involvement they had in their child’s project, if any. This is required at some of the local schools where I live.
2. Having the parents do the project for the child is just silly. Most decent teachers can see through this (assuming they care). Congrats to the adult parent for winning elementary school or middle school as an adult. :-/
I entered the science fair as a kindergartner with a poster project explaining how (the output color-mixing of a) color TV worked.
Principal accused my parents of doing it; they had no idea what he was talking about and protested that I’d done it. So he interviewed me about it and left convinced I’d done it. ;)
When in doubt, a simple question like “why did you choose this topic?” or “what was the hardest part of this project?” will usually make clear the driving force behind the project. Some younger kids will just blatantly admit that their parents did the project (sometimes/often to the child’s dismay).
I had an english teacher in college accuse me of cheating. Well accused me in a roundabout way. My paper was on psychosurgery, and violent criminals. He said he needed to ask his girfriend, who had MFCC, how to pronounce amygdala. From then on I dumbed down my papers for him. I would purposely use a bunch of semicolons, and dashes.
I loved to write until I had that guy as a teacher.
I think the big part is to be a mentor. Just asking questions like 'did you think about x', or 'how do you plan to handle y' can have a huge impact by making them think further into the plan without just handing them answers. In my opinion, having them think about the possible outcomes and then search out additional information is really what school is supposed to be about.
My memory of being a kid is that I could not count on my parents to do something I needed. I probably could not have gotten that short narrative from my parents and all it would say if either actually did it was “I didn’t help.”
So, on the one hand, as an honest parent I find such a requirement boundary crossing and a(nother) waste of my time; time I could spend doing something meaningful with my kid. On the other hand, as a former kid, I find the requirement a dealbreaker and I wouldn’t have even tried. Meanwhile, dishonest people are just going to write dishonest narratives.
In practice, what happened was that after we had done our hours, they asked us to do more hours. We said no. Then they cajoled us. We said no. They then essentially harassed us and implied we didn't care about our child if we didn't do more hours. We said no, but this still went on for awhile. You can't escape them either. Even after they stop calling, they gossip about you and get passive aggressive at events. I talked to some parents of older kids and was told that the volunteer organizers only ever bother the parents who actually volunteer. They don't bother with the ones who never do their hours because they figure they never will. So these parents just stopped volunteering altogether. After a couple years of this, I followed their lead.
Second,
The school my child attended was in the same physical building and had the same administration as another school. The two schools used different teaching methods. The population of the school my child attended was about 30% of the population of the larger school. Both schools were neighborhood schools. If you lived in the neighborhood and applied, you got into my kid's school. If you didn't apply, you got into the larger school. If you lived outside the neighborhood you could apply for either school, and IIRC, you got in through a lottery process and only if there was room. In practice, no one ever applied for the larger of the neighborhood schools, only my kid's school. Most people just didn't apply, so my kid's school was smaller and about 30% of those kids were from outside the neighborhood.
Each school had its own PTA. At one point, the larger school's PTA approached our PTA about merging into a single organization. It made a lot of sense on paper, especially since there were "all schools" events. So it happened. The president of the larger school's PTA stayed president. Her first act was to send out a letter to all the parents talking about the merger. It also talked about "putting an end to the special treatment of a select few." In other words, our kids weren't going to get their school-specific field trips that were made possible by our volunteer hours and other fundraisers.
The subsequent meeting was eye-opening. They talked as if the kids' of the smaller school were all little Gates, Zuckerbergs, and Musks, even though most of us lived in the same neighborhood and I only knew of one family with any significant money. Most of these people were wealthier than me just by virtue of owning property in the Bay. We lived in an apartment with rent we could barely afford that was larger than a lot of these people's mortgage payments.
What we thought was going to happen is we were going to merge our PTA's hard-fought opportunities with their sheer number of parents to raise more funds for everyone. What they thought was that we had more money because we were rich and it wasn't fair and they were going to take it and give it to their kids.
Bay Area schooling is yet another thing that makes Bay Area living less tolerable.
As the first in my family to go to college, I was working multiple minimum-wage ($5.85/hr) part-time jobs on top of a full course load just to afford to eat and live. I wrote the professor a letter explaining that this "volunteer" work would be an undue hardship because literally every waking hour that I wasn't in school I was working, so these "volunteer" hours could only come at the expense of work hours and loss of income (which was already not making ends meet).
Her response was that she didn't believe I couldn't spare X hours/week and wouldn't "bend the rules" for me - everyone had to volunteer. The exchange grew increasingly tense until I asked her how much was the activity worth? One letter grade. "Guess I'll be down a letter grade then." (It was a small university and required core course, so I couldn't just drop the class or take with a different professor.)
I have seen this most with larger projects, and usually the student was encouraged to seek outside expertise (just like one would do in real life).
The only catch was that the assistance from the outside sources needed to be documented.
For teens, they can do the documentation themselves. For younger children, a short note from a parent is adequate. If this is a burden to the parent, then I think there are probably some other issues involved.
Like heck I'm gonna sit there writing short narratives for some school. Homework stops at the kids.
What you call constructive help is literally parent organizing and guiding whole thing. If that is what homework project becomes, then it should not be homework at all. It should be in-class experiment, because it so far from being autonomous kids activity.
> Imho, parents should have to write a short narrative about what involvement they had in their child’s project, if any. This is required at some of the local schools where I live.
Personally, I think that homework should be within kids abilities scope - including attention span, access to materials and ability to organize.
I wish my parents had shown interest in stuff like this and supported me to some degree. It’s not about doing the whole project for the kids but showing interest is super helpful. I often gave up on stuff because my dad would basically say “what’s this nonsense for?”
I noticed this when read books about Steve Wozniak and Richard Feynman. Their dads showed interest and encouraged them to explore the world and also challenged them from time to time.
As an example of what I missed out on, while I was on a team of makers I was using a cordless drill and stripped a screw. A coworker poitned out there's a knob that controls the tension of a ratchet, so you can make t he drill stop spinning before stripping the screw. I had no idea, at 45, that was even possible. They had all known about it from early childhood.
It took me many years later to understand that those kids were actually getting help from their parents and I was not that bad actually
Perhaps it's you taking this children's assignment too seriously. Was the goal really to find who could grow the best sodium crystal, or was it to teach them how to manage a small project and learn a bit of chemistry? Did your daughter learn anything about those things?
That teacher has a bunch of other kids to educate. Maybe they don't care, or maybe you just have your priorities screwed up a bit.
But perhaps also a good life lesson because that happens all the time. It’s good to try and develop a healthy self-driven passion. Oh, you don’t care? That’s fine because I do and I learned a lot.
It doesn't sound as suitable for a take home project
We just accept this as normal. Nothing is less normal than a bunch of children growing up in a building sitting in chairs all day. In an environment that is strictly controlling with harsh limitations on freedom of speech, no tolerance policies for all sorts of relatively innocuous things, and a forced secularism as to ingrain in students the unimportance of spirituality, physical health, personal liberty, and nature. And lets rid ourselves of this notion this is about education, because it isn't. Every step of school is focused on obedience and preparing them for the next step so they will be able to get a job. It is the perfect way to mold a child into an obedient wage slave.
I am picturing you over a mortar and pestle crushing the salt of your enemies whilst a single tear falls into the mix - and en-vigorating (filling with life) - the salt of your defeated enemies..